Una Mullally: 40 years after the first Pride, we’re still fighting for LGBTQ+ people to live safe and free lives

Forty years ago, following many years of activism, gathering, demonstrating and coming out, a group of people marched in Dublin in what was effectively the capital’s first “proper” Gay Pride march. Here we are in 2023, with so much achieved, and an unfortunately necessary, urgent energy to continue the fight for LGBTQ+ people to live safe and free lives.

On the day I was born, March 8th, 1983, the killers of Declan Flynn – a man beaten to death in Fairview Park in Dublin by a group of young men who perceived him to be gay – were handed suspended sentences. The LGBTQ+ community in Ireland would not let society get away with such cruelty. They marched that month, and they marched that June. I was a newborn baby while actions were taken on the streets of Dublin that would enable me to carve out a life in this country.

I began my queer life afraid of harassment, homophobia and violence, all of which I experienced. You deal with it, try to process it as best you can, turn to your community of friends for support. And yet throughout my 20s and 30s, the arc of the moral universe did appear to be bending towards justice. The most grinding work to achieve this progress was done by those within the LGBTQ+ community who were the most vulnerable to the consequences of it not occurring. Homophobia and transphobia are not “LGBTQ+ issues”. They are issues for broader society, imposed on LGBTQ+ people, a cruel tax that demands one pay for the oppressive and bigoted actions of others.

[ Ireland’s first Pride parade, 40 years ago: ‘We had to suffer the beatings, the spittings, the jeerings, just for the right to walk down the street holding hands’’ ]

Often the term “activist” is imposed on people as though it’s some sort of state of moral ascension or sideline hobby. That’s certainly not my experience. No queer person I know selected that path as though an option. Many of us were turned into activists – temporarily or permanently – because the context demanded it. It was a response, not a choice. Given the constant solidarity and care LGBTQ+ people show to each other, how could you not fight for the rights of those who held you, protected you, taught you, enriched you and endlessly amused you?

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By the time I was participating in agitating for relationship recognition for LGBTQ+ people – in part necessary legislative change, in part a proxy to dismantle societal homophobia – the founders of Irish queer liberation, gay liberation, lesbian liberation, trans liberation, had done the hard work in a much tougher context. Dr Lydia Foy, in particular, deserves so much recognition.

Those who came before us had much harder battles to fight, on much rockier terrain. Their work was a mode of pure optimism and resistance, a gesture of potentiality, a rejection of oppression in a society extraordinarily hostile to their desires. Ultimately, the LGBTQ+ rights movement liberated many more than queer people.

In tandem with feminist activism, it began to turn Irish society away from the grim theocratic darkness that oppressed so many people, and towards a brighter future. Its diverse movements, activisms and agitations continue to do so, urging us all to self-reflect, to examine our relationship to our performance of gender, to interrogate how we are socialised, and to unpick the oppressive forces in our society that seek to curtail freedoms and attempt to exert control, over our bodies, our liberty, our dreams, our identities, our relationships.

And things do get better. Yes, there are peaks and troughs, and often that arc supposedly bending towards justice can feel like a chaotic squiggle. Yes, there are those who will misguidedly, intentionally, even gleefully attempt to once again prise open the door that leads to a darker future. It is incumbent on all of us to resist that nihilism. The rolling back of rights doesn’t stop with one marginalised demographic; it merely begins with it.

So we find ourselves at Pride 2023, a protest and celebration that morphs with the times. This year, in Dublin, across Ireland, and around the world, it feels potent. The threats we are facing as a community have created fear, of course. But resistance is also a mobilising force. In 1983, Noel Walsh wrote to The Irish Times asking people to turn out for the march. Forty years later, the span of my entire lifetime, we will find our footsteps once again tracing the grooves of those who came before us.

[ My first Pride: ‘We wore our wedding dresses’ ]

[ Anna Nolan: ‘The effect of being on a reality TV show unfolds over the years ... I definitely went through a depression’  ]

There are ghosts in these streets. The dykes who snuck out to dance at JJ Smyths. The men in hospital wards dying of Aids. The countless LGBTQ+ people who emigrated because they were rejected by families, by so-called friends, by employers, by society. Our friends who could not see a future for themselves with a pain so acute they opted out altogether. How do we honour these people, the ones who never made it?

The answer is quite clear to me. It is with love. And that love is fuelled by, and in turn fuels, the kind of energy that has always propelled us out on to the streets to claim our space, and to stake our claim as people and as a community deserving of a fully realised future without fear, and to live authentic, joyful lives. Everyone deserves that.