‘I wanted younger lesbians, gays, queers, trans and non-binary people to know the history ... I was told I would never get a job’

For someone with such a lauded academic career, a novel about a lesbian emigrant coming of age might seem like a bit of a handbrake turn, but Katherine O’Donnell has always written stories, often gifting them to friends. In fact, that’s how Slant began. The novel opens with its central character, Ro, immersed in the 2015 marriage equality referendum. “It became addictive,” the book begins, “the canvassing.”

Slant tells the story of Ro, a gay Irish woman contending with the stress of 2015. The novel then plunges us back in time to Ro’s lesbian origin story, as an immigrant in Boston infatuated with an English student, then as a young woman discovering herself in Provincetown while in a very tricky relationship with a stressed-out older woman, then chasing love in the UK, and back to Ireland again. Traversing decades, and steeped in themes of queer family and self-discovery, what began as a story for a friend who canvassed incessantly in 2015 became something much bigger.

O’Donnell initially studied at University College Cork, followed by journalism at DCU, and was then awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study a master’s at Boston College, before returning to UCC for her PhD, also spending time at the University of California, Berkeley. She was the director of the Women’s Studies Centre at UCD for a decade, before joining the School of Philosophy, where she is a professor. She is one of the five people behind the Justice for Magdalenes research, and was involved in drafting a document on what a Magdalene redress scheme could look like, elements of which were included in the State’s redress model. Her office in the arts block of UCD, has, she’s convinced, the best view on campus. It’s high up, so high that from Belfield, her office windows offer a striking vista of Dublin Bay.

I wanted the younger lesbians, gays, queers, trans and non-binary people to know the history. I think these things can get lost. I wanted them to understand where we had come from, for them to understand they have a cultural legacy

The contexts Ro finds herself in throughout Slant – the freewheeling rush of emigrating to Boston, gravitating towards gay men in Provincetown, dealing with the trauma of the Aids crisis, marching in defiance in the New York St Patrick’s Day Parade – will be familiar to the many Irish queer people who share some of those experiences. Emigration was a pressure release valve in a 1980s Ireland where unemployment was rife, but also for those who could not live freely in a theocratic context where homophobia was vicious, violent, embedded in legislation and incredibly oppressive.

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O’Donnell is nervous about the novel’s publication. It’s a normal feeling, but she is practised in academic writing as a mode that happens at “a distance, verifying that things are fact, and defending in a quite paranoid way a claim to a truth. This is just so completely different I don’t even know how to talk about it.”

As writing the book progressed, she found herself imagining her audience as her UCD students, and young queer people more generally. “I wanted the younger lesbians, gays, queers, trans and non-binary people to know the history. I think these things can get lost. I wanted them to understand where we had come from, for them to understand they have a cultural legacy.” Younger LGBTQ+ people in Ireland, she says, have come of age in a much different context to O’Donnell. “With marriage, it was going to change the whole lifespan of being queer ... They are in a place where the expectation is they’ll marry, settle down, have kids, it will be very heteronormative. I wanted to give them a flavour and a taste of what it was like when that wasn’t the automatic route, just as a resource to see if there was anything there they wanted to reuse.”

When I tell her how struck I was by a speaker at a recent trans rights demo about their desire for visibility on their own terms at a time when trans people are being made hyper-visible in a sort of spotlight-on-the-watchtower way, O’Donnell says she sees a commonality between contemporary trans rights activism and her experience of lesbian visibility when the LGBTQ+ rights movement in Ireland was very small. “It so reminds me of being lesbian back in the day,” she says, “because the spotlight on us then was about – and you always know when you’re in a truly repressed situation when two contradictory things are [apparently] true at once – being accused of being nymphomaniacal and frigid. Trans people are being accused of being too fixated on gender, and not doing it properly. Really?” she asks in disbelief.

“Nowadays, the younger queers have the map,” she says, “We weren’t given the map. I was told I would never get a job, by people who cared about me: you’re out? What have you done? You’ll never get a job here! You’ll never get a job in academia anywhere! That was a pretty good bet,” she says of people’s concerns. “When you don’t think you’ll get a job, you don’t think about planning what you’ll do when you do get a job. You don’t have it in your head to buy the house or even the car. I was trying to own a house communally for a long time. That’s how I wanted to live, and it’s still how I want to live. We didn’t see the obvious things because we were making our own maps. And some of us lost out. Some of us really lost out, especially people who were activists, especially people who were obviously queer and not very ‘employable’ at a time when employment was scarce.”

Within the Irish LGBTQ+ community, the marriage equality movement and its outcome occupy a curious space. There is broad acknowledgment of the usefulness of that era as a cipher to dismantle a lot of societal homophobia, but the pursuit of marriage – ultimately a conservative goal – and the “normalisation” of queer lives also instigated a loss of alternative pathways across relationship structures, and radical approaches to how we live.

It did feel that I was breaking one of our protections, or one of the things we had agreed to keep, which is to keep appeasing and saying thank you and that ‘we all did this together’, whereas actually, no. We knocked on your doors, and it was brutal

This is the minor chord underneath the major celebratory tone of how the song of that year plays in the national psyche, and it’s a thing that is not often verbalised outside of queer spaces. “It did feel that I was breaking one of our protections,” says O’Donnell of the depiction of the referendum in her novel, “or one of the things we had agreed to keep, which is to keep appeasing and saying thank you and that ‘we all did this together’, whereas actually, no. We knocked on your doors, and it was brutal.”

Slant is a book that is full of the complexities of love, not least in how it is also a love letter to the past. “We got to invent a world because we had to,” says O’Donnell of coming of age as a queer woman. “And yes, that possibility is still there, but there are far more constraints now. Even housing: we had cheap housing. We had intentional communities. We knew we had to create our art, not just to reflect ourselves but to have community and ritual and be with each other in those kinds of spaces. A lot of that possibility seems shut down for younger people. Yes, it was tough in many ways, but there was so much joy.” Many younger queer people, she says, “seem on this neoliberal, materialist, middle-class track”. She’s hoping the novel will remind people, and inform others, that “you can create a political world, a cultural world, a world of community and family outside of the structures you’re now being really pushed into.”

Slant by Katherine O’Donnell is published by New Island Books on May 23rd