A boy’s own story

WHEN NIALL Stokes asked me to contribute something to Hot Press’s ongoing series of articles about the state of being gay in Ireland in 1994 I thought about The Pink Pound, marriage rights, public education, the Catholic Church, AIDS, you name it.

And then it hit me.

Decriminalisation offers us opportunities we have always claimed to long for; the right to personal integrity, the right to selfhood, the right to lead one’s life openly, to dignify the lovers you cherish by having them at your side.

Isn’t it time we realised that it’s 1994 and we need not be invisible any longer.

Whether or not such a thing as a gay community exists, there is certainly a community of gay individuals and each of us has a story to tell, a double life to disclose to someone, somewhere. And it behoves us all, in whatever station of life we may find ourselves (and that includes RTE) to get those skeletons out of our closets – now.

Despite twenty-five years of progress, despite every confident claim nearly each and every one of us makes privately, the truth is, most of us are still scared to death, on some level, of exposure. No matter how sophisticated we feel our friends are, how understanding our bosses or how loving our families may be, deep inside, we still expect to be rejected. I’m not saying such fears aren’t justified. But the risks have to be taken.

Even as I began working on this short account of my own career in queerdom friends advised against it, saying that doors would start closing all over town. But for me to advocate visibility among, for example, my writing/broadcasting colleagues while simultaneously passing off things that had really happened to me as the experiences of some ubiquitous friend just wouldn’t do.

So rather than talk theory or data, speculate on physiology or economics I have decided to simply and practically illustrate what I feel is the most pressing issue for gays in Ireland today – visibility. There are millions of stories in the invisible city of Irish gays around the world. The telling of them, though, helps move them out from the twilight world of blind-eye tolerance, that limbo of cautious discretions and practised evasions in which most of us are forced to hide our lovers and our friends, and brings them forward into the light of day.

This is only one such story, but it certainly won’t be the last.

Since arriving at puberty some twenty-five years ago I have

spent half my life in my native New York and the other half here, in my adopted home, Dublin. As a gay man, my sexually active life has likewise spanned those years – from The Stonewall riots of 1969, where the modern activist movement began, to the decriminalisation of gay sex here, in Ireland, last year.

In some respects, my life has run concurrent with the movement itself – from best behaved boy in the class (that’s pre-Stonewall) to teen protester to disco bunny to domesticity, death, new beginnings and, finally, a happily and preciously earned sense of dignity and self-respect.

There’s no denying the central issue, never has been: I love men. I love everything about them and I’ve loved hundreds of them over the years as well. And, it must be admitted, I’ve no regret, no shame and no remorse about any of it.

As for my background, I grew up in an Irish working class neighbourhood in Brooklyn, though my origins were slightly more mysterious than that. I mention this only to explain that for the first three and a half years of my life I was mostly to be found in the Angel Guardian Home, a Catholic orphanage in Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst area. It was there that my own complicated and often torturous relationship with Catholicism began. It was also where I lost my virginity. I don’t know if it was a crazed nun with a broom handle or Dr. Mengele hiding out in the chapel but whoever was responsible, I’ve still got the scar.

The first boy I ever loved, emotionally, lived next door to a foster home I had been assigned to when I was two or three. I remember the day I was being ferried back to the orphanage. By way of saying goodbye to me, he brought me into his room and let me choose a toy. Although I’ve long since forgotten what I selected I remember being deeply affected by his kindness. There were no parents anywhere, just the two of us, so it was totally unprompted and genuine. The authenticity of his gesture triggered something inside of me. I may have only been three, but I knew I wasn’t a kid any longer.

The Farrells were a decent pair and although I made my mother mortified with an incessant, if clandestine, preoccupation with my genitals, they did their best to civilise me. Gradually, they introduced me to the fine points of Catholic doctrine. I remember realising one day, possibly just months before taking my First Communion at seven, that all that fiddling about I got up to down there was actually a sin.

I was shocked. After all, it’d been my hobby for nearly as long as I could remember. I attempted to clean up my act. By the time I was eleven I was head of the St. Dominic Savio Society in my grammar school. St. Dominic, in case you’ve forgotten, was this really cute Italian kid who looked like Sal Mineo on the mass cards, had mystical visions and died when he was thirteen or something. He was also (primarily, in fact) the patron saint of teen purity. Despite the fact that my prayers were earnest, it has to be admitted, my devotions to young Dominic were coloured by something more than just a mystical urge.

At that stage, anyway, I think I’d realised what most Irish queers learn pretty early on – that if you’re going to be different you’d better learn to shut up about it, take a few vows and join the missions or a monastery or whatever.

When I was ten I just knew that the priesthood was the place for me. Despite that confidence, erotic fantasies about Robin, the Boy Wonder from Batman comics and Fagin’s gang of pickpockets in Oliver Twist persisted and my nightly attempts to stop rubbing myself belly down on the mattress often proved futile.

When I was eleven, I had my first consciously remembered sexual contact with another person. A middle-aged fellow with a wife and a few kids of his own, his name was Callaghan. He was the coach of my little league baseball team and a leading member of the neighbourhood Knights of Columbus. That’s a sort of Americanised version of the Knights of Columbanus. They did lots of volunteer work to help us young Catholic boys through these difficult formative years. For his own part, Coach Callaghan took an interest in every boy the Knights sponsored in my parish.

He molested nearly every one of us, too.

It was around that time that my pubes started sprouting, although I’d started having real ejaculations nearly a year before. My already precocious sexuality began going into overdrive when I turned twelve. By the time the Stonewall Riots made the newspapers that June, in 1969, I remember knowing exactly what it was all about. I took the Village Voice with its front page photo of fey young men draping arms around each other and hid it like it was pornography. I confess I used it like it was pornography too.

Stonewall patrons and Greenwich Village locals had rumbled with police two night running. They burned the cops’ cars, and even charged the riot squad who had stumbled back in amazement.

“Faggots Fight Back!” screamed the headlines.

I decided to tell my best friend that “I liked other guys.” He told his mom, who told my mom, who cried and had me carted off to the parish priest.

Fr. O’Toole was, as you might imagine, disappointed in me, especially after I had shown such devotion to St. Dominic. I cried because I’d made my mother so ashamed and urged him to understand it was probably just a phase I was going through. Having wept in shame and promised to resist the devil in the future, I was sent home. I may have lied about it being a phase but at least I was allowed to finish out my tenure as head of the Dominic Savio club and my mother was spared an unforgivable scandal.

My plans for the religious life were dealt their final blow when my guidance counsellor in High School, Bro. Alphonsus Maher OSF tried to seduce me. I figured, “What’s the point?” and, at the antiquated age of 15, I began making my first exploratory forays into the gay scene of Manhattan.

The early gay movement was, it has to be remembered, a youth movement; a logical spin-off of hippie libertarianism. By the time I was sixteen I’d found myself becoming a regular at the Firehouse in Soho. Owned and operated by the Gay Activist’s Alliance (and, yes, they were better known as the GAA) it was the first club openly owned and managed by gay people for other gay people. With an age range of mostly teens and guys in their early twenties, that early community of activists took its ethos from the collectivist and communal principles that were then in the air. We were not only going to make love instead of war, it was going to be our making love that would win the war for us.

“An Army of Lovers Cannot Lose” was our slogan.

But as the hippies were gradually reabsorbed back into an American worn out from Vietnam and Watergate, the emerging gay culture likewise changed direction.

The Firehouse was burned out in an arson attack. The mob invested in better clubs. Things began, somehow, to return to normal. Gay life, became, as it had been before liberation, little more than an assortment of bars, clubs, saunas and restaurants. More overt, higher profiled, better dressed, perhaps, but still a ghetto nonetheless.

But in one crucial respect, even in that disco-ised world of butch hard-hats, cowboy studs, and motorcycle masochists, that mid-’70s gay culture remained true to its ’60s origins. That was in its conviction that promiscuity was not so much a surrendering to passion as it was a means of direct political action. In the booming gay ghettos of San Francisco and New York, acts of erotic expression and participation were seen as acts of solidarity and radicalisation.

The underlying belief was the conviction that as a “community” we had the power to transcend and dissolve distinctions. And in a way it was true. In the tunnels at the Anvil, say, or in the sling room at the Mineshaft, class and race vanished – distinctions of education, politics, religion became meaningless in a world of equals, of ‘buddies’ joined together in a playground of the erotic imagination.

In 1976 the slogan was “Are you man enough to be a faggot.”

I remember that that spring, when I was 19, I wrote out a list and it tallied near a hundred. That might sound like mere sluttishness, but for me, those hundred men were an education. For me to turn around now, join the revisionist panic triggered by AIDS and say ‘I must have been crazy’ would be dishonourable both to them and to their memory.

By my last year at Columbia in 1977/’78 I had taken up with a fellow student, a freshman named Russell. He was a shy, awkward, funny and intelligent guy and for the first time in my life I settled into a more or less monogamous relationship.

We watched TV. We got a cat. When the following term began, he felt it’d be easier for him to live closer to school. He got a share on Morningside Heights but, more often than not, he came and stayed with me downtown.

Then, on Halloween of 1979, Russell was murdered, strangled, in his apartment on Claremont Avenue.

It was the police who told me. They collected me from the office where I was working in Soho to take me uptown for questioning. It was clear after talking with me for ten minutes that they’d already written the killing off as another ‘pervert’ crime, hardly worth investigating at all. That was to be the first in a series of discoveries that were to make me finally understand just how isolated we, as gays, really were: that young man’s pointless death was probably the main reason behind my decision to leave New York and come here.

Over the years many people have asked, and much more often than not I have found myself evading the issue. The truth is, his loss practically killed me and it certainly turned whatever pleasure I’d found in New York into a poison.

And it got worse.

A knot of Russell’s college friends decided to contact Russell’s mother, who, in turn was expected to look after the interment. They ended up purposely excluding me from the memorial, to the point of even lying and giving me the wrong date. Ostensibly all this was meant to spare the feelings of Russell’s poor mother.

Shocked as I was to realise that I’d been lied to, I soon discovered that some of these so-called friends had actually figured that since I was Russell’s ‘gay’ friend I was probably his murderer as well. Within days the rumour had been circulated and for all too many people it seemed an easy one to believe or, at least, circulate further. Although lots of so-called friends backpeddled like crazy in the weeks ahead, it was far too late.

It was only then that I really came of age as a gay man, maybe came of age, full stop. I realised how quickly friends could turn, just how much society’s timidity about us and what we did in bed affected their judgement. As if it was so terrible in the first place that murder had to be a logical deduction.

For several months I went into a total tailspin. My life became an endless round of speed and dope, alcohol, acid, cocaine and sex. I was missing Russell so much. I felt so lonely without him. For the first and only time in my life, sex became a narcotic, a means of blotting out feelings as opposed to expanding them. I wanted to die and I didn’t care how, where or when.

Then, in June of 1980, at the march to mark the Eleventh Anniversary of Stonewall (an annual event that no matter how many poppers or pills I’d taken the night before I’d’ve managed to get to) I ran into the guy who’d been my first steady boyfriend, back when we were both 15.

To make a long story short, it was through him that I met my current. We mark our anniversary as the 10th of August, 1980. His love helped me reconstruct my life and together we came to Ireland in July of 1981. Together we’d rejected the gay ghettos of America (however upmarket they were becoming) in favour of a new life here.

By late 1983, the death toll from AIDS-related illnesses began rising back in the States. Over the next several years, he and I found ourselves losing one friend after another. The grief I’d felt over Russell had made people embarrassed and uncomfortable in 1979. Our generation of young activists and sexual subversives had seemed impervious to death. We were all still in our twenties or early thirties by the time the ’70s ended.

By the time the ’80s had ended, though, every gay man in America knew what it was like to have a loved one taken from them and many had also learned the pain of being isolated, of being told to stay away by that lover’s ‘real’ family or friends.

Death, though, also brought strength. This appalling tragedy woke us up to the magnitude of what still needed to be achieved. And, eventually, for every fool who ranted about God’s vengeance, there were another handful touched by his mercy, the forgiveness which brings reconciliation to both the living and the dead. I saw as many, if not more, families expanded to include the lover as had previously been left closed to him.

The last ten years have seen gay culture grow into adulthood, not solely seeking to spurn or shock the larger, parent culture like it did in its disco-dancing adolescence, but, rather, now working to become both fully and meaningfully integrated with it.

Though Ireland has watched developments abroad and learned reasonably well from them, we are still an astonishingly closeted society and, therefore, still have many years ahead of us. Though many gays and lesbians flee the country as soon as they can, many of us who have remained living on here seem satisfied that everything will be fine as long as we’re discreet and keep things to ourselves.

Well we can’t and we shouldn’t keep ‘things’ to ourselves any longer. Life’s too intolerably short for that.

Bill, dear, in the event that you’re reading this I know I’m a feckless, philandering, irresponsible bollix, but in my own desperate and unreconstructed way I do love you, cherish these nearly fourteen years we’ve been together and look forward to many more.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

After Independence Day

”This is a victory for all those working for equality in this country. When GLEN was founded we dreamt that one balmy summer day we would stand here as full and equal citizens of this Irish Republic. This is the day.”.

Those were the words of my fellow co-chair of the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network (GLEN), Kieran Rose, greeting the crowd gathered at the Central Bank following the biggest and Lesbian and gay Pride March ever. That day marked the end of a twenty year struggle started by David Norris and a journey through court battles and numerous government ditherings. The organisation, GLEN, had achieved the mandate set for us by all lesbian and gay organisations in Ireland.

Maire Geoghegan-Quinn has been beatified by our community and rightly so. The common principle of equality rings throughout the section of the Sexual Offences Bill that deals with homosexuality. It was thoroughly unfortunate that the legislation removing the 132 year old ban on same sex relations between men was combined with appalling legislation further criminalising another minority in our society, prostitutes.

Equality is a very important word. It was quickly realised that the inclusion of this word in the title of our organisation would mean that we would settle for nothing less than equality. While we wanted nothing special for ourselves, full equality with heterosexuals became our watchword. We built alliances with many other groups and organisations, continuing to break down barriers and to welcome diversity.

As a lesbian I have often been questioned for my work on this issue. Many fail to understand that although lesbians have never been criminalised we have always been associated with gay men as being ‘unnatural’. Queen Victoria failed to believe that women could love each other; we should be grateful to her for that I suppose. But the lack of criminal restrictions on our lives has made lesbians even less visible than gay men. Women in Irish society have always suffered and lesbians have had double suffrage thrust upon them. Now is the time for lesbians to enjoy our lives and cast away the shadows that we have lived under for too long.

The liberation cast unto our lives brings a challenge for the lesbian and gay community. No longer can we claim to be oppressed. We now must seek to celebrate our existence and work together with all to ensure that no young gay man or lesbian woman will feel isolated. Our work to prevent HIV transmission must and will continue. There will be further legislative changes that will bring security to our lives: full anti-discrimination legislation is to be introduced by Mervyn Taylor in the next 12 months. Lesbians and gay men are now protected from unfair dismissal.

These twenty years have taken their toll on the lesbian and gay community. We have lost many of our brothers and sisters, both through AIDS and forced emigration. Large Irish lesbian and gay communities exist in exile in London and New York. We hope that sometime they will feel able to return. For those who will never return, we keep them alive in our memories and continue to fight on and survive.

But before you say it, I will: legislation alone will not change attitudes. But the strong determined way that the Government have finally dealt with this issue is a true sign of acceptance. Education is of course the key and if the media finally stop parading lesbians and gay men as rare zoological specimens, then we may finally begin to be accepted as part of Irish society. When homosexuality is spoken about in schools in a non-derogatory way, we will have won another battle. It is not over yet.

• Suzy Byrne

Suzy Byrne is co-chair of GLEN and political correspondent with Gay Community News.