Gay Out West

GALWAY: A town (or is it a city?) also a county

GAY: Decide for yourself

SCENE:

(i) Arena for display

(ii) Description of a fragment of real or fictitious life

(iii) Agitated – especially with a display of temper

(iv) – of persons having information not generally accessible.

SHEELA NA GIG is a book shop in Galway. When it opened five years ago it stocked 25 copies of Gay Community News, Ireland’s free monthly lesbian and gay newspaper. Now it stocks between 100 and 200 copies. They are taken quietly and privately, without creating a big issue, by individuals and couples who can also buy books in the gay section.

These people, of all ages and social types from all parts of Galway city and county, living very private lifestyles perhaps with their own network or scene, are not involved in the more noticeable organised gay scene.

Many have chosen a low-key scene for themselves, integrating completely with the heterosexual community. For those who prefer a more open and obvious scene, there is a phoneline for both men and women and a Saturday afternoon P.L.U.T.O., a gay/lesbian/bi-sexual society, and monthly discos on Campus during term time. This summer saw the launch of “Liberation” a weekly gay disco and there is a Women’s Bar, privately run one night a week, which serves as a meeting place for lesbians.

Eugene McGuigan is in his late 20s. He moved to Galway three and a half years ago, but says it is only within the last one and a half years that “people have appeared out of nowhere.”

“The Galway gay scene has become very fragmented,” he explains. “When P.L.U.T.O. started up this term the ‘Collective’ appeared which can’t decide what to do and nothing gets past them. There is a communication problem; with short advance notice of discos, workers can’t organise weekends off or arrange for friends to come down. There should be a high-energy bar where we could go.

“I can’t speak about the scene abroad but Dublin is a meat market to a lot of people. In Galway if you meet someone you have to work at conversation. In Dublin you don’t, it’s looks more than personality that people go on. Here it’s more of a challenge and a game – are you or aren’t you – and you have to talk to people.”

Orla is 24 and the editor of the Connaught L.G.C.N., a supplement within G.C.N. She came to Galway from rural Donegal five years ago believing herself to be the only lesbian in Ireland. She saw the women’s phoneline number in the local paper and rang up.

Two women met her the next night and brought her down to the Waterfront Bar to meet others and generally look after her. The woman whom she spoke to on the phone that night is now a close and supportive friend.

“The Galway scene is much more friendly and open than Cork a couple of years ago, for instance. The women here are more friendly and look out for people more,” she says. “A big problem at the moment is that our meeting place The Waterfront Bar, advertised as a women’s bar in G.C.N., is now closed. Its lease is up for sale and no-one knows what will happen.

“I spend two thirds of my time in the men’s scene with a gang of friends. The guys down here are wonderful. Some people have this perception that lesbians are men-haters but that’s not true. When I moved out of my grandmother’s house I lived with a gay couple for five weeks.

“It’s a shame “Liberation” didn’t work out. We need a gay/lesbian disco. But the women I associate with are always looking out for each other. I think the women in Galway are brilliant.”

A jarring element came from two chaps I talked to who, being born, bred and reared in Galway, are active members of the general community and are not interested in a gay scene that turns in on its gayness and turns its back on the welfare of Galway city and county. One is a charming Galway business man with an ageless face, the other is 27, does something in the freelance advertising area and, in my opinion, is devastatingly handsome. Let us call them Jules and Jim.

Jim bemoans the lack of a Galway scene. “It’s non-existent except for a very few people and they’re in one complete circle. Things have changed dramatically here in three years. I have no time for it. I don’t feel comfortable around it. The scene is built on one group. As I’m involved in a relationship with someone out of town I don’t belong here. I don’t fit in. I have no interest in it.

Jules: “There are a few prominent people in the Galway scene who should stand back and look at themselves. They aren’t Galwegians. They don’t represent anyone’s view but their own. They live in one another’s ear as an exclusive clique.

“Galway is known as having a clique in the rest of the West of Ireland. The scene is very different in small, really small towns. It’s more liberated, more natural. What with the per-head of population and the weekend influx of gays, Galway should be leading the way, up with Dublin and London. I’ve been made so welcome in gay bars in other towns but it’s not done here.”

Jenny is well-travelled and bored with the gay scene in general. She’s been to various scenes in various countries and never found a gay bar that wasn’t tacky. She’s been in Galway since the new year having come from “a big city”. She’s also of the opinion that the Galway scene is “non-existent.” “There is a lot of potential so why the fuck don’t people get their act together?” she complains. “There are enough of us around to do something but all I find is people do jack-shit about it. They sit around and wait.”

There are a few National Monuments in Gay Ireland and Blackrock, a swimming area with a diving tower in Salthill, is one. Farther back than living memory, it has been the nocturnal meeting place of Connaught gay men.

I was taken there once by a friend to see this historic place in action and left with a deep sense of the loneliness and isolation experienced by generations of rural men in Connaught and along the West coast.

Nowadays at a Galway P.L.U.T.O. disco men come from Sligo, Roscommon and Mayo and even drive the four hours from Donegal to attend. If the Galway gay scene does not make room for these people, then it might as well admit itself to be a closed group of friends with similar interests and backgrounds pretending to be the centre of the Universe while the uninitiated continue to tread the steps of Blackrock in the moonlight hoping to meet a stranger in the night.

Running the Pink Press

Hailing from Limerick, Ritchie Prenderville is the editor of Ireland’s only gay publication, Gay Community News, now in its fifth year of production.

Gay Community News, published by the National Lesbian and Gay Federation, is a monthly tabloid with a current print-run of 7,500 copies. Naked of a cover-price, ‘in order to reach as many people as possible’, copies of GCN are distributed far and wide. With fixed distribution points in Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Galway, Waterford and Sligo, the paper can also boast a subscription list that sees copies winging their way to Yugoslavia, America and even Saudi Arabia, among other exotic locations.

GCN is based in the nerve-centre of Dublin City, Temple Bar, where it is housed in the Hirschfeld Centre, the one time gay community centre, before fire burnt the building to a shell in 1987. There are 25 FÁS workers involved with the paper.

Ritchie has worked with GCN for three years, the last eighteen months of which he has spent sitting in the editor’s chair.Ritchie is no stranger to publicity. His job involves acting as media spokesperson for the publishers – during the build-up to the St Patrick’s Day parade, he appeared on numerous radio and TV stations, including RTE and ABC America.

“Over the past five years GCN has grown in many ways – I would like to think for the better. As the gay community in Ireland is now growing, GCN is expected to grow with it.” The current plan is to give the paper a new look which will be launched to co-incide with the gay celebration, PRIDE, held at the end of June.

While Ritchie has been editor

for GCN, there has been considerable change both within the gay movement – and in the position of gays and lesbians in Irish society. “In the space of just six months, lesbians and gays were invited to Áras an Uachtarain to meet the President, Mary Robinson, the first lesbian and gay float took part in Dublin’s St Patrick’s Day parade and the Minister for Justice, Marie Geoghegan-Quinn, decriminalised homosexuality.”

He expects to stay in the job for another year – during which time he himself will go on learning.

As the sixth editor of the paper in nearly as many years, he is under no illusions that it’s a life-long job. “Each editor before me has advanced the paper in a certain direction, whether in its political coverage, its distribution or its educational role. Each editor left their own mark on it, and when they could advance it no further, they knew it was time to move on.

The paper has undoubtedly grown in the Prenderville era. “Since law reform last June, our advertising has increased dramatically, and that has certainly helped us.” The page count has doubled to thirty-two, it’s print run has nearly trebled, and there are now supplements from Connaught and Munster, and special pages dealing with women’s issues.

“If we cannot make GCN open to all, then we are failing,” he comments. “The reason we don’t have a cover price is so that the stigma of bringing the paper up to a counter and having to pay for it is not there. People can just pick it up and walk out of the shop with it, and that makes it instantly available to a lot more.”

There is more than a hint of prepared PR work when he reveals that the aim of GCN is to ‘entertain, inform and educate’. “We are the only stable link that gays and lesbians around the country have. There is a responsibility attached to that. We have to cover topics from HIV and AIDS to the latest film in town. We have to mix our mood for the reader, so that there is, hopefully, a little something for everyone.”