Respect Is The Key

This much is certain: we know not the day nor the hour. In the evening, Stephen Gately was out having a good time with his husband, on holidays in Majorca. The next morning he was gone, his last precious breath drained from him at the age of just 33. Even for people who didn’t know him well, the news was deeply shocking. In circumstances like this, it is natural that people are curious. He was so young! What happened? How? Where? When? Was there any foul play involved? Fans want to know. Friends need to.

A post-mortem was carried out by the Spanish authorities – but the results would take a few days to be published. Immediately the hack bushfire went into action. When there is a vacuum, newspapers fill it with speculation. The fact that Stephen was gay added a different layer of prurience to much of what was written. There were suggestions of a long night of excessive drinking. A Bulgarian man had gone back to the apartment Stephen shared with his husband Andy Cowles and it was he who had found Stephen’s body. This was seen as fuel, that added to the fire of supposition: what can they have been up to? Why did Stephen end up on the couch, where he died, and not in bed? Cannabis had been smoked; it sounded more ominous to say that ‘drugs’ were involved and so they did.
Innuendo was rife. Much of what was written was tawdry and disrespectful. When it emerged that he had likely died as a result of fluid in his lungs, assumptions were made that Stephen had been badly drunk and had choked on his own vomit. The worst offense was caused by Jan Moir in the Daily Mail, who penned a poisonous piece of homophobic vitriol, suggesting that Stephen’s “gay lifestyle” must have contributed to the circumstances of his death.
In the long run, all of the speculation proved fundamentally groundless. Stephen had suffered from an undiagnosed, long-term heart condition. As a result, fluid, which was not being cleared efficiently, was accumulating on his lungs. It is a common condition in people with heart complaints, but Stephen’s cardiovascular problems had never been identified. The coroner concluded that he had died from natural causes. It was pulmonary oedema that killed him, the fluid on his lungs leading to respiratory failure.
The Daily Mail meantime had been forced to retreat. A campaign was initiated by the comedian and actor Stephen Fry, and contributed to by Father Ted writer Graham Linehan, among others. Did Mail advertisers want to be associated with this kind of anti-homosexual prejudice?, they asked. The answer, in some cases at least, was no. When Marks and Spencer demanded that their ads be moved away from the offending piece online, and other major clients began to follow, the paper caved in. Moir’s piece was removed from the Mail’s web archive. People in positions of power were voting with their cheque books and the Mail was listening...

At eight in the morning on the day of the funeral, outside St.Laurence O’Toole’s Church on Seville Place, where the members of Boyzone had conducted an overnight vigil, fans wrapped up in sleeping bags were beginning to come to. It was cold but crisp and clear, and as the sun rose on another day, Dublin was bathed in an extraordinary kind of beauty.
By the time the funeral service started at 12 o’clock, thousands of people lined both sides of the street outside the church, most of them local working class Dublin people from the area, for whom Stephen Gately represented a hero, a local boy made good, one of their own.
The service was relatively simple and straightforward, until the boys from the band got up to speak at the end. In a matter of seconds the atmosphere was transformed. What they had to say was deeply personal and moving, and impressive – so much so that we have published it in full in this issue of Hot Press. It would be impossible to pay more eloquent tribute.
There was always an essential decency and honesty about the individuals in Boyzone, and that came through not just in what they said, but in how they said it. It is not easy having to stand up in front of a crowded church, and speak from the heart about the loss of someone you love, but – Shane Lynch standing shoulder to shoulder with them – Keith Duffy, Mikey Graham and Ronan Keating did it with grace, humour and dignity. It was a remarkable panegyric and it reflected well not just on Stephen Gately, but also on the band themselves, and the values they represent of hard work, modesty, open-mindedness and what is probably a somewhat old-fashioned sense of goodness.

The scene was not without its contradictions. The funeral mass was held in a Catholic Church, an institution in which being gay is still regarded as being a sinful aberration, something which can be cured. He meant well, but there was a clear uneasiness about the way in which Father Declan Blake, the priest who read the mass, glossed over the facts of Stephen’s homosexuality and his marriage to Andrew Cowles. He mentioned Andy by name without giving any clear signal as to what the relationship was: the fact that these were men who had sex together in the way that married hetero-sexual couples do. On the ground in the Catholic Church there are decent people who must know that it is deeply condescending and unpleasant to treat homosexuality as a sin but that is the vision of society and of sexuality that Catholicism and to a very large extent Christianity represents.
Keith Duffy made no concessions to banal propriety. He spoke of Andy as Steven’s husband. Ronan Keating deliberately repeated the reference. They joked about his campness and their own. It was the truth and it carried an extra charge being spoken in a place where homosexuality is forbidden. In terms of the evolution of Irish society, it was a telling moment. Stephen Gately may have been under pressure when he came out as being gay – but in doing so, and in the way he led his life subsequently, as an open, out, positive, guilt-free, working class gay man who espoused equality, he set an example. In Ireland there is still discrimination against homosexuals and the Catholic Church is in the vanguard of trying to keep it that way. In his own un-showy way, Stephen Gately told us all that this was or is not good enough and at the funeral service that message was reinforced by the members of Boyzone.
Thinking about Stephen and listening to the boys in the band, it struck me how much unpleasantness and abuse they had to put up with over the years, especially from the people who imagine that they have some kind of ownership of the idea of musical quality. And it occurred to me too that very few if any of those who lay claim to the truth in matters to do with music could carry themselves with even half the dignity or speak as well as the working class Dublin boys who stood alongside Stephen Gately from Sheriff Street in Boyzone. It also struck me how much more the drama teachers on the ground in places like Sheriff Street, who work with kids like the young Stephen Gately and encourage them to pursue the dream of expressing themselves, of becoming actors and musicians, contribute than the bullies who use whatever platform they are accorded in the media to try to damage other people’s reputations and ruin their ability to go about their work unmolested.
That isn’t to suggest that criticism has no place, or to deny that it is healthy to have a dialogue about art and music and entertainment and self-expression which pushes us all towards doing better.
But it is to say that snobbery, small-mindedness, pettiness and nastiness should have no part to play in it. There was none of that in the tribute paid to Stephen Gately by his friends, musical partners and brothers in Boyzone. It is, as they demonstrated, all about respect.

In different circumstances I would have written this column about Julie Feeney. Her music in some ways could hardly be more different to Boyzone’s. She is classically trained and operates as a kind of one-woman creative machine. Her second album Pages is a thing of extraordinary beauty and finesse, full of intricately wrought songs of quite dazzling brilliance. I saw her live last week, and the defiantly individual voice of the album was enriched even further in performance. She was stunning.
She wore a house on her head and the under-frame of a bustle dress for her clothes. She talked, sang and played with a marvellous sense of poise and conviction. She is a star. But she is only this because of the fierce hard graft she has put into her music. And she is still working like crazy, going out there and taking risks, traipsing up and down the country to play in all sorts of places, putting herself on the line in the hope that the world will catch up, as you think it must. She will be wonderful on a big stage.
Julie’s music is rooted in the classical tradition, but it is also beautiful pop music with fantastic, hummable choruses. It is luminously ambitious music, but totally devoid of snobbery. It is a fine expression of what and who Julie is, and as such it is warmly, personally alluring.
It is refined, brilliantly calibrated, self-conscious and, you might say, ‘middle-class’ music that is unlikely to fly in Darndale with the same critical mass as Boyzone’s music did. But it is wonderful art, and it shares with their music this: it is the product of hard work, conviction, a desire to deliver the most that we can from the raw material of the voice, the imagination, the musicality, the heart that is ours and ours alone and to share it with anyone who wants to, anyone who will listen..,
Give me people for whom that is the prize any day.