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Banned American bishop finds his voice - in "Serena"
Gene Robinson
Bishop Gene Robinson to make his presence felt at Lambeth
"Robinson's refusal to stay away from Lambeth seems to be part of a campaign against what he calls a lack of leadership from the Archbishop of Canterbury"
He may have been banned from attending the Lambeth Conference this summer to avoid any trouble with the hard-core bishops of Africa, but openly gay American Bishop, the Right Reverend Gene Robinson is set to make quite an impact when he is joined by campaigning gay knight, Sir Ian McKellen during the conference.
The Telegraph reports that Sir Ian, who made a speech at last week's Stonewall Equality Dinner, will stand alongside the banned Episcopal bishop and deliver a "broadside against the Church's attitude to homosexuals with the kind of passion and force usually reserved for his performances on stage".
Robinson, the only bishop among 880 to be "disinvited" from the shindig was quoted in The Guardian as saying, "I wish people could see me for a bishop. It is tiring, I must say. On the one hand I would like to be known as Bishop Gene Robinson but it's an accident of history that I'm the first openly gay bishop in the Anglican communion. I've learned to live with that."
His refusal to stay away from Lambeth seems to be part of a campaign against not only his exclusion but what he calls a lack of leadership from Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, who Robinson sees as having pandered to the more fundamentalist factions in Africa.
"It mystifies me that he has never commented on statements made by Akinola [the Archbishop of Nigeria] about homosexuality," says Robinson, who is soon to be the subject of a major article in men's magazine GQ (wearing his robes, he says, not Armani). "I don't know if it was Rowan's intention to divide the US house of bishops but he's done the very thing he was trying to avoid through his action or lack of action."
The complete story of Robinson's experiences as the first out gay bishop will be told when he publishes In the Eye of the Storm this summer.
