BOOK TALK: We've come a long way

June is Pride Month and we have just had our Mayo Pride this bank holiday weekend in Westport. In celebration of Pride, New Island publishers based in Dublin have just released a wonderful book entitled 'Reeling in the Queers - Tales of Ireland’s LGBTQ past' by Páraic Kerrigan. It is based on the format of RTE’s TV programme 'Reeling in the Years', looking at the timeline of Queer Irish History for the years 1974 to 2024. Kerrigan divides the story into fourteen chapters, telling the stories that most of us won’t know about; the stories of normal people who did extraordinary things at grass roots level to progress LGBTQ liberation in Ireland.

Pride today has become a very significant event across Ireland. Dublin Pride attracts 60,000 to 80,000 people every year, a long way from the first Pride march in 1985 with 50 to 100 people in attendance.

Pride in Ireland began as part of the wider international gay and lesbian liberation. In New York in 1969, the Stonewall Riots were a response to continual police raids on Stonewall Inn, part of a network of illegal gay clubs and after hour’s bars. The riots continued for 6 days and represented a watershed moment that encompassed years of activism and agitation. The following year, events were organised in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles on the last Saturday of June to commemorate that watershed moment and the theme of the event was 'Gas Pride'.

Phil Moore is someone most of us will not have heard of but if your life was touched by hers you will not forget it. It is so poignant and beautiful that Padraic's book starts with her story. Phil was a mother of two from Derry in 1989, one of which told her when he was 16 years old that he was gay. She was in the audience of a special edition of the Late Late Show featuring a debate around homosexuality and whether it should be decriminalised. The Irish Government had just been mandated to do so after David Norris’s campaign for Homosexual Reform was successful in the European Court of Human Rights a year earlier in 1988. Various concerned groups were claiming it isn’t normal, children were impressionable, an aberration and on it went. She couldn’t stand the idea of her son being called an aberration and intervenes bravely in the debate. She declared: “When you are talking about my child, he is wonderful and perfectly normal. It is nothing that he can grow out of, because if a mother says that to a child, it means you’re not accepting him.”

Phil went on to set up a 'Parents Enquiry Line' which provided invaluable support to parents. She attended a meeting with the newly formed Gay and Lesbian Equality Network who was lobbying newly appointed Minister of Justice Máire Geoghegan-Quinn to change the law. She spoke to Geoghegan-Quinn mother to mother about the plight that young people go through with their parents. So taken was the Minister by her that she herself became a key advocate for change and on June 24, 1993, she passed the legislation that finally decriminalised homosexuality.

There’s also the story of the first Pride demonstration on June 27, 1974 where people were so horrified to see overt declarations of homosexuality that the number 46A bus nearly crashed into the railings of St Stephen’s Green. A truck with two men parked outside the Ministry of Justice office to deliver a new carpet, one of which declared 'Jaysus Mick, Queers' and the other one grabbed a placard and walked with them. There’s the story of Rock Hudson who in 1968 on a week’s visit to Dublin frequented incognito Bartley Dunne’s Pub, a gay friendly establishment on St Stephen's Street. In the eighties, I loved that pub; everyone was welcome; gay, punk, hippie.

All of the fourteen chapters in the book tell a wonderful story of what can be achieved when we become agents of change, when we inspire and create a culture that embraces diversity and acceptance. This book is for us all.