Are you coming out tonight?

THIS IS a letter to anyone who ever fell for someone of the same sex. (If you haven’t, you might yet, so keep reading.)

Chances are you’ve often hidden your feelings and lied about them. (Hands up any of us who hasn’t.) But how can you be so sure that all your friends really would sneer, your boss would freak, your mother’s heart would break? And what good is their approval anyway, if it wouldn’t survive hearing the truth about you? I think this is the year to take a fresh look at the closet and ask what on earth it’s for.

I’m not putting pressure on anyone to delcare themselves bi or lesbian or gay or 100% anything, if the label doens’t sit right on them. Nor am I bullying people to sign up for life membership of ‘the community’. All I’m asking is, do you have to lie about the gender of those you have kissed? And is keeping the peace worth all these lies?

For most of my friends, coming out has been a revelation – they describe it as the missing piece of the jigsaw dropping into place, their eyes being opened to a new world, the discovery of a huge family of kindred spirits, or the prison gates swinging wide. Some have lost friends, been rejected by parents, or harassed on the street, but the sense of freedom seems to outweigh all this. I don’t know anyone who regrets coming out, and for most of us life has become infinitely richer and easier.

The closet’s Paralysing Fears

I spent the years from fourteen to twenty-one fully aware of my love and desire for women, and generally glad of it, but hiding it from most of the people who mattered to me. So I’m well acquainted with the closet’s paralysing fears and convoluted arguments (‘I’m just a very private person’ or ‘I’m not one of them, I just happen to love one person who happens to be the same sex as me’).

I know the closet’s pleasures too – those dangerous flirtatious conversations, the endless wondering about who knows and would they take off their shirt in the changing room in front of you if they did. Oh, I remember the cosiness of the closet, the lies worn smooth by time. But its comforts are prison privileges, and I’ll be damned if I’m ever going back.

The funny thing is that, all those years in the closet, I didn’t realise how much it was costing me – how much of my energy I was spending on propping up the walls. I was worrying my days away, working like a double agent but without a salary; what a con! Only when I finally came out and felt a huge surge of energy did I realise how much the closet had been literally depressing me. The first day I walked down Grafton Street hand in hand with a girl and the sky didn’t fall on my head, I wondered how and why I had waited so long.

The best reason for coming out is the selfish one: do it because it might make you happier and freer. There are other good reasons too – changing the world, for example. If you seize freedom for yourself, you win it for the rest of us too. When lots of us come out in all our diversity, any stereotype along the lines of ‘aren’t gay men so creative/spiteful/gentle/ promiscuous/witty’ or ‘of course lesbians are faithful/hairy/survivors of sexual abuse/nurturing/humourless’ tends to wither away.

Something Martina Navratilova often mentions in speeches urging adults to come out is the horrifying suicide rate among teenagers who are questioning their sexuality and can find no role models of queers surviving and smiling. In particular, I think those of us with any access to publcity and the media should come out unless we’ve got a damn good reason not to; these precious opportunities to show society that we exist shouldn’t get wasted.

However, the media can’t change anything on its own, no more than the law can. What really cures homophobia is knowledge – not leaflets, not documentaries, but the intimate knowledge you get between friends, families and workmates. What will end the prejudice that cripples Ireland is not an out lesbian (or any number of out lesbians) on the Late Late Show, but thousands of lesbians in thousands of living rooms saying, ‘I’ve got something to tell you’ during an ad break.

A Great Escape

I know I’ve been unusually lucky. I haven’t had children to lose in custody courts or a job to be sacked from, and my family and friends have stayed loving and loyal. So I can’t presume to weigh up the risks for anyone else and promise that everything will be alright. All I can say is that it’s a risk worth considering, a Great Escape worth plotting.

You really can’t tell in advance how people will react; many gays, bisexuals and lesbians I know have been surprised that when they finally took the plunge they emerged unscathed. Homophobia is so unpredictable – you can’t work out from someone’s religion, nationality, age, gender or education how they’re going to react.

Elderly rural parents who never mention homosexuality can turn out to have know about their lesbian or gay child for years. Those loved ones who react initially with fury or hysteria can often learn to accept you as you talk their anxieties away over a number of years. Workmates can come to their senses when you make them realise that the group they’re making snide remarks about includes your familiar face.

Of course, some of us hate having to call attention to ourselves. Why the hell, some ask, should we have to declare our sexuality when heterosexuals don’t? Well, quite apart from the fact that most straight people do announce it – a wedding ring is more obvious than any badge – the sad fact is that you will be presumed to be heterosexual unless you clearly show or say otherwise.

So yes, it would be lovely if no one made any asssumptions about the gender of the people you love or sleep with, but that’s still quite a few years away. It’s not that I’m urging you to force a phrase like ‘I’m gay’ into every encounter with a sales assistant or bus conductor. I just suggest you should claim the right to mention your lover when straight people mention theirs, and let them make of it what they will.

The right to be visible is only one of the rights we’ll need to fight for before we’re truly equal – how about ‘married’ tax and health benefits, eligibility for adoption, protection from job discrimination? – but it’s the best place to start. How can we change anything while we’re skulking in the shadows?

Unless you’re sure it would lose you something you can’t live without, come out in 1994. It may sound daunting, like an unfamiliar obstacle course, but it can’t possible tire you as much as years in the closet will. Let’s get the fuss over with, and then we can breathe free and get on with the business of living.

• Emma Donoghue’s first novel, Stir Fry, was published in January by Hamish Hamilton.

From now on, I will exist

Fil Carson reflects on the impact of decriminalisation

“GOD MADE me and he doesn’t make mistakes” a good friend told me when I was going through major changes in my life, basically I was coming to understand spirituality – what it means to me and how it effects my life.

I had for over thirty years confused spirituality and religion and was in the process of divorcing the two. I was still carrying some of the old ‘hang ups’ of being reared a Roman Catholic. I didn’t realise at the time I was working through further acceptance of my gayness, and coming to terms with the prejudices and preconceived conditioning society had pumped at me since childhood.

Alas, it didn’t work because instead of making me heterosexual it created a lot of hang ups, low self-esteem, fear and loss of self-worth. This I managed over the years to cover with a veneer of arrogance and outrageous behaviour, that in turn led me on to me becoming a very messed up human being.

I find it quirky that when Queen Victoria passed the law making Homosexual practices illegal she claimed “ladies wouldn’t do that sort of thing,” therefore Lesbians didn’t exist. For me the decision became, do I prefer to be illegal? Or simply not exist? Definitely my choice was illegal!

I once heard an analogy that England is the place where everything goes on but nobody does it, whereas Ireland is the place where nothing goes on but everybody does it – personally I think this says it all.

I cannot fathom how some people claimed after the law was passed that homosexual practices would increase; do they not realise that people have the right to express their feelings for each other without legal consent. Their comments imply that now that it’s legal everybody will be at it; the mind boggles!

What it does mean is that consenting males can make love without having to feel like 2nd class citizens. I still cannot understand a mind that condones a law that makes a sexual loving relationship between any combination of genders illegal, my only supposition is that its born of fear. My experience in life has taught me that the only fear I know is within I cannot know another’s fear except it already exists within myself. Out of Women’s liberation was born Gay liberation maybe now out of Gay liberation will be born heterosexual liberation.

On the 26th June, the day of our Gay Pride March, the atmosphere was electric – people happy, smiling and ‘Glad to be Gay’. The mood was certainly enhanced by the law change that had taken place the previous Wednesday, well done all who fought long and hard and as for me, as I was never illegal and didn’t exist, I now exist!