Growing up gay: 'Pride was a big part of my coming out'

As we celebrate Cork Pride, Jen Stevens speaks to members of the LGBTQI+ community about their experiences growing up as a young gay person in Ireland

Pride and prejudice: Five members of the LGBTQI+ community speak about the joys and challenges of being a young queer person in Ireland

PJ

PJ Kirby. Picture: Donal Talbot

• PJ Kirby is a podcaster, a dancer and an activist. One half of the I’m Grand Mam podcast, which he presents with Kevin Twomey, he moved home to Ireland from London in January this year. He has just raised more than €20,000 to support a new key support worker position for LGBT Ireland. He grew up on the northside of Cork and is 29.

“I actually didn’t come out ‘til I was 20 and had moved to London. Before I left Cork, I knew that I needed to explore that part of my identity, but I thought I never would because I experienced such shame and anxiety around it. 

"I think a lot of that was because I grew up on the north side of Cork City and I went to an all-boys school which was quite working class and a bit rough. I was a bit afraid to even think of coming out.

"I obviously knew a few gay people, but it was a very, very small amount and then when I moved to London and went to a performing arts college it was like this incredible explosion of people who were all being completely authentic, and I became more comfortable with the idea of who I was.

“Then, three months after moving to London my dad slipped into a coma and eventually passed away. He was the first person that I came out to when he was in a coma because I thought life’s too short, I need to just accept who I am. They said that hearing is the last sense to go, so I wanted to tell him.

“I came out in stages then. I told my sister when she collected me from the airport — don’t come out to your sister when she’s driving around a roundabout in Cork! She got the fright of her life. Then I went back to my mam’s house, and we had a few drinks and I told her. 

I found out about a year and a half after telling my mam that she had really struggled with it. 

She was worried for me because her idea of that life was so much scarier when she was young but then she said that she could see me blossoming into myself and she loved that for me, and she knew I was going to be ok.

“The main thing for me with Pride is visibility, especially, right now, with everything that’s happening. If I had seen headlines about men being murdered or attacked when I was young, I would have been terrified. 

"Pride is so much Queer joy in the streets. It’s a big celebration showing a loving community who are here for you. You often see, on TV and in the media, the struggle and the traumatic coming out whereas what we try to do is showcase that you can live a happy and healthy life as a Queer person. 

"I think that if I was exposed to more fair representation in my daily life as a teen, if people came to my school to give talks or if I’d seen a big pride parade I may have come out earlier and I wouldn’t have struggled so much.”

Darren

Darren Kennedy

• Darren Kennedy is a broadcaster, columnist, entrepreneur and one of Ireland’s most stylish men. He grew up in Dublin in the 80s and 90s.

“My experience of growing up gay in Ireland was, truth be told, quite difficult. I felt I didn’t really have any outlets or reference points. 

"Even though I grew up in Dublin, your community, and the place you grew up always feels very small, especially at that age. I felt very isolated, very outside. It was very difficult.

“I started coming out to family and friends when I was 16. Thankfully, everyone reacted positively overall. My parents found it a bit difficult at the time, but they worked hard and are now the greatest allies of all LGBTQI+ people.

“I think things have changed dramatically for young people but there is a misconception that, because we have marriage equality, homophobia has been eradicated and that is absolutely not the case as recent incidents will emphasise. 

"It’s important to understand that someone coming out is still going against what is perceived, and shown to be, overwhelmingly, the norm in society, but that is changing and we’re getting much better representation in government and on TV and all that certainly helps.

“I’d still love to see lots of changes when it comes to equality across the board. It’s about teaching allyship [supporting the interests of marginalised groups], and this is something that I say to my nieces and my nephews who are very young, it’s about teaching people the difference between right and wrong. 

"It’s all about that moral compass so that young people feel empowered to stand up against something that they don’t believe is right, and it’s about being courageous in the truest sense of the word.

"It only takes one person to be a homophobe or to bully someone for being gay. Everyone else in the group knows that’s wrong but they don’t feel empowered or courageous enough to stand up and say, hold on a minute, no, that’s not fair.

“For me, Pride is all about being open, being visible, celebrating and protesting, because that really is the true meaning of Pride. And, you know, there are many parts of the world where homosexuality is still illegal, and people are still being oppressed and persecuted. So it’s not necessarily about doing it for us in Ireland because, yeah, we’ve got some freedoms, it’s about the bigger picture. 

"Even in the UK, you see people opposing trans rights and conversion therapy hasn’t been banned, so you have to be very careful because equal rights means equal rights for everybody and you can quickly be frogmarched into a place where first it’s the rights of trans people being eroded, then it’s gay people, then it’s the rights of women or whatever. 

"That sounds dramatic, but you never know, stranger things have happened and so I think it’s really important to stand up.”

Moninne

Moninne Griffith CEO of Belong To Youth Services. Picture: Moya Nolan

• Moninne Griffity is the CEO of Belong To Youth Services, a former director of Marriage Equality, a feminist and an LGBT activist. She lives in Dublin with her wife Clodagh and their daughter.

“I mean, I knew I was different, but I’m 50 next year, so I was born in the 70s and I was one of five girls — a pretty typical kind of Irish family at the time. We were quite religious. I was very religious, like I was really holy. I wanted to be a nun and everything. 

I was obsessed with St Therese of Lisieux. Looking back now that might have been a giveaway that I wanted to be lumped away with a whole lot of women.

“It was in secondary school that I started to feel a little bit different. I had no role models really, nothing that I could relate to anyway and even then I had boyfriends. I really liked boys, my mum said I was boy mad!

“My parents worked really hard for us to have a good education and to do well, my mom’s a real feminist and so I really wanted to have good job, get married, have lots of babies. I wanted to be Mary Robinson with lots of kids.

“I did get married to a lovely man, but I started to just to kind of become more aware of stuff and it became an issue for me, and I became more and more unhappy as I became more and more aware of the fact that I wasn’t completely heterosexual.

“Then I went back to college to do a master’s in women’s studies in UCD in the 00s and that really rocked my world. I met all these other amazing queer women and some of them were in really happy same-sex relationships and had kids, so it was like, wow, you can have kids and be a lesbian.

“I started seeing a counsellor and eventually then I made big changes. I spoke to my husband, I came out, I moved out, I moved jobs. I really jumped off a metaphorical cliff. It was terrifying.

“I love Pride, it was a really big part of my coming out. I love it, especially for young people, especially those from small communities or very rural places. 

"They might be lucky enough to be in a youth club in the big town in their county and there might be 10 LGBT people in that group then suddenly they get up at five o’clock in the morning and they’re on a bus to Dublin and to arrive in the city in time to come to the breakfast that we run with our colleagues from Youth Work Ireland. 

"They arrive at the door and they’re like Bambi, with big eyes and then they’re in a big space with hundreds of other young people like them, and it’s like, oh my god, they probably grew up thinking they were the only one in their town or their village like them, and then see that there are hundreds just like them all over from all over Ireland. And their little faces, like, they just... I get emotional thinking about it because it’s just so lovely.”

Michael and Terry

Michael Murphy and his husband Terry O'Sullivan. Picture: Moya Nolan

• Michael Murphy is one of Ireland’s most well-known and well-respected news broadcasters, retiring from RTÉ in 2014 where he had been an anchor, producer and director. He is now a psychoanalyst and runs Psychological Therapy Services with his husband, Terry O’Sullivan, a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. 
• Terry was a founding member of the Rutland Centre, and is a former president of the Irish Association for Alcohol and Addiction Counselling (IAAAC). They have been a couple for 36 years.

“Now, you’re talking to us about prehistoric times, is that right?” Michael laughs.

“I was lucky,” Terry begins. “I grew up in a world where my parents were liberal, and it wasn’t a normal suburban environment. It was a place where there were lots of different kinds of bohemian people around but I still wouldn’t speak about it openly to everyone.

“I became involved in the Irish gay rights movement from the very beginning with David Norris and some others. 

"We had our first Sunday meeting in Leeson Street, a cheese and wine meeting, the cheese was awful, that Calvita stuff with silverskin onions and we used to call the wine Chateau Collapso Non Returno, it was poison! But it was a lovely place for people to go on a Sunday afternoon. 

"Myself and Ken Watters, who I went to school with, set up a health information club. Ken was a doctor and we decided we could teach people about sexual health and tell them what to do and where to go if something was wrong. 

People often waited far too long to see a doctor because of fear.

“Just to say,” Michael interjects, “Terry’s dad fought in the War of Independence. He was one of the first people to go on hunger strike in Tralee jail. 

"For somebody like that to be absolutely supportive of his son growing up gay in the completely repressive era of the 50s and 60s in Ireland was extraordinary.”

“There was a certain amount of luck there,” Terry says. 

“But I was very open from almost the beginning. The only thing I do remember is early in the Rutland Centre. 

"Initially I was worried people might find out I was gay, and it would be difficult but when I talked to my colleagues, they told me I should have absolutely no fear whatsoever, that they would stand by me.”

“It was very different for me,” Michael, who was born in Mayo, says.

“I was away in boarding school for a start, and you obviously wouldn’t act out any homosexual feelings or anything like that. 

"Eventually I ended up in RTÉ and I was very concerned about what would happen to my career if people found out. We’re talking about the 70s and 80s and there was a punishment in RTÉ that you could be fired for gross moral turpitude. It was in the rules somewhere. 

"As a result I was quite repressed until my late 20s or early 30s and even then, colleagues in the newsroom would have known about me, but I would not have been out publicly.

“There was a programme at the time called Hall’s Pictorial Weekly and they had a sketch where there was a newsreader with a beard who was very obviously gay. 

"It was so upsetting and undermining to me that the head of news at the time, Wesley Boyd, went to Frank Hall and asked him to stop using that sketch, which he did.

“[Terry and I] were were out with Máire Geoghegan-Quinn and her husband, John. They were friends of ours. We were in the middle of dinner when Máire suddenly said ‘What would it mean if we if we were to repeal the gay legislation?’

“We were both stunned because the possibility had never occurred to us. I can’t even remember what we stammered, something about not having to look over our shoulders, or something like that. 

Within a fortnight she had introduced the bill in the Dáil which got rid of all of those restrictions where you could have been imprisoned. It was absolutely extraordinary.

“We were recently stopped by two women in Wexford,” Terry says, “who wanted to say that they were appreciative of what we’d done, I said I wasn’t sure what we’d done.”

"We were public about it all I suppose," Michael smile.

"When I became a producer and director in RTÉ I always made sure to do programmes featuring gay people and when we got married it was in public. At least the people coming up behind us could see that it could be done.”

“You know,” Terry says, “people always liked and respected Michael and admired him on the TV and I think for a lot of people it was a case of well, if this man is doing that, is happy and he’s ok, then it’s going to be ok for my son or my daughter.

“Yes, that’s why we did it.”