Mike 🏳️‍🌈May 24, 2025

In our Yearly Meeting for british quakers we’re half way through the first full day, this morning considering what radical peacemakers are meant to be. And in this my second bulletin I need to say our Quaker Rainbow meeting of queer Friends & allies after lunch made this weekend trip down to London for me all worthwhile. What a wonderful gathering of new friends & old - a very special occasion for me.

#quakers #quaker #bym #BritainYearlyMeeting #today #FriendsHouse #QuakerRainbow

Mike maɪkMay 24, 2025

In our Yearly Meeting for british quakers we’re half way through the first full day, this morning considering what radical peacemakers quakers are meant to be. And in this my second bulletin I need to say our Quaker Rainbow meeting of queer Friends & allies after lunch made this weekend trip down to London for me all worthwhile. What a wonderful gathering of new friends & old - a very special occasion for me.

#quakers #quaker #bym #BritainYearlyMeeting #today #FriendsHouse #QuakerRainbow

Mike 🏳️‍🌈Jul 31, 2024

“Quakers rejoice in the things that make us different.”
The Yearly Meeting Gathering of Quakers in Britain came to an end yesterday. It was good to see the Quaker Rainbow stall was busy and it was good to meet and talk with other members of Friends LGBTQ+ Fellowship and interested visitors.

#Quakers #BYM #QuakerRainbow #lgbtq
#quaker
Hear the 2024 epistle to Friends everywhere:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMyQMS6r5fU

Adwoa Burnley – Epistle | Yearly Meeting 2024

YouTube
Mike 🏳️‍🌈Feb 14, 2024
As a member of #QuakerRainbow - LGBTQ+ Friends & allies - I appreciated this week’s ‘the Friend’ mag centre-page article. Some UK Quakers (incl some gay & bi Friends!) advocate going back on what we discerned in 2021, that we welcome & affirm trans & gender nonconforming people. Quaker Peterson Toscano writes to any who do not welcome or affirm people unless the gender they embrace & present aligns with the sex assigned to them at birth:
“You segregate yourselves from them & deny them a place at the table you have set. This all sounds painfully familiar. What have you learned from your oppression?
As a gay man who endured horrific abuse from intolerant Christian groups, & spent a significant period of my life learning about & exploring the overlapping issues of gender, sex, & sexual orientation, I urge you to repent. You have aligned yourselves with the very forces that for decades shut us out, denied us rights, & dehumanised us. Dear Friends, there is a better path for you.”
#quaker #quakers #lgbtq #Friend
Mike 🏳️‍🌈Dec 6, 2023

Quaker Rainbow is the community of LGBTQ+ Friends and their allies in UK. We’re planning a residential weekend together next May 3-5, at #GladstonesLibrary in Flintshire, near the city of Chester, celebrating our 50year history as a fellowship, & planning for the coming years.
#QuakerRainbow #quaker #quakersinbritain #lgbtq

https://www.gladstoneslibrary.org

Welcome to Gladstone's Library - Gladstone's Library

Gladstone’s Library: Your Place To Think…Since 1894. Gladstone's Library is the UK's finest residential library, with 26 bedrooms, an on-site restaurant

Gladstone's Library
Mike 🏳️‍🌈Sep 10, 2023
🌈 #silentSunday for me is usually an hour's silence sitting in a circle with #quakers so I'm off to my local Meeting. Today I'm taking a cake to share with other Friends there as I'm celebrating 50 years since the founding of Friends Homosexual Fellowship now known as #QuakerRainbow
Mike 🏳️‍🌈Sep 1, 2023
Time for a bit more about me..
I belong to Quaker Rainbow UK, a group of LGBTQ+ Friends & our allies. Our 50th anniversary was on 2023! It started as FHF Friends Homosexual Fellowship after a conference in Manchester 7 Sept 1973, one of the first groups within a religious body to support lesbian & gay folk in the 70s & the first in UK to affirm & celebrate equal marriage. That was one of the reasons I was drawn to quakerism. Another is the openness of UK Quakers to affirm folk of all kinds of religious or non-religious persuasion. Me I’ve since settled into a humanist/non-theist outlook. Another is the centuries (since the 1650s!) of hard learning that quakers have undertaken: how to abandon practises in human societies that have caused much suffering such as slavery, violence, war, the social class hierarchy, alcoholism, & in our day, the plundering & devastation of our planet
#quaker #QuakerRainbow #lgbt #lgbtq #humanist #nontheist #EqualMarriage #bym #BritainYearlyMeeting #BritishQuakers #quakers #Friends
Mike 🏳️‍🌈Aug 12, 2023

#today It’s a very rainbow day over our house in the north of Wales.
Not just the weather - sunshine and showers - but I’m hosting the online Meeting for the Quaker Rainbow community 🌈​
welcome Friends!

#QuakerRainbow #rainbow #quaker #lgbtq+ #lgbtq #quakers #BritainYearlyMeeting #lgbtq+ #TransRightsAreHumanRights #wales #cymru

Mike 🏳️‍🌈Jul 25, 2023

#introduction This is me for you, introducing myself on my first day on this instance

Derbyshire born, married a Scot, byw yng Nghymru (living in Wales)
sometimes miss city life (Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester)
#linguist, #francophile, #humanist #quaker #GayGardener

Concerns:
#ClimateChange
#TransRightsAreHumanRights

Loves:
#whippets
#butterflies
grow your own food
all kinds of music from #shostakovich to #supremes to #SamSmith
#languages
dysgu cymraeg
board games
#Bridge
progressive politics

#gyo #BeardedGay #woke #quakerism #QuakerRainbow 🌈

Mike maɪkApr 30, 2023
It’s a new day #today, & I continue to reflect on (& feel challenged by) last night’s Swarthmore lecture by Esther Loukin, who spoke from her experience of life as a disabled person, & how she has tried thru her activism, to bring about change, as well as the diversity of tactics needed to achieve change…. like keep complaining (tho not using the word!) when equality law is not being followed.
#quaker #swarthmoor #Friends #equality #disabled #QuakerRainbow