11/05/2026
Today is the funeral of the Revd Dr Malcolm Johnson (1936-2026). At Terrence Higgins Trust, we mourn his death, aged 89, and our thoughts are with his long-term civil partner Robert Wilson, with whom he had been together for 57 years, and his friends.
When HIV began devastating gay communities in Britain in the early 1980s, the response from many religious institutions was silence, condemnation, or worse. Malcolm took a different path. As rector of St Botolph’s, Aldgate, a church he had made into a sanctuary for the Le***an and Gay Christian Movement, he ensured it became the first church in the country to appoint a full-time minister to care for those affected by HIV, and opened a dedicated hostel for this purpose. He had prepared himself carefully.
Recognising early on how little anyone knew, he travelled to the United States at the start of the 1980s to learn from American clergy who were already conducting funerals and caring for the dying. “I didn’t know much about HIV and AIDS so I went over there for about a week,” he recalled in a 2017 interview at the Athenaeum Club. “I met a lot of clergy who were taking funerals and looking after young people.”
When he returned to London he founded the Ministers’ Group, an ecumenical network of clergy responding to AIDS, and brought figures including Bishop William Swing of California to speak to clergy about the unfolding epidemic.
Over the following years he conducted around 50 funerals for young men who had died of AIDS-related illness. Many had telephoned him in advance. “They knew they were very ill, they knew they wouldn’t last very long,” he said. “They would ring me up and say, ‘when I die will you take the service?’ And so of course I would go and see them, get to know them.” He recalled those men with grief and with love. “It broke my heart, because I got to know most of them. So many of the young men were very lovely and friendly and warm.”
He also went to the bishops of London and Southwark to insist that the Church address the reality that clergy themselves were living with HIV, and to put in place dignified arrangements for their pastoral care, without requiring disclosure to their congregations.
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The Church of England nicknamed him the Pink Bishop. Malcolm Johnson wore the label without apology. One of the first clergy in the Church of England to come out as gay, in 1969, he spent the following half-century quietly dismantling the idea that faith and compassion....
