Singer reveals how his coming out has given others courage
IT may be barely 10 years since he revealed his homosexuality, but one of the country’s best known gay celebrities has told how his coming out has given many Irish teenagers the confidence to admit their sexuality.
Brian Kennedy will tomorrow address March for Civil Marriage Equality in Dublin, organised by LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) NOISE.
Ahead of the event, the 44-year-old singer spoke of the small number of well-known people in Ireland who are gay. “It’s amazing the [small] amount of well-known people in Ireland that are gay,” he said. “There are few and far between out, happy, healthy, productive gay people doing their thing, in Dublin — David Norris, Anna Nolan, Mark Feehily, Brendan Courtney — you could count them on your one hand. I’m not sure why. Certainly, it’s getting easier to be different in any kind of way from being heterosexual, but I still think there’s a lot of work to do. And the gay marriage march and all of that is just another step in our development as a country and as human beings.”
Kennedy publicly emerged from the closet over 10 years ago, and seems extremely comfortable about talking about it now. He has sung at gay pride marches, and will speak at the LGBT NOISE-organised march for gay civil marriage equality tomorrow in Dublin.
For years, Kennedy flirted with the media about his sexuality. Was he straight, was he bisexual?
“It’s funny, I don’t think there’s an official coming-out-day in my calendar,” he said. “It was a funny tightrope walk for me, because I wanted privacy except I was living in a public arena. On the one hand, I’m naturally kind of private. If you think about it, when you spend most of your early life trying to cover up who you really are, you get really good at it. I had a responsibility whether I liked it or not, to be myself and to be happy about it and to not appear to be hiding anything. Because when you hide something, it’s like you’re ashamed of it, and I’m certainly not.”
Kennedy’s fan mail bag began filling up with letter from grateful Irish teenagers, telling him how easy he made it for them to admit their homosexuality to their parents. “The responsibility factor for me got turned up, and I thought if I even just help one gay person to feel better about themselves, then my job is done. So that’s why, when the march comes up on Sunday, I’m not that political, but what I am is I’m into human rights, I’m into human beings treating each other properly.”
One of six children growing up on the Falls Road in Belfast at the height of the Troubles, Kennedy was a sensitive child who spent much of his time musing about the colour of the sky and humming in harmony with the ambulance sirens on the street outside. He saw a man being shot in the back, and a woman’s face being smashed in with the butt of a soldier’s rifle. He was beaten and bullied and called “queer” at school.“There was always a vaguely pink cloud hanging over my head,” he says, describing his younger self as effeminate, asthmatic and overweight. “School was a nightmare, I was desperately bullied, and it’s not much fun if you’re not the popular kid at school. I just felt very unsafe all the time, a really scary place to be.
“There was either fighting or football, that’s it. And the idea that someone like me would go to a teacher and say ‘look I’m being bullied’ — it just wasn’t tolerated. Mostly you had to have your wits about you 24 hours a day, and just get in and get out, keep your head down, and try and roll with the punches.”
His earliest romantic memories are linked to music. At 11, he had his first kiss with a girl to the sounds of Never Let Her Slip Away on the radio.
Six years later, a drunken teenage Kennedy braved his first gay nightclub in Belfast city centre, and spotted a man drinking cheap red wine across the dance floor, to the sounds of Diana Ross’s Missing You. It was his first gay relationship and they dated for almost a year before Kennedy moved to London.
“I remember him fondly. It was an extraordinary kind of tenderness in the middle of such awful violence. It felt really natural to be with him, and that was the beginning of me starting to become more comfortable about being gay,” says Kennedy.
At 23, Kennedy signed a record deal in London, and was invited on tour with Van Morrison. Since then, he has released 10 albums, performed with Riverdance in New York, represented Ireland in the 2006 Eurovision, and written two novels. As well as receiving a Meteor Lifetime Achievement Award last year celebrating over 20 years in the music business.
“I was lucky because my passion took hold of me very early in terms of the singing and the music. My sense of self-worth very quickly wrapped itself around my singing. I was so distracted by that and the ambition to leave the Falls Road and to make something of my life, and move to London. Slowly but surely I thought maybe I could be a singer. But that took a long time, because we didn’t know any other singers or any other musicians, it was like, that’s something that people on the TV did. Not people from the Falls Road.
“I was lucky in that sense in that I had an outlet for creativity and a hunger to better myself.”
And at 23, living in another country and with a burgeoning music career, Kennedy felt confident enough to tell his parents he was gay.
“It was absolutely outside their experience, and only they could answer how they really felt, but I don’t think it was a huge surprise. But again, I think they were just regular working-class people with no experience of gay people. And the only experience they had actually was the unfortunate terms that were used, ironically, by the Catholic Church, talking about paedophilia and all that awful stuff. The only context we had for same-sex anything was in an abusive context. So God love anyone who was trying to make sense of a child who was exhibiting same-sex identity.”
He brands the recent David Norris presidential bid controversy as a witch-hunt.
“I know him to be a gentleman, it’s as simple as that. And I think it’s a great loss. Lest we not forget, the reason why we’re sitting here now being legal gay people is because of David Norris. It’s a scary thought, isn’t it? It’s not that long ago that I would’ve been illegal.”
For teenagers struggling with sexual identity, and for their parents, he advises honesty and compassion.
“Be honest to yourself, first of all. I would like to think that whoever reads this article and they have that emotion that their kid’s might be gay, just let their kids be who they are. Because the happiest version of your child is the version you want. Isn’t it? It’s difficult enough just being straight and young. Imagine what it is being something other than straight and unable to connect to the world. I would love to say look at me, I’m a happy, healthy, hard-working version of what it is to be a gay man, and that is absolutely possible for any child.”
The LGBT March for Civil Marriage Equality takes place tomorrow, starting at 3pm at City Hall, Dublin 2.
* www.lgbtnoise.ie
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