Image 1: A Summer of Not Standing Still
Yesterday I was back to ARU for Welcome Week and next Tuesday the first classes of Year 2 begin. People have asked whether I enjoyed the summer break. I did, of course, but in keeping with the Chinese proverb, I have not been standing still. Since June I have been building Queerly Beloved, a weekly Substack newsletter, and it has taken over my weekends, my notebooks and a fair amount of my head. This post records how it started, where it has got to, and what I want it to become this year as an Immersive Storytelling project. It has become a dearly beloved part of my week.
If you’d like to read or subscribe to Queerly Beloved, you will find it here:
https://substack.com/@qbqueerlybeloved
Where the name came from
Image 2: Where the name came from
Anyone who has sat through a wedding or a funeral in a church building knows the words “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here.” They open the big moments of a life. They say that this matters and that you are seen. I have heard them from both sides of the coffin, first as a funeral director and now as an Authorised Lay Minister. For a long time, people like me rarely heard those words spoken over our own lives. Changing one word felt like a small act of repair.
QB comes from an inclusive and progressive Christian place, and it rests on one belief: the table has no conditions attached. Grace comes first, even on weeks when the news gives plenty of reasons to be angry. Over the whole project sits a Chinese proverb: “Be not afraid of going slowly, be afraid only of standing still.”
Planning in a hurry
Image 3: The Golden Path of Pride
In early June I sketched out five strands: the Substack, an Instagram account, a podcast, a book club and, one day, a pop-up café. The café would be alcohol-free and inspired by Kafe Kweer in Edinburgh. That part matters to me. A lot of queer social life has been built around bars, and not everyone can or wants to be in one.
I also mapped the Church year against the LGBTQ+ calendar and found they overlap in useful places. All Souls sits near Transgender Day of Remembrance in November. Advent shares December with World AIDS Day. Pride Month falls in the long green season of Ordinary Time. That map became the backbone of the project.
Launch day at Cambridge Pride
Image 4: Queer Archives in the Shed
QB launched at Cambridge Pride on Saturday 13 June 2026. I put together a Pride Morning Walk through the colleges, seven stops with a coffee break at Michaelhouse, ending at the parade. Along the way were stories of men remembered side by side in college chapels, and of names such as E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes and Alan Turing. I spent the day filming and photographing, wearing two hats: student and founder.
Issue One went out the following Tuesday, 16 June. It arrived into a difficult climate. Reform-led councils had been taking down Pride flags, and Essex had moved to stop Pride events in its libraries. Trans people were frightened by the new EHRC guidance. QB has covered all of this, but it tries not to answer fear with more fear. It tries to answer it with welcome.
Finding a shape
QB now publishes every Tuesday at 8am. Each issue looks back at the gospel reading from the Sunday just passed. From that reading comes one question, and the question runs through every section:
- Welcome to the Table always leads.
- News, Social Commentary and History follow.
- A Table for Everyone carries the theology.
- Word of Pod covers what I have been watching, listening to and reading.
- Mirror Ball, SHED Talk and And Finally close the issue. SHED Talk is a short piece to camera from my shed office – it picks up on the project I completed at the end of Year 1 and recently I have decided to review the content with this becoming an occasional piece.
The method is simple to say and hard to do. Put two things side by side and let the reader make the connection. Use the strongest fact only once. Check every claim and every link before it goes out. There are also house rules: British English, no em dashes, and no evaluative adjectives. Each issue’s illustrations follow a different artistic tradition, because how we choose to look at people is never a neutral decision.
Moments from the summer
Issue Two looked back at Scotland’s first Pride in Edinburgh in 1995. I was 27, married, and not yet able to say who I was. A Birthday Special followed in July.
In August I took QB to Jersey to tell the story of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. They were a queer couple who resisted the Nazi occupation with handwritten notes they called paper bullets. My rule for that trip was that the past is drawn and the present is filmed.
In between, I was shortlisted for the AVEVA and ARU DesignLab open call. My proposal, Revealing the Code, was about Polari and machine language. It was exhibited at Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery, and I was interviewed by the BBC. It was not chosen for the final commission, and I wrote about that honestly in Mirror Ball. You can also read about on this blog: https://theoldtimes.co.uk/2026/09/17/what-i-did-on-my-holidays/
Issue 13 opened with my ancestor John Gellatly, charged in 1752 with “promiscuous dancing” by his local church session. It seems the family has form.
Issue 14, out this week, told the story of Will Geer, Grandpa in The Waltons. He was blacklisted, refused to name names, and bought a field where he built a theatre for others. A man shut out who built a table.
The summer also taught me things no lecture could. It taught me the discipline of a weekly deadline and the habit of checking dates against primary sources. Wikipedia got at least one of mine wrong. It taught me to write differently for Substack, Instagram, Threads and Bluesky. My kit has earned its keep too: a Sony ZV-1 II, a DJI Mic Mini, a DJI Pocket 4 and a Zoom H1essential.
The year ahead: QB as Immersive Story Telling
Image: The house of many doors
Immersive Storytelling asks us to make stories people step inside rather than simply read. QB already has rooms: a table, a shed, a mirror ball. This year the job is to open the doors (if only temporarily).
Trimester one: Complemental. The first part of the module is a set brief with a partner. My idea, still to be discussed with tutors, is Complemental. It is a binaural audio piece for the Darwin the Geologist gallery at the Sedgwick Museum. Darwin studied barnacles and found tiny “complemental males” living on hermaphrodites. His published books describe this carefully. His private letters from the same time are openly astonished. In Complemental you would hear the book in one ear and the letter in the other, on your own phone, through a QR code. No narrator explains the gap. It is the QB method moved from the page into sound. It builds on the museum’s own Bridging Binaries LGBTQ+ tour, which I am joining on 23 September.
Trimester two: QB itself. This is where I hope QB becomes the project in its own right. Several strands are taking shape:
- The podcast. It will be audio first, opening with a reading, then news and comment, with a separate strand for conversations with guests. Over time it may take over from SHED Talk.
- Rites of Passage. This series begins on Advent Sunday, 29 November, as the lectionary turns to a new year. It will look at the thresholds in queer lives: coming out, partnerships, marriages, transition and bereavement. The line I have already made public is that we deserve better ceremonies than the ones we were handed. Readers are invited to send in their own.
- The Book Club and the café. These are the parts where readers stop being an audience and start taking part. The café is where the table finally becomes a real table.
- Walks and maps. I would like the Pride walk to become something people can repeat. I would also like to build a map or timeline that lets people explore QB by date, place or theme.
- A production journal. Running through all of it, this will record decisions, reader responses and mistakes.
QB has gone slowly in places. The café is still a dream, and the podcast is still a plan. But it has not stood still once since June, and I don’t intend to start now.
Check out my post on the revisions to my learning manifesto for Year 2 coming soon.
Image prompts
For this post, I selected “Queer Folk Modernism” as a style for the images and used the following prompts in ChatGPT:
Style prompt:
Create a coherent series of editorial illustrations for an article about Queerly Beloved, a queer, inclusive and progressive Christian storytelling project.
ARTISTIC STYLE: “Queer Folk Modernism”, combining the strong carved lines of British linocut, the simplified shapes and confident composition of mid-century editorial illustration, touches of stained-glass geometry, and the layered texture of hand-cut collage. The images should appear handmade and slightly imperfect, with visible paper grain, ink texture and gently uneven edges.
MOOD: Warm, intelligent, reflective and quietly defiant. Queerness should be expressed through welcome, relationships, colour, history and unexpected connections rather than stereotypes. Christian imagery should feel inclusive and expansive, never institutional or sentimental.
RECURRING VISUAL MOTIFS: An open table, doorways and thresholds, paths, handwritten pages, recording equipment, small points of light, maps, archives and objects placed side by side. A fine golden line may travel through each image to suggest grace, connection and a story continuing.
COLOUR PALETTE: Deep plum, aubergine, violet, muted lilac, parchment, warm gold and midnight blue, with carefully placed colours from the intersex-inclusive Progress Pride flag. Avoid covering every surface in rainbow colours.
COMPOSITION: Editorial rather than photographic, with clear focal points and enough quieter space for use in a blog. Landscape 3:2 unless otherwise specified.
PEOPLE: Varied ages, ethnicities, genders, bodies and disabilities, portrayed with dignity, warmth and individuality. Avoid tokenistic line-ups, exaggerated expressions or corporate diversity imagery.
Do not include lettering, captions, logos, watermarks or accurately rendered flags. Any title or explanatory text will be added later.
Individual Image prompts:
Image 1: A landscape 3:2 editorial illustration in the Queer Folk Modernism style. A winding golden path moves from early summer into autumn across one continuous imagined landscape. It begins at a Pride gathering among the towers and college buildings of Cambridge, passes a warmly lit garden shed filled with books and recording equipment, crosses the sea to a small Jersey churchyard where handwritten paper notes fly like birds, and arrives at an open university doorway glowing with possibility.
At the centre, seen from behind, is a mature male student walking steadily forward. He carries a small camera and notebook. He is not rushing, but he is unmistakably moving. Along the path are subtle recurring motifs: an open book, a cup of tea, a mirror ball, a museum specimen and places set around a welcoming table.
Strong linocut lines, simplified mid-century shapes, layered paper textures and small stained-glass fragments. Deep plum, violet, parchment, warm gold and midnight blue, with restrained queer colour accents. Reflective, hopeful and quietly purposeful. No text.
Image 2: A landscape 3:2 editorial illustration in the Queer Folk Modernism style. An old church doorway stands open, but instead of looking towards an altar, the viewer looks through it towards a long communal table in warm light. Around the table sit people of different generations, ethnicities, genders and body types, sharing bread, tea and conversation. One place at the near end remains open, inviting the viewer to join.
Subtle fragments of former ceremonies appear within the architecture: wedding rings, a funeral candle, baptismal water and pressed flowers. These are being gently transformed by growing vines, new leaves and a fine golden line that runs through the doorway and around the table. The image should evoke the familiar words “dearly beloved” being reclaimed as an act of queer welcome and repair.
Hand-printed linocut texture, simplified human forms, collage paper grain and touches of stained glass. Deep plum, muted lilac, parchment and gold, with restrained rainbow details. Sacred but not solemn, inclusive without appearing corporate. No text.
Image 3: A landscape 3:2 editorial illustration in the Queer Folk Modernism style, showing a Pride morning walk through Cambridge. A small, cheerful group moves through an imaginative collage of college courts, old stone archways and narrow streets towards a distant Pride parade. A mature male student walks among them carrying a camera in one hand and a notebook in the other, suggesting his two roles as filmmaker and founder.
Historical figures are not shown literally. Instead, their presence is suggested through carved names, archival pages, chapel memorials and faint human silhouettes embedded in the stonework. A coffee cup on a café table marks a pause in the walk. A golden route line links each stop and continues beyond the edge of the image.
Bold British linocut lines, mid-century poster composition, layered archival-paper textures and selective stained-glass colour. Cambridge stone, deep plum, violet, gold and bright but restrained Pride accents. Lively, curious and celebratory, while retaining historical depth. No words, banners or legible lettering.
Image 4: A landscape 3:2 editorial still life in the Queer Folk Modernism style, arranged like a working desk where history, theology and digital storytelling meet. On the desk are an open Gospel, handwritten research notes, an archival photograph, a Jersey map, a small paper “bullet”, a Polari code fragment represented through abstract symbols, a camera, a compact microphone and a softly glowing laptop.
Objects are placed in thoughtful pairs: printed history beside a present-day screen, a church record beside a Pride badge, a rejection letter beside a small mirror ball, an old map beside a modern audio waveform. Thin golden threads connect the objects but leave the meaning open for the viewer to discover. In the background, the window of a garden shed looks out towards an autumn apple tree.
Handmade linocut marks, cut-paper collage, mid-century editorial composition and imperfect ink registration. Plum, violet, parchment, warm gold and midnight blue. Intelligent, intimate and gently humorous, conveying the disciplined work behind a weekly publication. No readable text.
Image 5: A landscape 3:2 editorial illustration in the Queer Folk Modernism style. An imagined building is shown partly in section, as though Queerly Beloved has become a place people can enter. Its connected rooms include a recording room with two microphones and headphones, a museum gallery with a barnacle specimen, a room for queer rites of passage lit by candles, a book-club table, and a welcoming alcohol-free café.
Doors between the rooms stand open. Visitors move freely through them, listening, talking, reading and contributing their own stories. A path and a fine golden line connect every space before continuing outside towards a map filled with future routes. The original garden shed remains visible at one edge, showing where the project began.
Bold linocut contours, simplified architectural shapes, layered collage textures and stained-glass pools of coloured light. Deep plum, aubergine, lilac, parchment, gold and midnight blue, with subtle Progress Pride colours. Imaginative and achievable rather than grandiose: a project growing room by room. No text.
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