SO, HOW free do you feel? Six months after decriminalisation became a reality in Ireland Hot Press went off to see had things changed, to see if it made a difference in people’s lives.

Certainly the scene in Dublin has never been busier. Clubs like The George whose new, improved and very public profile was launched last summer are thriving; Fifi’s and The Shaft have become institutions, enjoyed almost as much by the ‘straight’ community as by gay men and lesbians. Saunas such as Incognito and The Gym continue to pack in crowds and the new Horse and Carriage Guesthouse on Aungier Street has not only been patronised by visitors from both here and abroad but has been featured in positive, largely supportive items in the Irish Times and The Evening Press and on radio programmes like the Gerry Ryan Show. Gay Community News, the freesheet distributed in gay clubs and other alternative outlets throughout the country, has also been steadily growing with appreciable increases in both its print runs and its advertising revenues.

Yet despite Ireland’s finally having started to come to grips with the idea of ‘The Pink Pound’, the majority of gay people here continue to live in isolation and fear. For most, Dublin has been elevated to a kind of Mecca, with many patrons abandoning their closets for an occasional weekend of mad self-expression. Even on a quiet night, the Dublin clubs have the feel of a convention. Gays from every part of the country come here and many say they’d love to live here if they could.

Tom is from Galway. He’s in his late twenties and handsome enough by anybody’s standards. He tries to visit Dublin at least once a month, usually staying with friends, though while he’s here, it must be admitted, he’s busily trying to make new ones.

“Sure, Galway’s not the worst,” he tells me. “There’s a lot of students and a fair number of creative types, so the atmosphere, at least in the trendy circles is pretty tolerant. But that tolerance doesn’t translate into active support. I mean, you still have to pretty much keep your eyes and your hands to yourself.”

Tom’s friend Harry also went to UCG, but at 32 he’s been living in Dublin for the last six years. He’s quick to join in once he hears what we’re talking about. “It’s true, they tolerate you because they mistake you for some kind of fashion statement, but God forbid you should cross that line. It’s like it’s fine as long as you’re camp and funny, but when it comes to real needs and desires they don’t really want to know about it.”

Tom turned to him and asked if things were really so different here in Dublin. Harry replied tartly, “You should know, dear, you’re the one who keeps coming up.”

Surprisingly enough this ‘problem’ of trendiness keeps coming up. Gays based in college town like Galway, Waterford and Limerick all seem a bit distrustful of it. I found myself repeatedly asking people if that kind of integration wasn’t exactly what we all wanted. John, a 22-year-old from Waterford told me I shouldn’t confuse “acceptance with indifference.”

“They’re protected by money and a sense of personal style that tells them they don’t have to give a fuck, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they want to meet your boyfriend or be seen going to your housewarming.”

A couple of weeks back, Emma Donoghue appeared on The Late, Late Show to hear entrepreneur Harry Crosbie reiterate the same theme. “I don’t think anyone really cares anymore,” he said, dismissing the so-called problem of sexual orientation as “a storm in a teacup.”

I rang my friend Joe in West Cork on Saturday to see if he’d seen the show. He laughingly admitted that he had but spun the question quickly back on me by saying, “Look, I don’t know anybody who got the shite kicked out of them for holding hands in the Shelbourne, but that doesn’t mean you’d get away with it in Barrytown!”

Although Joe’s from Dublin, he’s lived in West Cork for close to a decade. He admits that the tolerance he finds there for gays a reflection of the shifting demographics of the area. (“People without roots tend to be much more accepting of others. It’s the same thing in Dublin, too, a transient or newly settled population will always be more open-minded.”)

Yet, Joe, oddly enough, never goes to places in the South that are known to welcome gays. He describes them, unfairly, as being filled with sad old drunks. “Besides,” he adds, “once they know you’re gay your chances of getting laid drop to zero.” According to Joe, the real action in Ireland continues, as he claims it always has, undercover. “Believe me, it’s the straights who are getting off with each other or, at least, the gays who continue to play the game of being straight.”

I remembered a comment a friend of mine who worked in the Waterford Arts Centre two or three years ago made to me. Like most Irish cities, there are one or two tacitly acknowledged cruising areas. In Waterford, it’s the strip on the Quays running from the public toilets down to Reginald’s Tower. He pointed out, like Joe, that the majority of people you’d find passing through on any given night thought of themselves as straight and that pick-ups often included a kind of ritualised discussion about one’s wife or girlfriend.

Joe affirmed that that was exactly the kind of thing that went on in Cork as well. “Once you’re perceived as being straight, you’re safe.”

Despite Joe’s confused priorities – and practically everyone admitted that outside of the larger urban areas relationships were nearly impossible to sustain – he seemed happy enough to let things rest. “Gay visibility doesn’t mean anything to me. It’s not what people say that counts, it’s what they do.”

After talking for an hour or two with members of the staff of Gay Community News (a microcosm of the larger Irish experience if there was ever one) it’s pretty clear that as politically incorrect an attitude as Joe’s doesn’t go down well with activists.

Frankly, it didn’t go down well with me either. After all, my own experience had taught me that the most vociferous enemies of openly gay expression and relationships were themselves often living a double life – bitterly resentful of those who, unlike themselves, chose to spurn convention and live a more open and candid life.

Everyone agrees that the Church has a lot to answer for in terms of perpetuating the stereotypes, though at the same time there’s a wry recognition that for centuries the Catholic Church offered the only legitimating alternative for the nation’s gays.

The biggest alternative, nowadays, has been emigration. Those who can, leave and, indeed, the number of gays who’ve fled Ireland in the last twenty years would certainly seem above the national average. “For lots of people, it’s the only way to come out.”

Yet, an awful lot of our gay exiles seem to be returning. Paul, the advertising manager with GCN, for example, lived in both New York and London through most of the ’80s and Mark, who sat to my right, had only recently returned from London. Respectively, they grew up in Mullingar and Newbridge – two towns of which they admit, much like Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, “There is no there there.”

But what about coming out, I wonder, has it become easier?

Staff writer and noted club artiste, Junior Larkin, from Kilbarrack, says that working class families are far more accepting than middle-class ones. “They figure, well, it could be worse, they could be drug addicts.” From a large family, Junior says that he and his lesbian sister have been accepted by the family but that the subject is still never discussed, at least not in front of his mother. “She knows,” he assures me, “I mean she even helps me make my frocks, but no, we never discuss it. She loves me. I’m her son, whatever.”

Mark, happily admitting to his own middle-class origins, agrees that middle-class parents are more likely to agonise over what they did wrong, or to simply misinterpret their gay children as being wilful or rebellious.

Yet the fact remains that the landscape has changed. Whereas even ten years ago friendships and careers might have been ruined with exposure, such incidents are now far less frequent. Nearly everyone I spoke with related at least one “coming out” experience in the last year when they were shocked by just how supportive a response they got. Evidently, on the one-to-one basis, enormous progress has been made and that’s one trend that doesn’t seem tied to the world of style or fashion.

In the meantime, local support groups are sprouting up everywhere across the country. Contact services, like personal ads and phone-ins, appear popular and helpful to those who are most isolated, and while greater integration seems to be progressing slowly, nearly everyone agrees that it is just a matter of time before the value (if not quite the legality) of gay relationships are, at least, tacitly respected by the majority. Most would see that happening by the end of the decade.

Dublin, meanwhile, seems set to continue being the country’s leading gay city. Some would even like to see it become like Amsterdam with a thriving and international scene. Tony, a regular Gay Times reader tells me that their recent survey showed more British gays going to Dublin for holidays than Berlin. I timidly suggest that this says more about the number of Irish gays who’ve gone to London than anything else. He lifts his pint to me in a mock salute saying, “We’ll see,” and, indeed, I suppose we will.

Recommended Reading

1. Plato, The Symposium: This classic text, once bowlderized beyond recognition, offered the most definitive ‘born that way’ defence of the ancient world.

2. Plato, The Phaedrus: In The Symposium, it is Aristophanes who offers the defence of gay love. For Plato’s own views, one must read this lesser known – and long ignored – work on the transmigration of souls.

3. Catullus, The Odes: Although Catallus appears to have been quite actively bisexual, his homo-erotic love poems helped encourage centuries of repressed gay men to learn Latin.

4. Sappho, The Poems: Considered by her male peers to have been a woman of great majesty, wisdom and beauty, Sappho’s island academy for women at Lesbos not only gave lesbians a role model but a name as well.

5. Christopher Kit Marlowe, Edward II: Marlowe once said “all they that love not tobacco and boys are fools”. Need I say more.

6. William Shakespeare: The Sonnets: Especially those dedicated to the mysterious ‘Mr. W. H.’.

7. Walt Whitman, The Calamus Poems: Whitman’s manly fellowship echoed the sentiments of the ancient Greeks and helped pave the way for the modern homosexual rights movement.

8. Oscar Wilde: De Profundis: Wilde’s passionate letter to Lord Alfred Douglas following his release from prison remains one of the most moving testaments in all of gay literature.

9. Andre Gide, The Immoralist: When published in 1902, Gide’s sensational and confessional novel provoked storms of controversy and introduced, finally, the gay man into the canon of modern literature.

10. E. M. Forster, Maurice: Although the squeamish Forster repressed the novel until his long-overdue death in the early ’70s, it quickly established itself as a major text of the post-Stonewall movement.

11. Marcel Proust, Rememberence of Things Past: Although remaining in the closet himself, gay characters seem virtually everywhere in his depiction of fin de siècle Paris.

12. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood: One of the first ‘art’ novels to deal explicitly with a lesbian character, Barnes’ book grew out of the literary hothouse and Sapphic paradise that Paris was between the wars.

13. Radclyfe Hall, The Well of Loneliness: Radclyfe (‘John’ to her friends) Hall was an outrageous character and her book prompted a sensational set of obscenity trials throughout the 1930s.

14. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas: Although Gertrude and Alice had long been famous in the avant-garde circles of Paris, it was this 1939 bit of biographical whimsy that catapulted her to international celebrity, making her and Alice the most positive lesbian role models of her day.

15. Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers: Genet’s world of moral criminals and ‘perverts’ inverted popular notions about social outcasts, conferring them with spiritual grace and sanctifying pain.

16. Jean Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: For those who failed to grasp Genet’s metier, no less a person than Sartre himself decided to tell the story.

17. William S. Burroughs, Queer: Although long unpublished, Queer dates from early on in Burroughs career, introducing themes that remain with him until even the present day.

18. Alan Ginsberg, Howl/Kaddish: Unquestionably the defining works of the ‘Beat’ generation, Ginsberg’s harrowing poems were an unprecedented assault on American conformism.

19. Yukio Mishima, Forbidden Colours: Japan’s major post-war artist and writer, the unbelievably prolific Misihima most famously entered gay history by having his lover cut off his head after he had ceremoniously disembowelled himself. The lover, it is often forgotten, joined Misihima in death by immediately committing hari-kari himself.

20. James Baldwin, Another Country: Baldwin’s masterful and touching portrait of the New York jazz culture of the ’50s is one of the great post-war American novels, largely for its depiction of the overlapping worlds of black and white and gay and straight sub-cultures.

21. Mary Renault, The Mask of Apollo: The book that singlehandedly put Greek love back on the bestseller list.

22. Jill Johnston, Lesbian Nation: Utopian textbook of the late ’60s that profoundly influenced the emerging sense of lesbian identity and culture.

23. Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle: A light-hearted and robust account of Rita’s own teenage years, it was one of the first pieces of popular fiction with gay characters who were well-adjusted, happy and having a good time getting on with their lives.

24. Arminstead Maupin, Tales of the City: Maupin’s chronicles of ’70s San Francisco life followed up on Brown’s example. This was a fun-loving, if hectic summation of urban life at its O.T.T. best. Gays were finally beginning to laugh.

25. Edmund White, A Boy’s Own Story: The ‘Coming Out’ story to end all coming out stories. Nice artwork on the cover, too.