Seán Moncrieff: My daughter is gay and I don’t care. I’m not uncaring. I’m thrilled for her

Due to a combination of bad planning and being broke, I had to stay a couple of nights in a B&B in Galway City. I was doing work experience in the Connacht Tribune newspaper. I was 19.

It was the cheapest possible option, so I had to share a room. I arrived first and got into bed. The other man turned up hours later. He didn’t turn on the light, so I never knew what he looked like. But judging from his voice, he was probably in his 20s. He was also stinking drunk: alternately talking loudly to himself and to me and quite oblivious to my desire to go to sleep. A lot of what he said was incoherent. Eventually, I told him to shut up. Several times. He responded with a creepy giggle.

He seemed to settle down after that, but then said: “Come over here and have a little chat with me.”

Written down, those words could be open to interpretation, but in that bedroom, in the dark, in the way he uttered them, his meaning was completely clear.

Seán Moncrieff: What does the word ‘woke’ really mean?

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Seán Moncrieff: As dull as it is, queuing isn’t just a cultural habit – it says something about society

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Seán Moncrieff: Psoriasis is one of the flaws that make me who I am

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Seán Moncrieff: To the British, the Irish aren’t really foreign

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I can’t remember what I answered, but it was enough to discourage him. He went to sleep – eventually, I did too – and when I woke up he was gone.

For a couple of years afterwards, I dined out on that story – my scrape with a sexual predator – until I began meeting gay people and hearing their stories and came to realise the encounter was probably more sad than dangerous: a man who could only admit to his sexuality in the pitch black, when he was blind drunk. I realised too that in telling it, I was feeding a poisonous trope that I had been raised to unthinkingly believe: the queer pervert.

Thankfully, times, and people, change. Yet even when I knew better, I maintained the selfish hope for my kids that they wouldn’t be gay or trans: simply because it was the more difficult road to take. It would be another thing to worry about.

But what I hadn’t noticed was the way the culture was changing, particularly in relation to gay people, (the trans “debate” is still venomous). Not just the marriage referendum, but a general, normalising process. Incrementally, to be gay was becoming less and less of a big deal.

So, when Daughter Number Two came out, there was virtually nothing to worry about. “Came out” is the wrong phrase: that implies revealing a secret. For her it was more a gradual realisation as to why going out with boys had always been a discordant experience. It didn’t fit.

As is always the way with my family, the others had told me before she did. So when she asked me what I thought, I was able to say I didn’t care. Not uncaring: I’m thrilled that she’s far happier now that she’s figured out something important about herself; that she has a partner now who suits her far better than any of the boys she brought home. It’s just that it’s interesting, and relieving, how little difference it makes in any other respect. The only change is that it’s provided Daughter Number Three with a new vein of filthy humour to indulge in. She says me and Daughter Number Two now have something else in common as we both like boobs. (That’s the only printable one).

I’m not being a Pollyanna about this, I hope. Of course, gay people in Ireland still face intolerance and hatred and violence. And Daughter Number Two is to a degree protected by where she lives and the circles she moves in. She says she’s never experienced homophobia. So far.

Intellectually, we’re very similar. I can easily imagine that when she has daughters of her own and a column in The Irish Times, she won’t feel the need to write anything like this. Because, finally, it won’t matter.