British Christian rock star comes out as gay

Christian rock star Vicky Beeching has come out as gay.

Beeching, 35, was born in Canterbury, Kent and studied at Oxford University before signing to record label EMI in 2002, and going on to become a star on the Christian rock scene in the US.

“I’m gay,” she told The Independent, revealing that she has known she is a lesbian since she was a teenager, but has only recently come to accept her sexuality.

Beeching was raised in a strict Christian family, and said that her religion taught her that homosexuality was a “terrible evil” from an early age.

“I was so embarrassed and ashamed. It became more and more of a struggle because I couldn’t tell anyone,” Beeching said of realising she was gay as a teenager.

“I increasingly began to feel like I was living behind an invisible wall. The inner secrecy of holding that inside was divorcing me from reality – I was living in my own head,” she continued.

“Anybody I was in a friendship with, or anything I was doing in the church, was accompanied by an internal mantra: ‘What if they knew?’ I remember kneeling down and absolutely sobbing into the carpet. I said to God, ‘You have to either take my life or take this attraction away because I cannot do both.'”

More recently, Beeching became ill, and during a visit to the doctor she was told that she has a serious auto-immune disease, which she believes was brought on by the psychological stress of hiding her sexuality.

“They said, ‘You need to sit down. This is really serious’,” Beeching recalled. “It’s an auto-immune disease called linear scleroderma morphea, and a form of the disease called coup de sabre.’ It’s a degenerative condition where soft tissue turns to scarring. At that point they didn’t know if it was just localised or whether it would affect my whole body.”

Despite her struggles to reconcile her sexuality with her faith, Beeching said that she hasn’t abandoned her religion now she has come out – and instead wants to help change Christian attitudes towards the LGBT community.

“The Church’s teaching was the reason that I lived in so much shame and isolation and pain for all those years. But rather than abandon it and say it’s broken, I want to be part of the change,” she explained.

Meanwhile, American football player Edward ‘Chip’ Sarafin has also come out as gay this week – read more here.