Once married, and now glad to be gay

GAY men cheered and women wept when Tom Daley came out. But when he added that he still fancies women, he highlighted the folly of boxing people off in terms of something as potentially fluid as sexuality.

While the Olympic diver’s words touched the hearts of all young people who are wrongly assumed to be heterosexual, they were particularly poignant for older gay men. Many, like Daley, had male love affairs in their youth, but instead of naming it as he did, they suppressed the truth of who they were, and married women.

Leitrim born Donal MacAodh was one such man: “In my late teens I had a couple of brief encounters with males,” he says. “Back then, admissions of homosexuality were typically greeted with horror. Because of that negativity and because of my strong desire to become a dad, I dismissed my previous relationships as ‘experimentation,’ made up my mind not to investigate whether I was homosexual and buried what was within me.