Fear still felt by gay people is to our shame

IN THESE grim times, it is worth noting that the last 10 days has been a very good time for a large minority of Irish people. For anyone who is gay, lesbian or bisexual, three apparently unrelated events have coincided to create a memorable moment. For anyone who is not gay, lesbian or bisexual, but who believes in common citizenship and common decency, the moment is equally precious, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE 

The first event happened on the same day as the Green Party conference and the Ireland-Italy soccer match and is probably of more lasting significance. The first open conference of gay, lesbian and bisexual primary school teachers took place in Dublin under the auspices of the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO).

The pretence that homosexual teachers did not exist (or worse, of ignorant and bigoted belief that they constituted a danger to children) was shattered as respected members of society decided that they could no longer live with a respect that included a denial of who they were.

As Cathal Ó Riada, who has been teaching in the village school of Cuil Aodha in west Cork for 25 years, told Rosita Boland in Saturday’s Irish Times, “I’ve been comfortable with my sexual orientation for years, but I can’t go on for the rest of my life pretending at work to be something I’m not.”

The novelist Colm Tóibín said in his opening speech at the conference that “Any historian writing about the slow and often gnarled progress of liberty in Ireland will see today as a central moment in the assertion of personal freedom in our country.”

That freedom is simply the freedom not to have to lie about who you are.

It was desperately sad that this moment of liberation should have happened on the same weekend that Stephen Gately, who made a similar breakthrough for gay men in the pop industry, died. Tragic as his death was, it led to the second breakthrough.

For the first time in Ireland, there was a widespread and comfortable use of “husband” to describe the bereaved partner of a gay man. Technically (and shamefully) the term is not strictly accurate – Stephen and Andy Cowles were never given the choice to marry and were civil partners. But everybody knew “husband” was the right word. The relationship was equal in love and affection, in commitment and in consequent devastation, to that within a marriage. It was unequal only in the eyes of a law that still presumes to make discriminatory judgments. The people of Gately’s home place accepted that. So, in essence, did the Catholic parish that conducted his funeral.

Even the Irish Mail on Sunday, whose parent paper in the UK had published Jan Moir’s creepy piece about how Gately had died of being gay, thought it right to call Cowles his “husband”.

The day after that funeral came the third emblematic moment. Donal Óg Cusack, the Cork county hurler, became the first elite sportsman in Ireland to come out as a gay man. In an extract from his autobiography, he declares: “I get more out of men. Always have. I know I am different but just in this way. Whatever you may feel about me or who I am, I’ve always been at peace with it.” In the macho world of sport, where there are, for example, no openly gay professional soccer players, and where homophobic taunts are the first option for abuse, Cusack’s honesty is as resonant as it is brave.

The significance of these three events is not that they mark the end of discrimination and prejudice. On the contrary, each of them emerges from a deep background of fear. Teachers, doctors, nurses and anyone else working for a religious-owned school or hospital can still be lawfully discriminated against if their sexual orientation is deemed to create a risk of “undermining the religious ethos of the institution”.

And it is not just the law or the church that gay people have to fear. The courts and the Equality Tribunal have recently been dealing with the case of a teacher in Drogheda who claims he was harassed and discriminated against for 10 years – by his own colleagues. He has described incidents of bullying ranging from the placement of a banana in a condom in his mail box to direct threats of physical assault. It is striking that the INTO conference of gay teachers was primarily concerned not with the attitudes of employers or communities but with those in the staffroom.

Gately’s coming-out wasn’t some kind of sudden epiphany. He had been haunted by the fear of being outed and came out when he thought a “twisted” tabloid expose was on the way.

Cusack had to fly home from South Africa in 2006 to tell his family he was gay because he feared that “internet gossips or barflies” would tell them first. There are still tens of thousands of gay men and lesbians who are in hiding from violence, contempt and ignorance. That is not their shame – it is ours.

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