Woman in the Making: Panti's Memoir (10 page)

Asakawa-san loved to travel (she even eventually came to Ireland) and enjoyed having all these young foreigners in her building, taking a motherly interest in
our lives and wellbeing. She worried about us and often asked after our own mothers. When I first began to feel seriously unwell, Asakawa-san was concerned, and it was Dr Asakawa who eventually told me I had hepatitis and would need to rest for a few months if I was to get better.

I was in my twenties and having the time of my life. I had hardly even heard of hepatitis, let alone knew that it was something I needed to be worried about, so it came as quite a shock to fun, stupid twenty-six-year-old me. There was no way I could lie in bed feeling miserable and not working for a few months in Tokyo. My paltry savings would be gone in no time and then what? I couldn’t expect my friends to look after me for that long either. So, like any good Irish boy when he needs looking after, there was only one thing for it – home to Mammy. I was very ill and remember little of leaving Tokyo or getting home, but somehow between them, Angelo, Helen and Hiroko (and my older brother Lorcan who was regularly in Tokyo on business at the time) got me organised and home to Mayo, while a box with my meagre possessions was shipped on later.

I
SPENT MOST OF
F
EBRUARY
and March of 1995 at home in Mayo, sleeping in my childhood bedroom, watching my parents’ TV, eating my mother’s brown bread and waiting for the lethargy of illness to lift, which it slowly did. During this period I was an outpatient under the care of a consultant at the hospital in Galway, and every few weeks my mother would drive me the thirty or so miles to Galway for my clinic appointment. It was on one of those drives that I sort-of-accidentally came out to my mother and nearly killed us both.

I know! You’re thinking,
What?
How can his parents not have known he was a huge flaming queen? He practically had rainbow flags coming out his arse! And it’s true, I practically did. Glitter-encrusted rainbow flags stapled to Liza Minnelli and Madonna.

It was all my older gay brother’s fault that I hadn’t come out yet. Lorcan isn’t just seven gay years older than gay me, he’s also the eldest child, the first-born, the
Golden Child, the gayer apparent. So, clearly, it was his gay responsibility – being seven whole years gayer than me! – to tell our parents that he, and we, were enormous homosexuals. This plan was clearly the natural order of things and, as such, was agreed to by the two of us. And it had been agreed to by the two of us
years before
! I had come out to my oldest sister, Auveen, when I was in my second year of college and she – emotionally – had called Lorcan in London to tell him the gay news, to which he replied, ‘Me too.’ It was a lot of gay in one day for poor Auveen. Soon after that the rest of our siblings knew (except the youngest, Clare, who was really pissed off with me later when she found out she was the last to know) and it was agreed by everyone that Lorcan should be the one to break it to our parents.

However, Lorcan kept putting it on the long finger, which was easy for him to do because he had lived abroad since he was fifteen and was rarely home to field questions from inquisitive neighbours or clutching-at-heterosexual-straws parents. And in an elaborate act of procrastination, Lorcan had decided that he wouldn’t simply
come out
to our parents – no, his would be the most perfect and most perfectly executed coming out in the history of coming outs. His coming out would be the gold standard of parental coming outs to which all other coming outs would be compared in future generations. To do this, he set about researching the best way to come out by talking to his gay friends about the
various ways they’d done it, and talking to their parents about how they wished it had been done. And after a supposedly exhaustive discussion, during which whole years passed, he decided that the very best way to come out was by letter. And he was right.

A lot of people imagine that the best way is to tell your parents to their faces. Surely that’s the decent, brave and honest way, right? To look them in the eye and be a lesbian about it. It’s not. When you look across the Christmas turkey at your parents in their naïvely cheerful paper hats and say, ‘Mam, Dad, I’m gay,’ you haven’t just ruined Christmas dinner for everyone
again
, there’s also a good chance you’ve ruined your relationship with your parents for another six months, because after your dad has stopped choking on the cranberry sauce he has to respond. He has to respond right there, right then, while the roast potatoes are going cold and your little sister’s mouth is hanging open. And, given the circumstances, without a chance to digest this news, without a moment to consider it, to remember how much he loves you or to readjust how he has always imagined your future, and with you sitting there waiting expectantly, having brought you and him to this huge moment without warning, the chances are that he will say something he never would have said had he had time to think about it.

He might say something out of shock or embarrassment or anger, or perhaps something well intentioned but clumsy, and then you have to respond (from your
indignant gay high horse) to his awkward response, and then he has to respond again, and before you know it, you’re both caught up in a spiralling twister of unleashed gay emotion till you flounce off leaving your mother sobbing into the Brussels sprouts and a family tension that can take years to iron out. It takes most gay people years to come to terms with who they are, so it’s hardly fair to expect your poor parents to leap immediately aboard the gay bandwagon with a rainbow flag and the lyrics to George Michael’s cruising anthem ‘Outside’. You are sitting there waiting for your poor parents to be the perfect Hollywood parents and say the perfect thing, as scripted by Oprah, but instead your dad opens his mouth and out falls a lump of stuffing, with ‘You’re queer?’

A letter gives your parents time to take in the news, adjust to the new reality, and carefully consider their response before writing back or picking up the phone. It greatly reduces the chance of someone saying something in haste that they’ll later regret. Of course, these days it’d be an electronically instant email, which demands a speedy response in a way that a letter doesn’t, but it’s still better than sitting there daring your parents to be impossibly perfect.

Once Lorcan had decided that a letter was the best way to do it, he then set about procrastinating even further by writing the perfect coming-out letter. It was going to be a work of art, a masterpiece, the
Ulysses
of coming-out letters, but without the masturbation or the
weird punctuation. Shakespeare himself would look at this letter and weep at its beauty. And so Lorcan spent months – no, years! – writing this perfectly pitched letter that struck exactly the right tone. He wrote it (he claims) and rewrote it (he claims) and left it on his chunky mid-nineties laptop on an aeroplane (he claims).

Meanwhile I was now spending an extended period with my parents for the first time in many years, vaguely avoiding topics of conversation that might stray on to awkward areas and slowly becoming more frustrated and annoyed by it. I felt I was hiding something from them, in a way being deceitful, and, unbeknown to them, it was coming between us. I say ‘vaguely’ avoided certain topics of conversation because through all of this I just assumed that really my parents already knew and were just waiting for me or Lorcan to tell them. I certainly knew that the possibility of Lorcan being gay had been discussed in the family long before we knew for sure, and I assumed that the same conversations had been had about me. After all, my parents knew about my college drag shows, and surely it wasn’t going to surprise anyone that the artistic boy, who hated football and liked Martina Navratilova and drawing dresses, was gay. Surely you didn’t have to be Jessica Fletcher to put that one together.

So, one bright West of Ireland spring morning my mother was driving me to my hospital appointment in Galway. I was feeling a lot better by then and we were
talking as we travelled along the familiar road (Galway had always been our local town, where we went to do a ‘big shop’, get the sewing machine fixed or broken bones plastered). My mother, in the context of some long-forgotten conversation, said, ‘Well, it’s not like you came home and told us you were gay and have AIDS.’ And in that moment, as my unsuspecting mother drove us along the long, straight Curragh Line across the flat bog, I
thought
what she was really saying to me was, ‘I know you’re gay, son, so let’s just get that out of the way, and while we’re at it will you just reassure me that there’s nothing more to worry about than a bout of hepatitis?’

And I, with some relief, replied, ‘Well, I don’t have AIDS but I
am
gay,’ and my mother nearly drove off the road.

It turned out that, bizarrely, my mother had never thought I might be gay. I had so many girlfriends! Apparently Lorcan had drawn all the gay suspicion. Lorcan was probably the gay one and sure there wouldn’t be two gays in the one family so I was off the gay hook – until I climbed up onto that gay hook and came crashing through her windscreen on it just outside Galway.

After my mother had managed not to kill us both by keeping us on the road, we spoke about it for
a minute
. I don’t remember what was said except that it was awkward and weird, and
absolutely everything
that Lorcan’s letter was
not
going to be. In fact, it was worse than that because even in Lorcan’s worst nightmares he had never imagined that leaving the coming out to me
might almost kill our mother in a car accident. And then my mother said she didn’t want to talk about it any more. Or, at least, not yet. She needed time to let it percolate.

For three whole days we awkwardly didn’t talk about it while all the while it loomed over the house like the world’s most pregnant pause. My mother acted as if absolutely nothing had happened. I avoided being in the same room as her, and my father pottered about entirely oblivious.

Of course I knew that my mother was a devout Catholic, a woman who took her faith seriously and thoughtfully. Her bedside table was always weighed down with reading matter, and among it there were books of prayers or papal musings or theological treatises. She read at mass, spring-cleaned the church and was a minister of the Eucharist. The parish priest called in for tea, we said the Angelus at six o’clock, and confessed, confirmed and communioned more than was strictly necessary, but my mother’s devoutness had never been overbearing. Sure as a kid I’d had no choice but to sit miserably through Sunday mass and go to confession in a creepy dark box with a musty-smelling old man and pretend to be sorry about things I pretended I’d done wrong, but I also had to brush my teeth and take a bath every Saturday, and so did every kid I knew. And when I was in my teens and I started to slack off going to mass there were some tense discussions and testing of boundaries, but I never felt I was being Bible-bashed.
She wasn’t Carrie’s mum. I never felt my mother’s faith was
blind
faith. Her faith was considered and thoughtful and well read, and I assumed that when her faith, or at least the teachings of the Church, came into conflict with a real-world situation, like discovering your son was gay, my intelligent, reasonable mother would intelligently and reasonably discount those arcane teachings. She would simply make up her own mind.

But, not for the first time, I had underestimated the power of religion, because it turned out that my mother was having real difficulty in reconciling her faith with her gay son. On the morning of the third day, while my father was out at work, my mother called her brother. Uncle Brendan was an Irish Catholic priest in heathen England, a very different breed of priest from an Irish Catholic priest in holy Catholic Ireland. Before the implosion of the Irish Catholic Church from a seemingly never-ending string of abuse scandals and corruption, Irish priests tended to act as if they owned the place – because they did. Their authority was unquestioned; arrogance and self-entitlement were woven into their DNA. However, Irish Catholic priests in England were different.

Uncle Brendan was priest to a small, poor, sometimes discriminated-against minority community in a country of heathen Protestants, who viewed him with suspicion and sometimes derision. He didn’t stride about like he owned the place while hats were doffed and indulgences
sought – he schlepped about in his little car, part social worker, part local businessman, keeping the parish afloat by running the Catholic club attached to his church as a pub, wedding venue, bingo hall, dance hall and working-men’s club. Uncle Brendan was a priest, and a realist. While a priest in Ireland could, until the nineties anyway, bleat on and toe the party line about contraception, divorce or homosexuality without looking ridiculous or laughably backward, because the state and its laws were aligned with this arcane world view, in England a Catholic priest had no such luxury. In Protestant England a Catholic priest had to make accommodation for condoms, the pill, divorces and queers because they were realities.

I don’t know exactly what Uncle Brendan said to my mother when she called him but, whatever it was, it worked. It reassured her in some way, I guess (that I wasn’t going to Hell? That I wasn’t broken? That Mary Magdalene and I would have been great mates?), and when she put down the phone she was ready to talk.

We sat on my parents’ bed and, like so many mothers before her, she cried. She cried for the loss of the future she’d imagined for me, she cried for what she thought would be a difficult path, she cried because she worried I’d grow old and lonely, like the gay people in books and movies, she cried (I guess) for the unknown, and she cried (I suppose) because she felt she didn’t really know this new gay me. She cried for the imagined son
she felt she’d just lost. And she cried because she loved me. And I cried because I loved her back.

We spoke about Lorcan, and after she’d talked to him on the phone and stoically taken on the full gay picture, we sat longer on her bed. Then she looked at me and said, ‘You and Lorcan always seemed like two exotic birds that just landed down on top of us.’ I knew exactly what she meant.