Guest posts: what next? What this means.

As a follow-up to last week’s Guest Posts for Equality series (read them!), I asked people to share their thoughts on two topics: what does the referendum’s result mean to them, and what comes next.

Today’s offering is a little different to the usual- two people who I’ve spoken to on Facebook who’ve allowed me to share what it felt like to be in Ireland this weekend. 

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Here’s Naomi O’Kelly. Naomi  is an Irish woman based in Scotland, where she works as a community artist, storyteller and theatre maker. You can find her at Walking Around Like We Own The Place, and this is what she had to say about the overwhelming sense of joy and relief that came with the referendum- a sense that many people outside our country can’t really grasp to its full extent:

I get the impression that some outside of Ireland are sceptical about the mass emotion – an ecstatic hysteria – coming out of the country at the moment about the referendum. And I totally get that, because from the outside it might seem that the Irish people are saying, “Ok, gay folks, I now annoint you with equal rights, yeah, you can thank me later. Actually – thank me now – yeah, keep thanking me, go on, we’re great.” Ha! And I really, really want to explain to sceptical ‘outsiders’ that it’s not like that.

I think that the huge outpouring of emotion is actually about something other than gay rights. It’s about a national release from what I can only think of as ‘evil’. (Yes, a very emotional choice of word.) The Authority in Ireland is traditionally narrow minded to a very cruel extent (abortion is denied even to minors who have been raped), whereas the broader population of ordinary people in Ireland are just not like this. The roar of relief from Ireland is reaction to the fact the NO VOTE DIDN’T WIN. It’s about finally, finally, getting to say, “No, you don’t get to persecute people in my name and in the name of my nation.”

So, for me, and I think for many, it’s not only about granting a right that should, of course, already be in place (equal marriage rights). It’s about having the opportunity to do that. After this referendum, I see my own country as a place where my own gay relations can be less afraid, and I also see the hope that women will be allowed to choose what happens to their bodies. I never saw Ireland this way before, and it matters so much to me. This is BIG.

And here’s John. If you’d like to hear more about his wedding and what led him there, you can read more in this gorgeous article from Confetti. Here he is, though, speaking about what this means for his own life, and his own family:

For me, this weekend’s results meant everything. I’ve been with my partner for over 10 years and last July we had a civil partnership surrounded by our friends and family. Up until this weekend, that was the most loved I’d felt. The day we said “I Do”, I could feel genuine love and acceptance in the air from our friends and family. This weekend I felt it from every corner of Ireland.

Next up, we’ll get married. We are in no rush however as in my eyes, the day we said ‘I Do’ in July 2014 was the day I married the man I love. Now I get to say “I Do” all over again to the same man.

John CP

 

Guest posts: what next? What this means.
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Guest Posts: What Now? Thoughts as we celebrate the 34th Amendment

As a follow-up to last week’s Guest Posts for Equality series (read them!), I asked people to share their thoughts on two topics: what does the referendum’s result mean to them, and what comes next. 

Jon Hanna was born in County Down, but has lived in the Republic for all of his adult life, and Dublin for all but a few months of that. He once swore off activism on the basis that he doesn’t think he’s very good at it, but does still occasionally write things like this.

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The strong sisters told the brothers that there were two important things to remember about the coming revolutions. The first is that we will get our asses kicked. The second is that we will win.

25 years ago, those words were part of the Queer Nation Manifesto handed out by the Act Up contingent at the Pride parade in New York.

At a time closer to the Stonewall Riots the parades commemorate than to today,
at a time when here in Ireland the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act, and the 1885 Criminal Law (Amendment) Act made sexual acts between two consenting men illegal,
at a time when one of the ways you could identify someone on television as gay was visible Kaposi’s sarcoma,
at a time when people ganging up with the clear and premeditated intent to kill a gay man, because he was a gay man, and doing so, could expect to be given a suspended sentence,
at a time not long after that had happened,
I began to realise I liked boys as well as girls.

The right to same-sex marriage isn’t a right I hope to exercise, because I still liked girls as well as boys, and the person I since met, that I want to spend the rest of my life with, is a woman. And we got to celebrate our love and our wish to be together recently, in a beautiful wedding.

But you are who you are. And I am who I am. And when as a schoolboy I came out a little over 20 years ago, I was lucky to have that received well by good people. And I’ve mostly been lucky to have other such good people around me throughout my life, whether I was married, single, dating a woman, or dating a man. That my life never ended up such that I ever wanted to marry a man, is far from the point, and that is the same for many others who are LGBT (and let us not for a minute forget the T, or anyone else that doesn’t fit the cis, hetero pattern that we’ve for so long been told is “normal”).

Not everybody has been lucky in that way. And nobody should have to be lucky that way. People need protected rights, protected not just by a few good people they are lucky to have around them, but by the people; that “we the people” don’t hand out moments of decency, but insist that all of us the people are treated with respect.

And those who are gay need to have their gay lives, and their gay loves or lack of them as those gay lives unfold, treated with respect.

And those who are trans* and those who are ace need to not have their lives forced into the mould of another’s.

And those of us who are bi need to have our lives treated with respect, with the loves that may come to us as our lives unfold neither allowed because they are straight enough to fit the norm, or allowed because they are gay enough to distance us firmly from the norm, but accepted because they are our loves and they are our lives, and we are all of cherished as citizens by all of us.

And we the people should have been able to legislate for same-sex marriage through our representatives. But when some in the Dáil insisted it wasn’t constitutionally possible without a referendum, that was what we the people had. And, on the day that would have been Harvey Milk’s 85th birthday, a million Irish people said that they think all of our loves and all of our lives should be given the same respect. And that brought with it something that no constitution can give the Dáil the power to deliver, something that goes further than the right to marry the person you love, or even the equality it still brings to those with no intention of such a marriage; it brought a genuine sense that we belong in this country, that we the queer people are indeed seen as part of we the people.

And in a moment of fear that we would lose, and that the loss would push us back grievously, I thought of the few rare optimistic words in the Queer Manifesto; “The second is that we will win.”

The strong sisters could tell the brothers that, because the sisters had been in other fights before, and they knew that we would win, just as they knew that we would get our asses kicked.

They were right on both counts.

And if it’s tempting now to think that we are near the beginning of the end, we need only look at the sisters’ fights to know that this isn’t the case (Repeal the 8th!). There will still be fights, and we will get our asses kicked, and we will win. As will the sisters. It’s not the end, but an Ireland where a million people vote to allow marriage to be lawful “without distinction as to their sex” — an Ireland where people will not only travel to their polling station to do so, but thousands will fly or sail into the country to do so — can be one where we might be near the end of the beginning.

Guest Posts: What Now? Thoughts as we celebrate the 34th Amendment

Never Stop Holding Hands: how love took on a monster, and won.

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Panti said that she got through an entire day without checking herself, and that she does not feel oppressed.

A couple of friends of mine walked to the local shop together. A man approached them shook their hands, and told them to never stop holding hands.

Another friend talked about all the same-sex couples she saw holding hands, embracing, being unapologetically together on our streets and in our parks.

And I walk down the street alone with a Yes badge on my shirt- I can’t bear to take it off yet. It’s met on every street with infectious, unstoppable smiles. Moments of overjoyed connection with strangers- and not just the strangers we’ve been led to expect. The buttoned-up, the middle-aged, the most conservative appearing of us can’t help but break into grins when we see each other.

This is about marriage, but this is about so much more. This was about changing a society, and it was about letting everyone in that society know how it had changed.

This campaign was hard. It was cruel at times. The helpless frustration of seeing signs on every street telling you that you are unfit, inadequate, should be happy to put up with less. Hearing unashamed bigotry dressed up as genuine concerns in a cowardly media. Feeling the weight of money and influence wielded by people who hate us so much that they threw everything they had into keeping us down. Hearing stories of kids of same sex couples, of adopted kids, of kids of single parents seeing those same posters telling them that their families weren’t enough, and feeling helpless to do anything about it.

The campaign was cruel, and it was an unnecessary cruelty.

But- and here is the beautiful thing- the campaign was also kind. We didn’t just fight. We cared for each other. We knew that we could only win by sharing some of the most vulnerable parts of ourselves with strangers, and by being judged for those. So we did. On doorsteps and streets and online and in newspapers and even on TV we shared our stories, our families, our lives and our fears, in the hope that they would find a spark or humanity and empathy in people who had never met us. And it did. Continue reading “Never Stop Holding Hands: how love took on a monster, and won.”

Never Stop Holding Hands: how love took on a monster, and won.

Guest Posts for Equality: Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Lesbians??!

In the run-up to Ireland’s Marriage Equality referendum on May 22nd, I’ve invited a series of guest posters– people from Ireland or who live here, of many different backgrounds and orientations- to share their thoughts on the referendum, the campaign, and what it means to them. Contributions to Guest Posts for Equality are welcome- drop me a message

When not freely giving her unsought opinion on a wide range of topics, Fiona works half the week as a designer, photographer and social media manager  (both of which can be found on Facebook) and spends the other half trying to negotiate/trick/bribe her three year old into just being sound.

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Legend has it that when Queen Victoria signed the Criminal Law Amendment Act in 1885, banning oral sex between males, no banning or even mention of oral sex between females was included because she refused to believe that lesbians even existed. The credibility of that legend has been disputed, but if the late monarch found herself in Ireland during the Marriage Equality Referendum debate, she could be forgiven for holding that very belief. The invisibility of lesbians, their lives and their relationships during this debate has been quite shocking and incredibly insulting to all LGBT women, especially those working tirelessly on the campaign.

Despite the fact that the marriage equality referendum in Ireland owes a huge amount of its success to date to Ann Louise Gilligan and Katherine Zappone, almost every debate has been framed in the context of two men. In discussions where Paddy Manning and Keith Mills obsessively bookend every sentence they utter with the phrase “I’m a gay man”, and Eileen King – as a woman – finds it deeply offensive that the Yes campaign are trying to “remove” women from marriage, LGBT women, afraid to rock the boat and deflect from the real campaign issues, are left facetiously asking each other on Twitter how they suddenly mastered a collective disappearing act.

Obviously, this is largely down to the No campaign, who are using the example they know plays on the fears of those opposed to surrogacy and the one that will unsettle their staunchest voting demographic (middle aged and elderly men). There appears to be a bid to convince the electorate that, if passed, we’ll wake up on 23rd May in some sort of a post-referendum dystopian wasteland, where gay men forcibly marry all the straight men, kidnap fertile women, chain them up and use their ripe ovaries and juicy wombs to create a surrogate baby production line. However, the Yes side, committed to running a positive campaign focused only on the relevant issues, have been slow to take an active role in trying to create gender balance within the debate.

The only satisfaction to be derived is from appreciating two sweet ironies – one that the No side, who argue so vehemently about the importance of maintaining gender balance (cringingly described as “yin and yang” by Breda O’Brien) and women’s traditional roles, have deliberately tried to remove any mention of the women that this referendum affects the most. And secondly, that, if passed, it will undoubtedly be women voters who push the referendum over the line.

It can be argued that currently and historically, nationally and internationally, women are more politically and socially progressive. During this campaign, official polls and anecdotal evidence from canvassers have reflected that, with women of all ages more like to to be Yes voters. Take a walk through Dublin and I bet you’ll see more women and girls wearing Yes Equality badges.

From my own conversations during canvassing and with friends and relatives, I’ve been struck by how many older women, of a generation we might assume to be overly influenced by their husbands and male clerical figures, have given us a strong ‘Yes’. For this same reason, Daniel O’Donnell’s recent statement in favour of a Yes vote will have come as a blow to the No campaign – these women are unpredictable and flexible. They will not be controlled, they will listen to both sides of the story and make up their own mind.

The flip side of this coin is that the whole discourse has also been incredibly demeaning and insulting to men, especially fathers. It has played up to a tired cliché that paints husbands, fathers and men in general as irresponsible, infantile and barely able to look after themselves, let alone be trusted to care for a child. This trite tale isn’t fooling modern Ireland. We’ve seen a huge increase in stay-at-home fathers since the recession, and working fathers are significantly more hands-on than the generation before them. The vast majority of voters know from first-hand experience that a man can provide his child with the same care, love, attention, and affection as a woman.

Next week, regardless of the outcome, the Irish LGBT community needs to examine how and why, in so many debates and conversations, it allowed its female members to be thrown under the campaign bus and to remember that being part of a group that tries to dismantle patriarchy, does not make us immune to it.

Guest Posts for Equality: Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Lesbians??!

Guest Posts for Equality: The nation’s ready to come out

In the run-up to Ireland’s Marriage Equality referendum on May 22nd, I’ve invited a series of guest posters– people from Ireland or who live here, of many different backgrounds and orientations- to share their thoughts on the referendum, the campaign, and what it means to them. Contributions to Guest Posts for Equality are welcome- drop me a message

Ursula has just recently finished studying Psychology and works part-time as a Parliamentary Assistant in the Seanad. In her free time she enjoys writing, playing Bach and Leonard Cohen and long conversations over pots of good tea. You can find her on Twitter.

“Holding your boyfriend or your girlfriend’s hand should not have to be a political statement”, a friend of mine said memorably in a debate about Ireland’s LGBT community five years ago. But during this long and seemingly never-ending campaign, each hand held in public, each vulnerable conversation, each embrace of love, has been a political statement. There exists a debate within the minds of LGBT people when engaged in conversations about the referendum with their families, friends, colleagues, and even at the doorsteps canvassing, of whether to come out yet again, to them. Whether to make the political debate personal. Make it real. Put a face on it. But in so doing, open oneself up, and lay one’s life bare and open to judgement. It has been difficult to escape the politicisation of our lives, and be unaffected by that vulnerability.

Something else has also happened. Not only has the personal become painfully political. The political has also become remarkably personal. We see it in Leo Varadkar saying that he would be more devastated if this referendum does not pass than if he lost his own seat. And you believe him. We see it in political correspondent Ursula Halligan’s beautifully honest article in the Irish Times; Ursula, who found herself compelled to come out and speak out (revealing the power of gentleness) despite being so private, because she could not help being personally affected by the campaign, and knew that it might just help. It’s a lot to hope for, but perhaps this vulnerability can lead the way towards creating a more compassionate politics.

Henry James once wrote that three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind. The act of coming out demands great empathy and kindness from the receiver, but it is also an act of generosity and kindness from the person coming out. I think of that line which Nina Simone sings: “I wish you could know what it means to me, then you’d see and agree, that every man should be free.” While I had always felt different in one way or another, when I was nearly 13, I knew I was different in a particular way. Years before I spoke to anyone about it, in my own mind I was happy to name that difference as bisexual. I knew then, as I know now, that I wasn’t undecided or confused. Rather, I had a real sense of my sexual identity. The fact didn’t surprise, or bother me. I had fallen in love with a girl in school, and knew it was as real as any of the crushes on boys which my peers spoke of. Comments from girls at school about lesbian, gay and bisexual people, not directed at me specifically, but a reflection of the overtly heteronormative culture in so many secondary schools until recently, were alienating. Though I bore them no resentment, I could not relate to their language and world, and for most of my adolescence reconciled myself to a happy solitude. Now, 12 years and many loves later, I have no idea if I will ever marry, or if I will ever wish to marry, but this Referendum has helped me to understand more fully what my identity means to me. Beyond that, it has also forced me to consider what that identity means to the society in which I live.

There is no doubt, that whatever the outcome of the count on Saturday, that something remarkable has happened in Ireland during the course of this campaign. The country has been forced into a cross-sectional, inter-generational, and fast-evolving conversation not just around the question which will be voted on this coming Friday. This national conversation is also about difference. As a small nation, obsessed with our historical identity, our struggle with difference, and with what is Irish, or what is Gaelach, has been the inner social struggle of our recent history. Irish people, young and old, have now been faced with vital questions: What is difference? Who is different? Why on earth does it matter? Are we intolerant of difference? Maybe, maybe not, but surely tolerance is not enough when we speak of our fellow humans? And, the most painful question of all, have we been unkind to those we love, who are different?

We’ve seen tens of thousands of young people register to be able to vote on May 22nd, and many hundreds of them out in droves canvassing. This Referendum has given many demoralised and unheard young people the opportunity to dream of an Ireland they can take pride in. Pride, of course, is such a vital word for this community. The right to take pride in one’s life is taken for granted by those who think that pride is the opposite of humility. But pride is not the opposite of humility; rather, it is the opposite of shame. For so long, this community was shamed into invisibility and exile. And pride is a struggle, and an ongoing one, which will continue long after this Referendum.

The humiliating preoccupation of opponents to equal marriage with the sex lives of gay people stems from a very real homophobia. Homophobia is essentially a discomfort with same-sex intimacy, but homophobia further belies an inability to fully appreciate the personhood of LGBT people beyond that preoccupation. I have met that preoccupation on the doorsteps from people whose discomfort with same-sex orientation blinds their ability to see that their love is the same. The seeming contradiction, which is not a contradiction at all, of this campaign, is that we are fighting for the right to live privately, to not have people preoccupied with our lives, and to not have to come out in order for them to understand. It has been so necessary to do so, in order that future generations will not have to bear such a burden. When we ask for equal treatment under the law, and when we ask for the same rituals which are available to others, as Colm Tóibín put it recently, we are simply asking to be included.

The cumulative impact of so many individuals finding their lives are more liveable when they can hope to love freely has had a freeing effect on the country. Ursula Halligan’s piece began with that great line from Martin Luther King and so I’ll end by looking at it another way: that our lives really begin when we can speak about the things that matter. Amidst the trepidation and anxiety of the coming days and the ongoing tireless efforts of the campaign is a sense of a beginning. A kinder, more confident, more alive beginning.

Guest Posts for Equality: The nation’s ready to come out

Notes for Equality.

It may be the last couple of days before the referendum, but there’s still time to have conversations, to do something.

My housemate had the most lovely idea the other day. She’s made handwritten notes to send to all the apartments in our complex. She- and, as of this evening, me too- has been writing these for days.

Here they are:

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Feel free to use the text, if you would like! We’ve received some wonderful notes in return from our neighbours. And hopefully led some more of them to think a little about Friday.

Notes for Equality.

Guest Posts for Equality: These people are not teachers.

In the run-up to Ireland’s Marriage Equality referendum on May 22nd, I’ve invited a series of guest posters– people from Ireland or who live here, of many different backgrounds and orientations- to share their thoughts on the referendum, the campaign, and what it means to them. Contributions to Guest Posts for Equality are welcome- drop me a message

Unfortunately I can’t give you a bio for this piece’s author. He has kept his name from this article both because he wants to maintain his practice of not expressing his opinions through his professional identity and because, sadly, due to Section 37 it is still inadvisable to come out when you’re a teacher without job security.

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I am a teacher. I help young people to develop and grow, to recognise their strengths and to become the brilliant people they can be. To say I love this work is a massive understatement. I have met vastly different kinds of young people, all unique and all with different strengths and talents. It has been an honour to be their teacher.

In this role, I have many responsibilities. For example, in helping my students to develop as their own people, it is not my job to impart my views and opinions to them and expect them to fall in line. As such, I never discuss my politics or my personal life in class, as is proper. Separately, I’m a gay man. Needless to say I have personally found the run-up to this referendum hard. I expected that. I didn’t expect to find it hard as a teacher, but then I learned about the “Teachers for No” group set up on 14 May.

One of the primary responsibilities of a teacher is to care. To foster a safe environment for their students, to accept and embrace diversity as represented through the individuals they teach, and to allow those young people to develop and grow in a warm, accepting environment.

It is not to create an atmosphere wherein even one of their students is made to feel second-class because of who they are. Choose any ten schools at random and look at their mission statements. You’ll see messages about inclusion, safety and caring. This group represents none of those things. Like much of the No campaign all they represent is their own discomfort at a reality that they can no longer pretend isn’t there.

Objectivity is important, but even casting aside my own personal reasons for opposing the No campaign, the effect of their message and its tone on young people is abhorrent. These people claim to be standing up for children. They are not. They stand up for a dying era in Irish history which saw untold suffering in so many different ways, and standing against a better future for many of the young people they have the responsibility to care for.

These people are not teachers.

 

Guest Posts for Equality: These people are not teachers.

Guest Posts for Equality: David Norris says YES

In the run-up to Ireland’s Marriage Equality referendum on May 22nd, I’ve invited a series of guest posters– people from Ireland or who live here, of many different backgrounds and orientations- to share their thoughts on the referendum, the campaign, and what it means to them. Contributions to Guest Posts for Equality are welcome- drop me a message

A friend of mine ran into Senator David Norris on the train this week. Naturally enough, he was eager to ask him some questions about the referendum- not that there’d be any doubt over what Norris’s position! But here’s what he had to say:

Guest Posts for Equality: David Norris says YES

Guest Posts for Equality: Marriage is being undermined. That’s why I’m advocating a yes-vote.

In the run-up to Ireland’s Marriage Equality referendum on May 22nd, I’ve invited a series of guest posters– people from Ireland or who live here, of many different backgrounds and orientations- to share their thoughts on the referendum, the campaign, and what it means to them. Contributions to Guest Posts for Equality are welcome- drop me a message.

Robin is a Galway-based writer of plays, short stories, liberal propaganda and the occasional scrap of poetry. One of his best friends and most useful critics once remarked that Robin’s symbolism will always get in the way of his stories. This is probably true. Stay tuned next for his inspiring short story about a lamb-loving opponent of food stamps and abortion, who, after losing his job, home and wife, grudgingly bunks up with a commune of socialist vegan squatters. He twitters, he tumblrs  and about once a decade, he blogs.

 

I’m a man who is, by and large, attracted to women. This sexual preference of mine means that, under Irish law, I enjoy the right to enter into marriage. I have gotten involved in the campaign for marriage equality primarily out of solidarity with my many LGBTQ friends, whose relationships and families have been demeaned, repressed and disadvantaged for the longest time. However, my motivation is also personal. I strongly believe that marriage equality will be tremendously beneficial for all relationships, including mine.

Maybe I’ve watched one too many Disney movies as a kid, but I have always been under the impression that marriage is about love. We’re familiar with many tales of princes and princesses unhappily plunged into arranged marriages, only to encounter their true heart’s love among the commoners and elope, in defiance of their parents’ suffocating traditionalism. These stories tell of dark times when fathers married off their daughters without regard for their own wishes and wellbeing. They also celebrate the supposed enlightenment of our day and age, where people are free to pledge themselves to each other regardless of caste, ethnicity, denomination or the pressure to produce offspring solely for the perpetuation of the family name. Continue reading “Guest Posts for Equality: Marriage is being undermined. That’s why I’m advocating a yes-vote.”

Guest Posts for Equality: Marriage is being undermined. That’s why I’m advocating a yes-vote.