CAUSING A STIR

“BONO IS the only man I’ve ever had sexual dreams about,” says Emma Donoghue. “And you can quote me on that.”
Emma is reminiscing about her teenage years during which she was a major U2 fanatic. Over eight years later, she still remembers how thrilled she felt when one night, not long after her sixteenth birthday, she had a vivid dream in which Mr. Vox made her a gift of his hat. “That was in one of my non-sexual dreams about him,” she hastens to add.
These days, Emma lists among her main musical squeezes such people as Melissa Etheridge, k.d. lang, The Indigo Girls, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Sweet Honey In The Rock and Zrazy, with whom she became close friends after first meeting them last summer at the Michigan Women’s Music Festival, of all places.
“Zrazy had a whole band of Irish groupies out there really,” she recalls. “We were sorta home from home. We were all capering round while they sang their song about emigration. In fact, that festival helped me discover a whole other musical tradition. And, it’s great now that so many female artists are coming out. Janis Ian, k.d. lang and Melissa Etheridge were all out within a year of each other.
“I find that when I look at the male musicians in my long line of tapes now, they’re mostly the very spiritual ones,” she continues. “They’re people like U2 and The Waterboys who have lyrics that are often very spiritual. Whereas if it’s just men singing about girls, it doesn’t do much for me.”
Of course, like most people, Emma Donoghue spent much of her adolescence in search of role models with whom she could identify – but even the rarefied world of pop music had little to offer in this regard to a young Irish lesbian.
“In a sense, my role models were Freddie Mercury and David Bowie,” she says. “Pop music was this kind of haven. You had a feeling that either as a writer or as a rock star, you could be abnormal and get away with it. There was a sense that in those worlds, you didn’t have to fit in. You could be special and maybe even get rewarded for it. But still, there was no lesbian role model, certainly nobody close to home. When I was growing up, I knew that Martina Navratilova was a lesbian and very successful but she was so far away, in so many senses. I needed models close to home and I didn’t have them.
“I was frightened to read that the rate of suicide among lesbian and gay teens is about three times that of their heterosexual equivalents. And it really is due to isolation. A couple more role models would help a lot, especially role models close to home.”
The number of high-profile gays to publicly acknowledge their sexuality in Ireland is notoriously low. Does Emma Donoghue feel that there is a particular onus on, say, closet lesbians in the relatively liberal worlds of the arts or the media to make a point of coming out?
“It’s not always easier for those people,” she insists. “Individuals in the media might find themselves in tricky situations. For example, the possible loss of children. It’s not that liberal a world. I just think that such people have a particularly good opportunity to change the lives of those kids out there, because they’re in the public eye. And I wish more of them would.
“When I was in school, I knew of no Irish lesbians at all and, later on, when I heard the names of the various closet lesbians, I thought ‘why aren’t they out, that would’ve been such a help to me’ so there is a sadness about that.
“However, I can’t judge a different generation. I’m sure it was scarier in the Seventies and Eighties. I can’t judge women who had children, families, jobs they might lose. I’m in an exceptionally free position. I have no children to lose, no employer. I just wish that somebody, somewhere would’ve done it when I needed a role model.”
Through her own success and public honesty, of course, Emma Donoghue herself has now become precisely such a role model for the emerging young Irish lesbians of today. “I’m only a role model in that I’m a visible lesbian,” she avers. “It’s not that I have any exemplary characteristics at all. But I think that any of us who are out are role models in that we show that you can be out and the sky doesn’t fall on your head. I’m not a representative, I can only speak for myself.”
In private, Emma “encourages but doesn’t bully” all the closet lesbians she knows to come out. “Times are changing,” she says. “I feel that we build up these fears that our lives are going to fall apart if we come out publicly. And it doesn’t always. Most of us assume that our parents are going to cast us out and, in fact, many parents come to terms with it just fine. Once you’re in the closet, everything outside becomes blurred and you just don’t dare. It’s almost like a rite of initiation. If you can push yourself past that, you enter a kind of adulthood.
“While I’m very young, I feel quite old in lesbian years. I’ve been out to myself for ten years. Whereas if I meet a thirty-year-old woman who’s only just out, she feels younger to me. So yeah, I do think coming out is the single most effective, and most political thing, that anyone can do. It changes the life of everyone around you, just by you being a living example.”

Emma Donoghue depresses me. A mere twenty-four-year-old, she has already had a play produced (last year’s acclaimed I Know My Own Heart), published a history of British lesbian culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Passions Between Women) and has now delivered a first novel (Stir Fry). Along the way, there was also a degree in UCD, work on a PhD in Cambridge, a couple of short stories and she is currently editing the lesbian section of a new volume of the Field Day Anthology. Jesus Christ, has this woman ever heard of the word sleep.
Emma gives much of the credit for her rather disciplined approach to work to her education by the Dominican nuns in Muckross Park Convent in Donnybrook. Beyond that, however, she says she has little to thank the good sisters for. “They had a very repressive code on how you looked and your sexuality,” she recalls. “They wanted us to be career women but also to have a marriage and children. Our sex education was incredibly paltry. Homosexuality wasn’t even mentioned once in my entire school life.”
Not even as a no-no?
“Oh, they didn’t even want to raise the issue,” says Emma. “It was an implicit no-no, something that didn’t even need telling. Which of us was ever told not to masturbate? We all just knew. I had a sense of the nuns in that way as the enemy. I felt I had to hide. They thought of me as such a good girl and an achiever and I was doing the debates and so on but I had this entire secret life and I just knew that I had to keep it totally secret or I’d get thrown out.
“I knew a girl in another convent school who was expelled for going into the toilet with a friend for a private chat. They weren’t lesbians but there was a suspicion that they were. So, I felt if they were thrown out for suspicion, God help me.”
Emma Donoghue first discovered her lesbianism, “completely out of the blue,” when she was fourteen. Up until then, she had felt a degree of separateness from other girls her age but she put this down to the fact that she was convinced that she was one day going to be famous.
“Then, at fourteen, I fell for a classmate,” she explains. “At first, I thought I was a platonic lesbian but within about three weeks I decided I wasn’t platonic. I knew there must be others out there but I also knew that I would have to wait quite a while to meet them. So, I just kept this as my deep, dark secret. Everything else in my life at that time was contributing to making me feel valued and important and so on. Poetry competitions, exams, debating and acting, everything else was backing me up so that helped. But I had the feeling that if people knew I was a lesbian, all their liking of me and respect for me might go away.
“It’s a strange feeling. You’re not being isolated or jeered at in a corner. People are being nice to you but you don’t know how unconditional that is. My parents were very loving to me but I kept thinking: ‘They don’t know who they’re loving’. As it happened, they guessed and they did love me. But, for a long time, I felt like a queen on false pretences. Any minute now, I expected someone to storm in with a gun and say ‘Give back that crown, you’ve no right to it’.”
At the age of sixteen, hiding this deep, dark secret began to become especially tricky when she entered into a sexual relationship with a classmate with whom she’d fallen in love.
“The strain of keeping that secret was immense,” says Emma. “Not smiling at each other too much, and so on. Obviously, we were visible friends but we had to be really careful. We’d write notes to each other on our books and then erase them – but were they rubbed out enough, did anyone see us, it was very stressful. I really had a sense of ‘bide-your-time, get to University and then you can be free’.”
Outside of school, the two young lovers also had to cover their tracks. “Thankfully, in Ireland, girl friends are expected to spend a lot of time together,” smiles Emma. “Lots of twosomes go up to their room to listen to U2 for hours. Music was a great cover (laughs). As it happened, my mother guessed eventually what we were up to, but we were never exposed at school or anything. We got through safe enough and were lovers for years, but it was a rather scary time.”
Emma Donoghue came out, in various stages, between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one. At first, she told a few selected friends, then she told her mother (who already knew) and, at nineteen, she told her father (the literary critic and academic, Denis Donoghue). Secured by their supportive responses, she then came out publicly in UCD, also when she was nineteen.
“That was great fun, running round and coming out in seminars and so on,” she recalls. “I could still really shock people in those days. Nowadays, when I meet someone they usually know that I’ve written and so on, but, in those days, I could actually make jaws drop. I miss that a little and I even slightly miss the thrills of the closet because you could have such wonderfully ambiguous conversations with people. But no, I prefer the fresh air of being out.
“I did feel a bit of a token in UCD because though there were other lesbians, they weren’t willing to speak publicly. Well-meaning, liberal men would come up and say, ‘Well, Emma, what do Irish lesbians think about such-and-such’. And, I’d say, ‘I don’t know, I can’t find any’.”
At this time, only five years ago, the UCD authorities still refused to recognise The Lesbian And Gay Society as an official campus society. “We and Sinn Fein were the banned societies,” says Emma. “We were the groups that would subvert all of Irish culture. They used to say to us that we would get hold of seventeen-year-old before their ‘psycho-sexual identity had crystallised’. And I, as the only public lesbian there, had to personally convert all the young females there. It was quite a job, I can tell you. There were hundreds of them.
“Ten years in a row, UCD had refused to recognise us as an official society and it was only in 1990 that they, grudgingly, did so. But that was after years of campaigning, trying to get staff members to sign petitions and so on. Staff members that we knew to be gay would walk by and not sign. You do get a bit bitter when influential lesbian and gay people will do nothing to help you. I’m generally against outing but in the case of, say, British Tory politicians who are voting to keep the age of consent up, that would be a case when it would be justified.”
These days, though she says she keeps a very close eye on political developments and always votes in elections, Emma says that the world of politics, especially parliamentary politics, holds little interest for her. “I still go on the odd demo and so on but parliamentary politics weary me,” she says. “It’s just a lot of boys shouting at each other.”

In a recent Sunday Times interview, loud-mouthed media star, Camille Paglia, herself an avowed lesbian, launched a full-frontal attack on the act of lesbian love-making which she described as “frustrating” and lacking in the “wild”, “primitive” and “brute animal quality” of heterosexual shagging. “Bodies fit together in heterosexuality,” she asserted. “It’s so tiring, making love with women, it takes forever. I’m too lazy to be a lesbian. Let me get a little air.”
“I think she’s a nut case,” responds Emma Donoghue. “She has this line where she says ‘If lesbianism is all that hot and exciting, how come I haven’t had a date in years?’ Well, if you follow that up logically, Camille, it’s because none of us wanted to go out with you. If she thinks that all lesbian sex is slow and frustrating then she’s not meeting the lesbians that I’m meeting. For some reason, probably to do with her own personality, she’s had bad experiences and she’s daring to judge all lesbians on that basis. None of those clichés about lesbian sex being slower and gentler are true at all. I can’t believe that she gets press time for such nonsensical remarks.
“Yes, heterosexual bodies fit together in the sense that you can put a penis in a vagina but that doesn’t achieve all that much on its own. I’m biased here (laughs) but in terms of the details of technique, lesbians are often very imaginative because there’s no one thing that they’ve been traditionally told to do. There tends to be a huge amount of variety and experimentation. We listen to each other’s bodies more, I suppose, because we haven’t been brought up to think that sex is one particular act.
“Camille is also on record as saying that lesbians are sexually inert – I just don’t know where she gets these ideas. She’s peddling stereotypes, that gay men are exciting whereas gay women are hung up on their mothers all the time. That just doesn’t connect with my experience at all. She makes these statements like ‘Lesbians don’t have one-night stands’. Rubbish! Lots of them do. Maybe not as many of us as heterosexuals, but do we judge the excitement of sexuality in terms of the number of one-night stands we have? I’ve met every variety of lesbian – the ones in the long-term couples, the ones who are having one-night stands all the time, the ones who rarely have sex, the lot.”
Indeed, one of the oldest clichés about the gay world from another stereotypical perspective is that homosexuals and lesbians are completely decadent and promiscuous, that they engage in nothing but one-night stands.
“I think we’re more honest about the number of relationships we have,” asserts Emma. “I think you might look at a heterosexual couple and see that they’ve been married for twenty years but you don’t know all the affairs they’ve been having. Whereas we would tend to say, well, yes, I had a lover then and another lover then and another lover then. And also, we don’t reproach people as much for having serial relationships. We don’t see it as failure. If I break up after a couple of years with someone, I don’t see it as a marriage that went wrong. I see it as a few good years with someone from which I learnt a lot and it was a good thing.
“There are pressures on us socially that make it hard to have very long-term relationships because we don’t get things like tax benefits, house benefits, all those things that heterosexual relationships get wound around. And again, we don’t have that many role models. You see plenty of husbands and wives on chat shows but you don’t see long-term couples in the media much.
“Anyway, I don’t think that we necessarily want any equivalent of heterosexual marriage. And I feel it’s quite healthy, this code of serial monogamy or serial relationships even. Quite a few lesbians don’t even want to be monogamous. They say it’s an unnatural life to try and only be sexual with one person in the entire world. I’d say it’s serial monogamy is what actually appeals to me.”
But back to Ms. Paglia for a moment. “It is strange to see a lesbian-hating lesbian like her,” states Emma. “We know that there have been plenty of homosexual-hating gay men. We are made to hate ourselves and someone like Camille may feel she’s gone past all that but I think it’s still there. She did say, quite significantly, that if sex-change operations had been around and she’d been aware of them when she was younger, she’d have wanted one. There’s a discontent with gender there. She does seem to value everything male while unwillingly being trapped as a female.
“Of course, there was also her other famous statement about how you can’t be a real lesbian without worshipping the penis. Well (laughs), some of us cope, some of us cope.”
In Passions Between Women, Emma Donoghue’s cultural history of British lesbianism, she gives many examples of how, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, female cross-dressing was often synonymous with lesbianism. “Dressing like a man was seen by some lesbian women as one of the only ways to assert their difference,” she explains. “Then, in other cases, a priest or confessor might order a woman who had confessed to an attraction to women to ‘dress like the boy she clearly was’. It’s a tradition and part of our history that I’ve become very interested in.
“My next play is going to deal with this area. It’ll be based on this real-life woman who was a male impersonator on stage in 1880’s New York. There was a huge craze for women on stage then who looked like men. I’ve seen photos of these women and they looked amazing, really well made up and dressed in the proper costumes. They would sing funny songs about life as a Victorian man, that was their act. This wasn’t elegant androgyny, it was a real craze for women convincingly impersonating men. The specific woman that my play will be based on took it so seriously that she used to shave until she grew a moustache.
“It would be dangerous enough to do that nowadays but can you imagine the bravery it took in 1880’s New York? She also ran away with her dresser, a woman, and they got married in disguise with a best man who was a pantomime dame. When I discovered all this, I just knew that I’d have to turn it into a play.”
Does cross-dressing hold any appeal for Emma herself?
“I do have a Christian Dior suit and all the way round on the inside of the belt it says Monsieur as if to reassure the wearer that he is a man,” she laughs. “I got it for a tenner in a charity shop but I tend to wear it with a black bra and a velvet choker. One of my favourite badges says ‘Butchy Fem’ which I think is quite fun too. Rather than, in a very stern way, rejecting all the old roles, I prefer to play with them and not take them seriously at all.”
Since she was a teenager, Emma has been an avid collector of black and white picture postcards of women. In fact, just before we met in the Shelbourne for this interview, she’d had another trawl around some city-centre shops and further enlarged her treasure trove with some shots of Doris Day, Glenn Close, a very young Shirley Maclaine (“doesn’t she look so cute?”) and Meryl Streep. So, who would Emma single out as her personal heart-throbs?
“k.d. lang would definitely be one,” she replies. “Though I was irritated recently when a journalist misreported me as saying that k.d. lang was a great role model for coming out. I was out long before k.d. lang was, but she’s definitely one of my heart-throbs. In general, it’s probably brunettes. I’ve a bit of a brunette thing. In I’ve Heard The Mermaids Singing, there’s a dark haired character and every time I watch the video I pause it when she appears and worship.
“It irritates me when they talk about lesbian chic and they give Madonna as an example. Please, if we’re gonna do lesbian chic, let’s do it ourselves. Boasting that she’d once gone to bed with a woman is not the same thing. If somebody is genuinely bisexual, fair enough, but just joking about it to get in the papers doesn’t give you the right to be a spokesperson.”
Not surprisingly, Emma Donoghue is less than happy with how lesbians have traditionally been depicted on the movie screen. “The early ones are just dire stereotypes like in The Killing Of Sister George which is such a grim film,” she says. “Or else, you get nice ones like in Children’s Hour but they have to commit suicide. There was quite a nice lesbian character recently in Three Of Hearts but the lesbian relationship was over within the first five minutes of the film, and there was a scene in a gay bar which made me cringe – all the women are in jackets and waistcoats and playing pool and sort of swaggering. I’d like to see us as bit parts in lots of things but they tend to cut us out. In L.A. Story, for instance, Steve Martin’s house mate was a lesbian but they cut that at the last minute because early viewers’ reactions were bad. In the comedy Switch in which Ellen Barkin plays a man reincarnated as a woman, that character gets seduced by a very glamorous and likeable lesbian but the sex scenes were cut at the last minute and they had Ellen Barkin fainting before anything can happen. These little censorships are deeply annoying.
“Any good lesbian films I’ve seen tend to come from independent producers, films like John Sayles’ Lianna, Desert Hearts. Clair De Lune is trash but it’s fun. I’ve Heart The Mermaids Singing is probably my favourite film. That manages to be about lots of things and also a lesbian film. It doesn’t make it a big, heavy issue but it’s not at all nervous about being a lesbian film either.”
Emma has also been impressed by the portrayal of the incipient lesbian relationship between Beth and Margaret in the Channel Four soap, Brookside.
“Oh, I’ve been glued to it,” she enthuses. “I wholeheartedly enjoy it. It’s exceptionally well done for a soap opera. They’re giving the two women much more time in their scenes and rather than having to come up with dialogue all the time, it’s really well-miked so you can hear every little gasp and gulp and hesitation. I think it’s beautifully done and it’s really interesting because they are so ordinary.
“Any viewer must realise that this could happen to any two girls, and that I love. It’s really interesting at the moment because the Margaret one is both the most terrified but also she’s taking the initiative in wanting to go further with it. Rather than one pursuing the other, it’s much more ambiguous.
“It’s a funny cliché of films though that the dark-haired ones are always convinced that they’re lesbians and the blondes are always unsure. It was the same in Desert Hearts, in Clair De Lune. There’s something about us dark-haired ones, we’re always the lesbians. I’ve found that the blondes are lesbians too (laughs).”

Like many other people, Emma Donoghue was appalled by the derisory representation of women’s writing in the Field Day Anthology of Irish Literature which was published three years ago. She has since been asked to edit a volume of Irish writing on lesbianism which will be published sometime next year as part of a move to redress that imbalance.
“What bothered me most about the original Field Day Anthology was that the editors were all male,” she says. “The categories that they chose also tended to exclude women. When I was asked to do this lesbian anthology, I realised that it was an afterthought, and that was infuriating. It’ll be a hasty book and it may suffer for that. The other one had over a decade to be formed so we’re not getting an equal chance to do well. Because it’s being published afterwards, it’ll be seen as the stuff that wasn’t good enough. But I agreed to do it because it will be a very useful book. It may not be the ideal circumstances but if it means that a text, a big text, about Irish literature which will focus on lesbian writing will exist then it’s worth it. It’s something that I would’ve loved to have read when I was in college.
“I’ve found a huge variety of stuff. I’m using twenty-five different writers, ranging from the eighteenth century to the twentieth. There’s some men in it, some straight women, lesbian women – I don’t say anything about the writers’ sexuality because that’s not too important, and also I’d be sued in some cases. But the writing all has lesbian content. I’ve mixed all the stuff up, it’s not chronological at all. If it was chronological, people could read it as ‘first, there was innocence and friendship and then everything became sexualised’. I’m really against any kind of simple reading of history like that. Just as many women in the nineteenth century were having sex with each other as now, but they weren’t recording it. There were many hidden lives. There’s no reason to assume that all these women were being perfectly sexless.”
Because of all her other pursuits, Emma’s PhD (on the invisible women who surrounded the male literary ‘greats’) is currently on hold. However, she continues to base herself for much of her time in Cambridge, where she lives with a group of other women in a housing co-op.
“It’s not a commune, we don’t all have to sleep with each other,” she explains. “But there’s more sharing than in your average house of tenants. We eat meals together, have parties together, share the house duties together. It feels like a real family.
“There is a sense, especially at Christmas, that a lot of us splinter off back to our biological families but when we come back in January that we’re home to our other family. There’s a feeling that the bonds between friends are much more reliable than the bonds between lovers. The bonds between ex-lovers is a fascinating thing in the lesbian community – they’re often really strong.
“I live in a house with my ex-lover, along with four others. Not all ex-lovers are close friends but a lot are. There’s a huge element of friendship to start with. Also, there’s this feeling that it’s a small community and you don’t decide not to see someone again just ’cause you’re not lovers any more. It’s different ideas about relationships among many lesbians. I would hate to be on bad terms with an ex-lover. If I have loved her once, why on earth should she then become my enemy?”
Would Emma ever like to have a child? “I’m twenty-four so it’s really not a burning issue,” she says. “Like, for the straight women I know of twenty-four, it’s all very distant. If I wanted to, I certainly could. I could easily end up with a partner who has a child already. Huge numbers of lesbians don’t realise it until long after they’ve married and had children. So, I’m open-minded but it’s certainly not something that would determine my emotional life.”
Though based in Cambridge, Emma returns quite frequently to Dublin and says she likes the feeling of having “a foot in both camps.” It’s only in the past year or so, however, that she’s felt a part of the lesbian scene in the Irish capital.
“Since I came back with my play, I’ve started meeting a lot of people through that,” she insists. “And I’ve had a real sense of linking up with other generations. There’s a wonderful class-mix and age-mix in lesbian communities. It’s not like in straight pubs where twenty-year-olds mix with twenty-year-olds, and the forty-year-olds go somewhere else. It’s been great meeting women in their forties and thirties who’ve given me a huge amount of advice and wisdom about what it’s like here.
“It is, however, a community under a lot of pressure. Most people aren’t out at work. They’re basically afraid of losing their families and their jobs. There are married women who come into the pubs one night a week and it’s like their one night off. There’s a lot of people who are out in Dublin but then they go home to the mammy and button the mouth. It does feel like a very nervous community but it also feels that it’s changing and coming alive just as we watch it. The numbers are booming.
“There’s a new club in The Cellary, called Girlicious, which feels like nothing else I’ve been to. You can talk downstairs and there’s food and velvet over all the surfaces and you can dance upstairs. Real old-style salon decadence rather than grimy pubs all the time. And it just has a real kind of confident feel to it, rather than hiding away. I much prefer Girlicious to the pub scene because I don’t drink. I just eat crisps all the time.
“I never got the taste for drink. I never felt I needed it. I discovered women at sixteen and I’ve been intoxicated with them since. Sex and chocolate are my only vices.”

Emma Donoghue’s immediate plans are to complete the
Field Day project, finish her second novel (the third and fourth are already outlined) and get started on her second play. There’s also been talk of a screenplay for a possible movie adaptation of Stir Fry.
“I want to write a lot of brilliant books,” she proclaims. “I want to do plays and more history work but really I want to be a novelist. With fiction, you can seize somebody’s imagination for an evening, you can create characters that they almost believe are real – that gives me an excitement.”
And, for the most part, Emma’s writing will continue to centre on the lesbian experience. This is not something which she feels is restricting in any way.
“There’s been a huge number of novels written about nothing but heterosexuals,” she says. “In a sense, what’s open to me is even broader than a heterosexual background because so much of what heterosexuals have to say has been said already. It’s been covered by the greats, by Romeo And Juliet, by everything. Whereas, I’ve all these stories to tell that haven’t been told before because they’ve been stifled.
“There’s a huge amount of new things to say, new issues to look at, new angles to see. There really is so much to say.”