Woman in the Making: Panti's Memoir (20 page)
The New Gay hadn’t struggled and fought to forge a hard-won identity, whose value it then appreciated. It hadn’t searched to find ‘the gay’: bits of ‘the gay’
had seeped into its world. Corporate-friendly, sexually neutered bits.
Will & Grace
was on at teatime, and every evening de-sexualised gay men were beamed into your living room as they decorated your dreary houses or refurbished your middle-aged women. Your best friend and eunuch. Your granny knew where The George was, and young gay boys in Mayo could join online discussions about what the mean doorman said to whom last night, and why the DJ refused to play Miley Cyrus.
The underground had come overground, then shrivelled and died in the light.
Being gay had been emasculated. It was no longer a rejection of the status quo, it was embracing the status quo and adding a few cushions. Being gay was no longer dangerous and exciting and anti-establishment and mother-horrifying. It was easy and inoffensive and emasculated, and brought its mother to gay bars ’cos she’d love them.
But your mother shouldn’t love them! When you’re gay and twenty (Hell! When you’re straight and twenty!), your mother should be horrified at everything you do. If she even suspects a small portion of what you’re up to, she should be pulling her hair out in despair, frantic with worry, gnashing her teeth and beating her breast, howling with rage and praying for the courage to disown you.
The New Gay had jumped backwards over my generation. It was sitting on the sofa with its granny, tut-tutting at cruising and bathhouses and casual sex.
What was liberating and full of honesty to me was sad and shameful to them. The New Gay wanted to bring a boyfriend home at Christmas. I wanted to fuck Christmas!
The New Gay, raised at the comfortable teat of the Celtic Tiger (which was then imploding around them), wanted to go to sexless, shiny, over-decorated bars owned by straight corporations, and drink Bacardi Breezers on glass tabletops. I wanted to smash the glass tabletops and fuck on the shards.
Gay culture was being stripped of everything that made it interesting, dangerous and offensive. Plucked, emasculated and disembowelled. Shaved and polished, infantilised till it was a neutered, sexless child of indeterminate gender. Even the New Gay’s icons were children’s entertainers: Steps, Miley Cyrus, Britney. Entertainments designed for children filling dance floors in gay clubs.
I thrilled to stars like Morrissey, Boy George and young Madonna – stars who kicked against everything. But in 2008 the gays worshipped sixteen-year-old Christian Miley Cyrus. Instead of liberating you from a rigid world, being gay now gave you a new set of rules designed for children – packaged, anodyne, domestic. Britney was carrying around children and twittering about watching
Nemo
. Debbie Harry didn’t have kids – she had sex. Our Madonna was wild and lascivious, shoving two fingers up to my mother, taking off her clothes and giving
blowjobs in sex books. Their Madonna wrote children’s books and adopted babies.
Domesticity was the New Gay and that wasn’t the gay I’d signed up for.
The New Gay even rejected being gay! It wanted to be ‘straight-acting’. It screamed, ‘
I’m not a gay man, I’m a man who happens to be gay!
’ as if its sexuality was nothing more than a haircut. Something to be glossed over, rather than an intrinsic, integral and powerful part of you that colours everything you do and are. It rejected it as an identity because assimilation, not revolution, was the New Gay’s dreary goal.
My generation was the generation who came of age under the shadow of AIDS. We grew up with sex and death inexorably linked. AIDS was there to kill us for going against Nature, to punish us for our promiscuity. And we adapted. We had ourselves tested, and watched friends die, but we never turned against sex and the liberation it had brought us. Sex defined us – and why not? Sex defines us all. Straight people just don’t notice it so much, because their sexuality is simply part of the background, assimilated into every nook and cranny of everyday life. It’s less obvious because it’s ubiquitous. It’s only gay sexuality that’s thrown into relief against the heterosexual background.
Our sexuality awakened us, and sex itself was the physical, emotional and even political expression of our sexuality and ourselves. So we never, despite the
horrors of the AIDS epidemic, gave up on sex. It was odd that it was the New Gay, those who had grown up post-AIDS, who had never seen friends die, who hadn’t grown up with condoms and headstones on TV, who had given up on sex.
Being gay used to mean being part of a fire of creativity and exploration, but rather than burning bigger and brighter, in 2008 it seemed that the fire had dwindled to a barely smouldering ember.
But I had underestimated the younger gays. I was the old fogey on the bus, tutting at the youngsters and tarring them all with the same brush. I was shaking my fist and shouting, ‘Get off my gay lawn!’ at these feckless layabouts, when it turned out they were neither.
In 2008, the campaign for same-sex marriage hadn’t yet caught the public imagination in Ireland, but neither had it yet caught the imagination of the younger LGBT community. They were too young and having too much fun to be worrying about grown-up stuff like marriage rights. Nevertheless, established, experienced LGBT rights organisations were working hard in meeting rooms and politicians’ offices to get civil-partnership legislation through the Dáil. That was their priority, and once that was achieved, they’d work towards full marriage equality. But tensions were emerging in the community over this strategy.
A younger breed of activist was emerging, inspired and influenced, via the internet, by marriage-equality
campaigns and successes in other parts of the world, and they were impatient and radical. The older activists knew that handshakes, lobbying and gentle nudging had got them to the brink of civil-partnership legislation, a stepping stone from the finish line, but the new, younger, activists saw civil partnership as second best, a cop-out. Some even felt it was an insult. They were fired up on viral videos and influenced by direct-action groups, like Act Up, which had achieved great success in turning the AIDS debate around in the eighties through creative, headline-grabbing protests. Now these younger activists were beginning to organise demonstrations, holding ‘kiss-ins’ outside the Dáil, and chaining themselves to railings. Some in the gay community were worried about this development, worried that the whole project could be derailed if nervous politicians thought the LGBT community weren’t united behind civil partnership. Why take the political risk of alienating conservative voters if some of the gays weren’t going to thank you for it either?
But I was excited to see it. I was excited to see a flash of anger, a take-to-the-streets energy from young gay people. Nothing energises me more than the sight of a dyke with a megaphone agitating on the streets! And, as far as I was concerned, it could only help, the more the merrier. So what if the two ‘sides’ weren’t exactly on message? The general thrust of their arguments was the same: a thrust towards equality.
I was somewhat ambivalent about the drive for same-sex
marriage. It seemed a very conservative project to me. One of the things I had always loved most about being gay was that it freed you from many of the usual dull pressures your straight friends faced. The pressure to find a nice wife, a steady job and a semi-detached in the suburbs where you could raise your steady kids. We gays were spared the inquisitive eyebrows of visiting aunts at Christmas, the gently probing questions of a mother with grandkids on her mind. Once you were gay you didn’t have to care about football and you didn’t have to bring home a fertile nurse from a nice family. The gays were free to work out their own ways to be happy, to form other kinds of relationships, create their own kinds of families.
I recognised that most of the LGBT community didn’t share my ambivalence. They wanted the same things as their straight brothers and sisters wanted. They wanted the same respect as their straight brothers and sisters expected. And they wanted their relationships to be cherished equally. They wanted to be able to declare publicly, like everyone else could, the special status of the bond they shared with their partner, and they wanted that bond to be acknowledged and respected in the same way. They wanted simply to be able to say, ‘This is my husband’, ‘This is my wife’. They grew up in a society that presents marriage as the goal. A society that encourages and urges them to get married. A society that raises them from the day they are born
to be married. Fairytales always end happily ever after in confetti. Mammy smiles wistfully about her wedding dress and Granny remembers your mother’s lovely cake – ‘Four tiers!’ Wedding anniversaries are celebrated, and isn’t it wonderful to see the O’Reillys? ‘Seventy-five years married they are!’ Unmarried middle-aged women are embarrassed to admit it and unmarried middle-aged men are viewed with suspicion. But the day a gay person comes out they’re expected to forget all that. Lesbian little girls grow up wanting to be princess brides too, but the day they came out as lesbian all that was whisked away: ‘No, sorry, not for you! That’s for your sister.’
So, despite my own ambivalence about marriage generally, I saw it simply as a question of equality. If gay couples wanted to get married, let them. Gay people have exactly the same hopes and dreams and ambitions for their lives as everyone else and should have the same opportunities as everyone else to fulfil them. We are full and equal citizens of this country and should be afforded the same rights and responsibilities.
I understood, too, of course, that there were many urgent and practical reasons why gay couples’ relationships needed to be recognised equally under the law: inheritance rights, medical responsibility, taxes, bereavement … Gay couples lived in a legal limbo where loving partners, who had committed their lives to each other, were treated as strangers under the law. And gay couples had children. Children they fed and clothed,
loved and picked up from school. Children whose hair they brushed, sandwiches they made, homework they helped with. Children they cheered at the school sports day, worried over during exam time, and for whom they lay awake in bed waiting to hear them home safe from the disco. Children to whom, in the eyes of the law, they weren’t related at all.
One Saturday afternoon in the spring of 2009, I got my dog and wandered into town to attend a marriage-equality protest organised by a new, youthful, energetic campaign group. The turnout was disappointing and it annoyed me. Where was everyone? Could the New Gay not tear himself away from his dating app for an hour? At the time I kept a lively blog on the Pantibar website so the next day, still annoyed, I wrote a blog post to get it off my chest.
NO MORE MISTER NICE GAY
Lazy-arsed queers
On Saturday afternoon, Penny and I went to the ‘LGBT Noise’ demonstration on Dame Street to support their campaign for gay marriage (and against the weak, second-class civil-partnership bill that is due to come before the Dáil – though I wouldn’t hold your breath). There were about a hundred and fifty people there, mostly the usual suspects, and we had a pleasant, social afternoon.
Long-time activist Tonie Walsh made a rousing speech (delightfully, he couldn’t resist aiming a few kicks at the Catholic Church. I howled when he referred to the Pope as ‘that German eunuch in Rome’!) and Penny got lots of attention and met a few other gay dogs. It was nice to see some politically engaged young gays, and those of us who were there had our batteries recharged somewhat. And I think Noise were happy with the turnout as it was a lot more than their last demonstration at the Dáil.
But one hundred and fifty people? That’s pathetic. There were a couple of thousand gays drinking and dancing and hitting on Brazilians within a five-hundred-yard radius of Dame Street twelve hours earlier. Where the fuck were they? Where the fuck is the righteous anger?
When some bouncer in The George is mean to a drunk gay, the forums light up with horrified nellies, protests are mooted, and Facebook groups are set up. But when a fundamental human right, available to everyone in every civilisation since the formation of human societies, is denied them, they can’t be arsed getting out of bed. Where is the righteous anger?
When Sunday clubbing hours are curtailed, angry gays join angry protests outside the Dáil, petitions clog up our inboxes, and outraged
gays shout about the nanny state. But when the government that taxes them the same as everyone else tells them that in return they’ll only have some of the same rights afforded to everyone else, they can’t be arsed having brunch an hour later than usual. Where the fuck is the anger?
When Alexandra and a bunch of other people you’d never heard of a few weeks earlier make it to
The X Factor
final, you won’t leave the house and no one can get through to you because you’re furiously text-voting, but when you’re told you’re a second-class citizen and your relationships aren’t real relationships, you can’t be arsed walking over to Dame Street from H&M because the cute assistant has just gone to check if they have that cute jacket in your size. Where the FUCK is your righteous anger?
And don’t bother telling me that you’re not interested in marriage. That you think it’s an outmoded institution, a hangover from a patriarchal society that was only about the protection of property. I don’t give a crap. Plenty of other gays do want to get married, and you should be furious on their behalf. Furious that something as basic and fundamental as marriage, something that is taken for granted by everyone else, something that society expects, encourages and cherishes for everyone else, is closed off to them, and them
only. Anyone else can get married. Any race, any creed, any gender … Hell! Any idiot, murderer, rapist, child molester. Any asshole, racist, queer-basher. Any dumb-fuck soccer hooligan. Any mentally disturbed lunatic. But not the gays! The sky will fall down!
And where were those gays who do want to get married? The ones who’ll be rushing to the registry office if and when the weak-brewed, watered-down, domestic partnership version of marriage is thrown at us to shut us up, and the government slaps itself on the back for being modern and progressive.
Why the fuck are you watching your
Sex and the City
box-set when you should be rioting in the streets?
What is it going to take to make you angry? What is the spark that will finally light a fire under you? Are you waiting for a gay Rosa Parks? Well, you have one. In fact, you have two. Katherine Zappone and Ann Louise Gilligan have already refused to sit at the back of the bus. Do you need a gay Emmeline Pankhurst to throw herself under the King’s horse? Will that finally wake you up? If you think the fact that you can hold hands with your boyfriend in Topshop is progress enough, then that’s all you’re going to get. If you act like a second-class citizen, you’ll be treated like one.
And
it’s not just the gays I’m pissed off with.
I’m pissed off with the pensioners. When their medical cards were threatened, the streets were in tumult with anger. And rightly so. But the slight against the pensioners was much less than the one against us. The government wanted wealthy pensioners, who could afford it, to pay for their medical expenses, not deny them all a fundamental right given to everyone else. Can you imagine the reaction if the government had decided that pensioners’ marriages were no longer valid? Or even if their marriages were to be downgraded to a weaker version of marriage, a faux-marriage, because, after all, old people’s relationships aren’t real, they’re just pretend relationships so a pretend marriage should be good enough for them? They would have torched the Dáil.
And the pensioners didn’t protest alone. Gay people were out on the streets. Gay people wrote to newspapers. Gay people lobbied their TDs, called radio shows, threatened to oust the government at the earliest opportunity. But where are the old folk when we need them? Why isn’t your granny calling Joe Duffy to express her outrage that you are expected to take on all the responsibilities of citizenship but only some of the rights? And don’t tell me she has a religious objection! I don’t give a toss if she has a religious objection. She’s
welcome to it! We’re not asking to get married in her church. We’re asking – demanding – the right to civil marriage, under the same law, in the same state, that we, too, are supposedly equal citizens of. It’s payback time, Granny. Quid pro quo.
And where are the bloody students? When college fees were mooted, gay people rallied, too. We scratched their back, and now they can bloody well scratch ours. Quid pro quo. And the farmers? Quid pro quo. And the unions! Where are the bloody unions? Gay people pay union fees too. And the nurses, and the teachers, and the rest. In the eighties, the Dunnes Stores workers went on strike rather than handle oranges that came from apartheid South Africa, a country and a people half a world away. And yet they couldn’t give a toss that the guy working on the checkout beside them is segregated.
But it’s hard to see why they should care when you don’t seem to.
Perhaps the problem is that we gays have wanted to be left alone for so long that we’re used to keeping our heads down. We don’t like to draw attention to ourselves by rocking the boat. Well, I’m fed up not rocking the boat. It’s my bloody boat too! I want to scream and shout and kick and throw things. I want to riot! I want to take to the streets and hurl abuse. I want people to know
how pissed off I am. I want to break things and tell the people who campaign to keep us in our place to fuck off. I want to scream, ‘How DARE you? How fucking dare you stick your nose into my business? How dare you try to tell me whom I can and cannot marry? How dare you tell me that my relationships aren’t real? How fucking dare you? Fuck off and mind your own bloody business, you interfering, mean-spirited, petty, backward, ignorant, patronising asshole!’
I have a lot of respect for NOISE and their campaign. At least they’re doing something. But I think the time for protests that are about making pretty pictures that will hopefully make it into the
Evening Herald
is over. What we need is righteous anger. What we need is a Stonewall riot. Oh, I’m not suggesting we rip up the pavement slabs and loot Arnotts. But what we need is a thousand gays to get angry on the street. What we need is two thousand gays with eggs to turn up at the Leinster House railings at Merrion Square and have them hail down on the cars of country TDs, to chain the gates shut, to refuse to move, to pour paint on the pavements. What we need is for fifty gays to get arrested. So what if we get arrested? A day in court and a fine? We’ll have a whip round! But we need to get angry. We need to be our own spark.
No more Mister Nice Gay.