Amid the munching of popcorn in the Cineworld on Parnell Street during the week, there was something curious about the demographic of the audience as they waited for the lights to go down for Hairspray, the musical based on the Broadway hit of the 1988 cult film by John Waters (the Baltimore film-maker with the Clark Gable moustache, not the bearded columnist from this paper) about black civil rights in 1960s America.
The seats were filled predominantly by teenage girls and gay men. In fact, I don't think I have seen so many gay couples entering Cineworld since Brokeback Mountain, which was like a well-groomed Noah's Ark. But there's a lot about Hairspray'scivil rights message that resonates in Ireland today.
Watching the movie with my boyfriend, two girls beside us bickered loudly over sweets, but fell into conspiratorial whispers when one pigtailed minx looked over in our direction. Her eyes rolled like two escalating snowballs down our arms, past our intertwined fingers until, finally, reaching our tangled legs.
She whispered to her friend, who stretched forward in her seat to take a look. Hot damn! We were more interesting than a cross-dressing John Travolta singing his heart out on screen. I felt like an exotic bird with unfortunate plumage. Pretty ironic as we were watching a Utopian, feel-good movie about forbidden love.
That said, the audience split didn't come as a surprise: it's a camp musical with a glittering cast of Hollywood stars and Waters is a lifelong gay activist and champion of the outsider. So far, so gay.
The teenage heroine Tracy Turnblad wants "every day to be Negro Day" on the segregated Corny Collins Show, a TV dance-off. Token representations of gay life on Irish TV, British and American imports aside, have been less than patchy. (Exhibit A: the alleged veto of gay couples on TG4's Paisean Faisean.)
In Hairspray, one idealistic black boy and white girl who fall in love are told: "You two better brace yourselves for a whole lotta ugly comin' at you from a never-ending parade of stupid." This is when the lives of the gay audience members, who live as best they can in Ireland's legal and social maelstrom, must have flashed before their eyes.
Falling in love is the easy part. But try walking from Stephen's Green to, say, the Spire, holding hands with your same-sex partner without a face in the crowd from that parade of stupid burning with indignation like a slapped arse. Or worse. Abuse hurled at you from that same parade of stupid. Or . . . well, think of the knife scene in West Side Story.
Still, a gradual desegregation is taking place. More visibly gay couples are moving to suburbs and country towns, not always to a red carpet welcome. If a gay couple moves into No. 49, would the walls in No. 50 come tumbling down? Would there be a biblical plague of frogs in the hot press? Clearly not: one civil right does not negate another.
There are obviously massive differences between black and gay civil rights. But Martin Luther King's wife Coretta Scott King, who died last year, was often criticised for comparing the two. She once replied, "I have worked too long and hard against segregated public accommodations to end up segregating my moral concern".
The Foyle Pride Festival, which painted the iconic Free Derry Wall in the Bogside pink last week, understands that we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny. "The wall has always been about civil rights and civil liberties," the festival's organiser David McCartney said, hitting the paintbrush on the head.
In retrospect, segregationists seem like evil, comic-book villains, perfect for a musical fantasy. When we look back on gay rights in years to come, remembering generations of sometimes lonely, loveless, lovely people, let's hope we feel the same way. But, as the American civil rights movement shows, legal equality is only the beginning.
In a couple of months, the State will reclaim a part of its own history when the Irish Queer Archive, currently in an anonymous lock-up in Ballyfermot, moves to the National Library. Last week, the archivist Tonie Walsh and I sifted through old newspaper clippings. To see a room chock-a-block with decades of campaigning was humbling. Getting on the Luas afterwards, two kids shouted: "Homo! Gay!" It was depressing as we had spent more than three hours discussing gay civil rights and how, with the move to the National Library, part of this epic struggle will finally be recognised by the State. And now this? No one on the Luas flinched. Not, by the way, that I expected them to.
It was shocking but, given what we'd just been talking about, it was actually also kind of funny. I thought, "what would Tracy Turnblad, that inspirational, larger-than-life anti-segregationist teenager from Hairspray, do?" I knew right away. I smiled back at them. But, knowing this was no musical, I waited for the Luas doors to close first.
Vincent Browne is on leave