Gay love as Gaeilge

"WHEN I was growing up, my mother made the fairies so real that they were no different from the neighbours for me; maybe that's why I became a fairy."

Forty years ago, a little boy, whom they named Cathal, wad born to Micky and Agnes O Searcaigh who lived in an isolated Irish speaking hill farm under Mount Eargail in Co Donegal. He was to be their only child, and from earliest childhood he was marked out as different. He was gay and he was intent on being a poet.

This week Cathal O Searcaigh, a member of Aosdana, whose work has been translated from Irish into French, Catalan, Italian and German, was at the Oideas Gael Language and Culture Summer School in Glencolumbkille to launch his fifth collection of poetry, Na Buachailli Bana ("the white boys" or "the gay boys").

The publication of the book marks the Irish language's irrevocable coming out of the closet, as much of the book is made up of tender gay love poems. Cathal himself came out long ago: "I was never in the closet. We never had anything so stylish as a closet," he jokes.

For the boy Cathal grew up, not in an ignorant, stifled little house hold beneath Eargail, but in a home which was so far outside the bounds of normal, polite society, that the imagination held in it almost complete sway.

"The other world ran parallel to our world," he says. "Around our house no tree could be disturbed. If my father moved certain rocks, my mother chastised him, because the fairies lived in those rocks. When she was about to empty out the dish water, she would pause for a moment at the door, in case any fairies were passing by.

Now, retrospectively, I see that she was also a manic depressive. She would begin story telling, day after day. I would be embarrassed when my little friends came into the house. But by the time I reached 11 or 12, I was fascinated by it. They were stories which emerged out of her own conflicts, and they were full of archetypes. They were pure magic realism. When I read Marquez's One Hundred Years Of Solitude, I realised this was close to what I had been hearing from my mother."

CATHAL became aware of his homosexuality early on: "I was receiving different messages on my aerial from an early age," he says. "When I was 10 I fell in love with somebody who was four years old, when I saw him coming to school. There was this halo of sweetness off him. I realised intuitively that he would have a strong impact on my life. He wasn't gay in the accepted sense, but he understood something about masculine tenderness. He bridged all those early years."

O Searcaigh pushed his aerial higher, as he came into his teens, by reading widely: "There was nothing in Irish which was speaking directly to me," he says. "I read Whitman and Ginsberg, which began to explain my predicament as a young gay adolescent."

For all the wonder of his inheritance from his parents, he had the importance of education borne in on him in the most savage ways. The question why his parents had only one child elicits this response: "The most revealing experience of my early life was trying to explain my mother's periods. She had no formal education, and she talked about haemorrhaging. I was traumatised as a small child trying to work out what this was. That was one reason I wanted to read. I intuited that the knowledge my mother needed was in books.

"My father was a migratory worker and he could read and write, but my mother had to depend on other people reading the letters. I wanted to read and write at an early age. I felt it was a social necessity."

His aerial was now scanning the airwaves for different ways of being: "I felt that little glen to be claustrophobic. I was listening to Radio Caroline and Radio Luxembourg: the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, the Beatles. I wanted to go somewhere which had the ethos of that music."

And so, at the age of 15, he hitchhiked to London, intending to be a writer in English, a language he had learned at school at the age of seven or eight. He worked in a bar, trading books for pints with certain customers, and he worked in a sex shop called Harmony Heights, where, he says, "People came in and asked for a dildo as if it was a loaf of bread." He also saw, for the first time, "the public acknowledgement of homosexual joy two men going into a pub, hand in hand".

HE also discovered that he needed to go home: "I read Derek Mahon's poem, Afterlives. The last lines are: But the hills are still the same/ Grey blue above Belfast./ Perhaps if I'd stayed and lived it bomb by bomb/ I might have grown up at last/ and understood what they mean by home. I realised that I had to go home and learn my own language, if I was to articulate myself properly."

Now his poetry is intimately associated with his native valley. In Anseo Ag Staisiun Chaiseal Na gCorr (Here at Caiseal na gCorr Station), from An Bealack no Bhaile (1993), he incants the area's magical names and writes: "Seo duanaire mo mhuintire/ an lamhscribhinn a shaothraigh said go teann/ le duch a gcuid allais." (This is the poem book of my people/the manuscript they toiled at/ with the ink of their sweat." (trans. Michael Davitt).

"I feel my work is devotional," he says. "A celebration of tongue, tradition and place. That's easy in Irish because of the dinseanchas (place names). But the younger generation is not aware of the named landscape. I feel a terrible tragedy when a place no longer answers to its name. It was cut out of the wilderness. Our people reclaimed the wilderness of landscape and made it a home."

First awakened to poetry by his father reciting the work of Robert

Burns, in Irish he went back for inspiration to the short lyrics of sixth and seventh century hermit monks: "They were very much in tune with the Creator, whoever He or She may be, and I admire their Green philosophy." Now he is moving towards longer lines, inspired by the folk song (amhran), which came to the fore when the Gaelic order, with its professional poets, collapsed.

O Searcaigh told a taxi driver on our way out of Glencolumbkille how his father died last year; (I tried to remember much of this conversation, lines like these: "His mind was like a blank page at the end. He slipped into eternity, drop by drop.").

Now he lives alone, by choice, in his family's old farmhouse, on its 200 acres of mountainside:

"My physical home is my spiritual home," he says. "When you're an artist of any kind, you're out there on your own. The poet, to some extent, is the seer. The word `file' means the ability to see what others have forgotten to see."