PJ Kirby: I was filled with so much shame, I thought I would never come out

Ahead of Cork Pride, podcaster and dancer PJ Kirby talks to Nicole Glennon about acceptance and his hopes for the future

Sun, 30 Jul, 2023 - 17:45

Nicole Glennon

"Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Fergie has just been injured. They’ve found you in the crowd. You know all the moves. This is your moment. And 3, 2, 1…”

The music starts, and the room thrusts forward as PJ Kirby calls out the steps.

Under his instruction, I am strutting across a floor in Liffey Trust Studios, all hips and hair flicks, lip-synching along to “boys just come and go like seasons”.

I’m having fun, despite the fact I’ve just realised that the secret suspicion I harboured of being very good on Dancing with the Stars if I ever got the call is very, very wrong.

I realise just how wrong I am when Kirby shoos the 40-50 students in his Throwing Shapes class to the side to demonstrate the routine in full before we have another go ourselves.

We’re all captivated by him, erupting in whoops and cheers as he blushes, “don’t embarrass me”.

At 6’4”, Kirby could never have been a wallflower — the Cork dancer was destined to stand out, even if he wasn’t always ready to embrace it.

“There’s a thing in Cork, where if someone loves themselves, you call them septic,” Kirby tells me over an iced oat latte in Dublin’s As One café. “Oh my god, she’s septic, she loves herself.’

“You’re allowed to be septic in [my] class, you’re allowed to love yourself.”

When Kirby, 30, says this, he says it with some authority. Born in 1993, his arrival coincided with the year homosexuality was decriminalised in the State.

PJ Kirby: 'Growing up, I didn’t know that many queer people or gay people on the north side of Cork.' Picture: Brown Thomas

But as the Blarney Street native says wryly, people weren’t exactly “flying the flag” in his youth.

“Growing up, I didn’t know that many queer people or gay people on the north side of Cork. There was one boy who came out in secondary school, but he was getting stones thrown at him. So, I was terrified. That’s why I think I didn’t come out until I was 20 when I moved [to London]. I didn’t think I was going to be able to.”

Kirby, who has become one of the most recognisable faces — or rather, voices — of Cork’s LGBTQIA+ community thanks in part to his chart-topping podcast I’m Grand Mam (hosted with fellow Corkonian Kevin Twomey), is chatting with me ahead of Cork’s Pride festival. Naturally, one of my first questions relates to his experience coming out. I hate asking it, I tell him, it feels invasive.

“The whole coming out thing, I hope we get to a stage where no one has to come out,” he says, “no hetero person has to sit down and tell their parents, basically, who they want to have sex with.”

Kirby tells me the first person he ever came out to was his late father, Patrick, who was in a coma at the time.

“Everyone in the hospital said your hearing is the last thing to go so if you have anything to say, say it now. That gave me the shove to own my truth — I know how wanky that sounds — but it did. I am really grateful for that.

“I was filled with so much shame, I thought I would never come out. I thought I would never get married, never have kids. I was really in turmoil. I think that whole situation [with my dad] made me realise life is way too short and it can be taken away in two seconds.”

While Kirby’s father sadly never got the opportunity to react to his son’s coming out, the podcaster says he feels his father “gave [him] the push I needed to come out”.

PJ Kirby: "I thought I would never get married, never have kids. I was really in turmoil." Picture: Miki Barlok

“There have been loads of times I felt robbed but, if I look at it from a positive angle... I don’t know if he would have accepted me, I don’t know how that journey would have went, but I am grateful that, that moment has led me to where I am now, really proud of who I am.”

But while his first ‘coming out’ experience may have a dramatic sheen to it, as time went on, the repetitiveness of the occasion led to a kind of irreverence.

“You have to come out a million times,” he says, his vintage engagement ring twinkling against the plastic cup, “I started just getting really flippant with it.”

'I WAS SO LUCKY SHE WAS JUST WORRIED'

He came out to one of his sisters driving round the roundabout out of Cork Airport (“she nearly crashed the car”) and his mother by casually asking, “Hey Mam, guess who’s gay?”

“She said, ‘Oh I dunno, who?’ and I said ‘Me.’ She laughed thinking I was messing and I said, ‘No, seriously.’ She didn’t know what to do,” he says laughing.

At the time, he thought his mother had taken the news well.

“I always thought, my mam’s gonna be so fine with it. But a year after I came out, she told me she really struggled,” he says.

“Because she was afraid for me. She was thinking my life was gonna be so difficult. She was thinking of people being mean to me in the streets, the prejudice I’d face. She lived through the AIDS epidemic... she had to go on a huge journey.

“Now she’s like, the biggest ally in the world. She’s queen of the gays, Nuala Kirby,” he says with a grin.

“I was so lucky that she was just worried about me. Worry comes from love.”

PJ Kirby with mother Nuala and other guests on the Late Late Show

And when it comes to love – there’s a lot of it in PJ’s life right now.

The Blarney Street native got engaged to photographer-beau José Galang on New Year’s Eve 2022, who popped the question via a birthday cake iced with ‘Will you marry me?’

Asked how the wedding planning is coming along he deadpans, “It’s not, really.”

Since the engagement, he’s been touring Cliché, a one-man show about “a gay man having an identity crisis”, writing an upcoming book with Twomey for Gill ( The I’m Grand Mamual, out October 12), and hosting various events across Dublin as part of his role as a “multidisciplinary creative”— he delivers the title with an eye roll.

Does he feel the pressure, I wonder, as an openly queer man, to deliver a certain kind of wedding?

PJ Kirby at the Platinum VIP Style Awards 2023 at the Dublin Royal Convention Centre in Golden Lane, Dublin. Picture: Brian McEvoy

“I told my friend’s mam everyone will be wearing a dress, and she said ‘What if the lads don’t want to?’ I said, ‘Oh no they’ll have to, it’s a gay wedding,” he laughs.

“But yeah... people who know me know me, say they know the wedding will be cool and tasteful, but some other people are like ‘It’s going to be fabulous honey slay!’

“So, there is a bit of that. I don’t want it to become a spectacle or a gimmick.

I don’t want it to be like ‘I was at a gay wedding’. I want people to say ‘I was at PJ and José’s wedding.

Kirby, who last year organised a successful fundraiser for LGBT Ireland to hire a Key Support Worker to work in the area of hate crime, says he feels he is one of “the most privileged” members of the community as a white, gay cis man who can take care of himself (in Cliché, he alludes to the fact he wasn’t afraid to get his knuckles out to defend himself in his youth) and with Pride, he feels a responsibility to “speak up” and be “visibly queer” for those who are still struggling to be accepted in today’s society.

'YOU NEED TO BE ABLE TO SIT DOWN WITH SOMEONE'

Like many of his peers, he has noticed what appears to be a poisonous spread of anti-LGBTQIA+ sentiment from the US and UK, which has taken hold in Ireland in recent times.

Kirby’s fundraiser for LGBT Ireland came in the wake of the killings of Aidan Moffitt and Michael Snee in Co Sligo in 2022, which had followed the Dublin city centre assault of gay man Evan Somers, who was walking along Dame Street following a night out in The George.

In recent months, Pride flags have been burned in Waterford. Bricks have smashed through gay bars in Dublin.

Libraries have been issued with instructions for securing buildings as protesters attempt to remove LGTBQIA+ books for young people, drag queens have been harassed at work.

PJ Kirby is releasing his first book with podcast host Kevin Twomey in October

In May, the nation showed collective outrage as video footage emerged of a teenager being assaulted online, purportedly a victim of bullying because of his sexuality.

Kirby too experienced what life outside his “bubble” was like when he appeared on The Late Late Show back in March. Dressed in a mesh top with painted nails and earrings, he says he was “ripped apart” on Facebook.

“I think Pride for me in 2023 is going to be about not being afraid to talk to those people [who don’t accept members of the LGBTQIA+ community or aspects of how they live their lives].

“Saying ‘fuck you, you’re so stupid’ is not going to incite change. You need to be able to sit down with someone who has a completely different opinion — and yes, in the back of my mind I am thinking that opinion is wrong, everyone should have the right to live the way they want — but calling someone homophobic, all it’s going to do is make them defensive.

“If you sit down and ask them why they believe what they’re saying, keep asking why, then you have more of an opportunity to alter someone’s perception.

“There have been a few times I’ve been drinking in Cork with friends, and friends of friends will arrive, and one of the lads’ lads might make an off-hand comment and I’ll pull him on it. Nine times out of ten, after chatting, they always go ‘oh, yeah,’ and it’s altered the way they [think].

“I also would like to work on taking the fear out of people asking questions. I think a lot of the time, especially the older Irish community, they just don’t understand. My mam, for example, doesn’t understand what a non-binary person is — it’s not that she doesn’t agree with them, she just doesn’t understand, it’s not something she grew up with or ever had to understand.

"So, sometimes some of the questions she’ll ask are offensive, but her heart is in the right place. I think if their heart is in the right place, don’t jump down their throat. The more we ask, the more we learn.

“What happened to that poor student in Navan... those kids weren’t born hating someone who is different. They learned that,” he says.

The line left unsaid is — they can unlearn it.

“I am still learning too.”

PJ Kirby runs weekly Throwing Shapes dance classes in Liffey Trust studios, wearethrowingshapes.com
He will take to the stage with I’m Grand Mam podcast host Kevin Twomey at Cork Opera House on Wednesday, August 23, for a sold-out performance as part of Cork Podcast Festival,corkoperahouse.ie