It can seem to sidestep the whole business of becoming an adult in favour of becoming an authority. This deferment is less than satisfactory for both ordinand and church, but for the church it means that a guard must also be set up within the gates. Elsewhere, ordination can be a means to defer questions about sexuality. It has to.Yet it is not enough, if such a policy is maintained, to guard the gates. At the moment it is only the Roman Catholic Church, as it examines the Anglican supplicants for ordination, which can be confident that it is dealing with candidates whose sexuality is set in a mature pattern.
And there is no doubt that some such job description obtains in every church that tries to maintain a strictly heterosexual priesthood. But it is actually an important part of the explanation of one of the more interesting religious phenomena of our times: why are there so many gay priests?The way the question is characteristically framed, it suggests a dereliction of duty on the part of those whose job it is to keep the gays out. Worse, it might sound like one of those sweatily pious talks about celibacy delivered by Catholic priests. Conversely, when I find that I loathe someone, their sexuality is an important part of their loathesomeness. This would appear to be the common experience of humanity, to judge from the enormous popularity of sexual insults for non-sexual disparagement. This may seem to have nothing to do with religion.
Sexual attraction and sexual enchantment are among the deepest currents of the imagination, and the imagination is almost always the most attractive part of someone's personality. This is a thought I find comforting because it suggests that the gays I don't like are nasty because of their personalities, not their sexualities The trouble is that the two can't be disentangled. One of my favourites is that I don't really care about the sexual orientation of my friends: I'd like them just the same if they were gay or straight, whichever they aren't. Now that liberalism has become the cement of society, to be a liberal means being ready with the sort of pious conservative lies which any society needs to keep it going. Mercer's most famous composition, featured over the years by the Ellington band, was "Things Ain't What They Used To Be", but some of his lesser-known pieces like "Moon Mist and Jumpin' Punkins" had considerable merit.He visited Britain as recently as last month for a television appearance and last year had produced an album featuring Cleo Laine and John Dankworth.Steve VoceMercer Ellington, trumpeter, composer, arranger: born Washington DC 11 March 1919; married (two sons, two daughters); died Copenhagen 8 February 1996.. He wrote "Pigeons and Peppers" in 1937 and Cootie Williams recorded it under his own name with Duke on piano.
These were broadcast in their entirety and the many hours of previously unknown music caused a sensation amongst Ellington enthusiasts throughout the world.Had his father not been such a great and prolific composer, Mercer Ellington would have been held in high regard for his own writing. In 1978 he wrote a biography of his father, Duke Ellington in Person. Between 1981 and 1983 he and the band worked with unusual success on a Broadway musical of Duke's tunes, Sophisticated Ladies.When Mercer disbanded he settled in Denmark with his family. At this time he handed over to Danish Radio a colossal archive of unissued Ellington recordings which his father had made over the years. Many of the older players were also in poor health by this time - the tenor saxophone player Paul Gonsalves, a key member of the band since 1950, had died the week before Duke did, and as they fell by the wayside the magic character with which Duke Ellington had invested the band quickly dropped away. Cootie Williams remarked that the band now sounded like a bunch of musicians trying to sound like the Ellington band.However, Mercer showed great fortitude and kept the orchestra on the road into the late Eighties.
It worked less and of course had lost the fount of all its great music. There should have been enough of Duke's wonderful creations to keep it going indefinitely, but the older man had spent the money he had earned over the years in subsidising the band - he loved to be able to write music and then hear what it sounded like when the band played it back to him the next morning.The Ellington organisation was not properly geared to make money as, for example, the Glenn Miller or Tommy Dorsey bands had been Mercer inherited a musical treadmill Duke had died without making a will. "All Pop left me were Harry Carney, Cootie Williams and a few scraps of paper," he once said, referring to two of the star instrumentalists who had been in the band since the Twenties.The band library of Ellington's compositions had deteriorated over the years; many sheets had been lost and the music survived only in the memory of the Ellington musicians. BARRIE CLEMENT Labour Editor Leaders of 500,000 nurses are expected to demand a pay increase of some 4 per cent, on top of the 2 per cent national award sanctioned by ministers, with a warning that the claim could be backed up by industrial action.As leaders of nursing staff continued yesterday to express their anger over the relative generosity of rises of up to 6.8 per cent awarded to doctors, union leaders predicted that a further 400,000 National Health Service workers would next week be offered a similar deal to nurses.Leaders of the non-TUC Royal College of Nursing are due to meet today and may decide to set a claim to be negotiated at NHS trust level, on top of the 2 per cent rise.Representatives of other unions, however, expressed the hope that all nursing staff - and other health workers - may be able to thrash out a target figure for trust-by-trust negotiations in a meeting scheduled for Monday.Christine Hancock, general secretary of the RCN, has already indicated that her members should expect "equality" with junior doctors, who received a rise of 6.8 per cent on basic salary.It is understood that the giant public service union Unison wants to target the bigger and richer trusts initially, during the local "top-up" bargaining envisaged by the Government, and then to urge others to match them.Unlike last year, when ministers recommended that a nationwide rise of 1 per cent might be increased by a further 2 per cent locally, the Government has issued no specific guidelines.Under a framework negotiated last autumn, all wage scales for health workers are to be uprated on 1 April to the full 3 per cent, to reflect local negotiations last year. He later came to terms with the problem as Mercer took the administration of the band from his shoulders and allowed him more time to write music.When Mercer was born in 1919, Duke was not a fully professional musician, earning much of his income as a sign-writer. "The `real books' method and child-centred learning have not done well."The college is in Liberal Democrat/Labour-controlled Berkshire, a county which boasts some of the best comprehensive schools in the country. But Mr Lewin is in no doubt that large numbers of children are slipping through the net of basic educational skills and has protested to Gillian Shephard, the Secretary of State for Education and Employment.He said: "The level of achievement of basic maths skills even among those who have passed GCSE maths is quite worrying and obviously needs remedial work.".
