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

I’m in Anna Nolan’s kitchen in Inchicore eating chocolate Hobnobs (“The ratio of chocolate to biscuit is just superb”) and drinking French press coffee (“I went through a Nespresso phase,” she says, pointing towards a high shelf where that machine is lurking). A rescue cat, Minnie, a Siamese mix, wanders around my legs.

Nolan is a nun turned Big Brother participant turned television presenter turned head of development at Coco Television turned, most recently, chairperson of the National LGBT Federation NXF (though she’s still with Coco). She is funny and thoughtful and self-deprecating. When something comes through her letterbox she says: “Please let it be nice. I’ll even accept a pizza menu.”

She grew up in Rialto, the middle child of seven. They’re all still in Dublin, her mother in Rathfarnham. The house was full of music, she says. “I played the violin. Our parents encouraged us all to take up musical instruments. And in this school, in Crumlin, there were two teachers who were just passionate about classical music. So there was a full orchestra. We got instruments on loan. Everyone played cello or violin or bassoon. Our household was full of classical music. Dad and Mam falling asleep holding manuscripts as we were rehearsing.”

What type of parents were they? “The most unassuming, liberal parents ever. There was never a homophobic comment, never a racist comment. Very accepting of all people, of all identities… And that came about, I suppose, because my dad…” She pauses. “Actually, it’s his birthday today. He died a few years ago.” Her voice breaks. “It’s funny when these things just kind of pop up out of the blue. Sorry, I’m getting emotional. I shouldn’t. Give me a second, sorry.”

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A moment later she says: “He was this man from Ringsend. And he came from a docker’s family. So they all worked on the dock. And he got interested in jazz as a teenager, which was really unusual for somebody from Dublin to be so in love with the American jazz scene. I remember when he died, I got an email which said, ‘Your dad and I used to hang out, and we were the coolest kids on the block.’ It was a very niche scene. They went to jazz clubs and jazz performances. And I think, as a result of that, dad was very open-minded. He really understood the struggle that black jazz musicians would be going through over in America. So, while they weren’t vocally political, there was a real liberal sensibility about them.”

Were they religious? “We were thrown to Mass every week. But as the years went by everybody just gradually left… I think we’re all atheists now, actually. All of us.”

She laughs, anticipating my next question. How did she end up being a nun? “I was in school. I didn’t have much discipline. I could only do well in the things that I enjoyed doing, and really didn’t care about anything else. Music and maths, that was it. Probably I was getting a little lost, not aware of my sexuality. Other classmates were doing things that teenagers did, and I just wasn’t really interested in that. And then, I suppose, in my final year of school, I just didn’t know what I was or where I wanted to go and there was this really cool nun called Marjorie, and I just liked her and what she was about. The Loreto order was all about education for women. And I liked that. I genuinely felt I had a calling.”

Does she remember making the decision? “It was so ridiculous. There was one evening when I was like, ‘Will I do this? Will I join the convent?’ I said, ‘Okay, God, give me a sign.’ And I literally opened up the Bible.” She mimes opening a Bible with her eyes closed. “I picked a page and it said, ‘Come follow me’.” She laughs again. “It’s probably in the Bible a thousand times. I went, ‘That’s it, I have to’.”

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Did she believe in God? “I did,” she says, before adding: “Kind of… I didn’t like going to Mass. I liked discussions about theology. I liked the work that they did. The thought came into my head: ‘What about joining these incredible women?’ I was more drawn to the community of these women.”

She laughs. She hadn’t really realised she was a lesbian at that point, she says. “I didn’t make that connection. I loved the energy of women and this was appealing to me, this group of women.”

It was just incredible because it was my coming out, and I was seeing this room full of women and lesbians and it was like, ‘I’ve arrived’

She was with the convent for two and a half years. In the second year she lived there full time as a postulant. What was it like? “Like the army, I imagine. Up at 5.45, prayers at six, Mass at 6.30. Breakfast at seven. I did a kind of human development theology course with lots of other training nuns and priests... It tests whether you’re committed or not. During that time, I was going, ‘I like this. I don’t like this. I don’t think I believe in God. Is that a problem? I really want to spend time with this basketball player I’m hanging out with. She’s fantastic. I love her red hair.’”

Did she miss it when she left? “There was a lovely calmness to convent life that I enjoyed. I think I’m a person who does need structure. And they were a lovely bubble, a lovely religious bubble with lots of kind people. Then when I was leaving, as Harvey Norman would say, ‘When you’re gone, you are gone.’ Pack up your bag. You’re going tomorrow… And when I left, I was a little lost.”

She came out as gay in 1991, shortly after she left the convent. “I dated a guy just to make sure.” Her family were very supportive. The first lesbian night she went to, she was accompanied by her sister Jane. Later, at a different lesbian event, her sister Mary said, “I just love it here. I feel so tall.”

She started attending a lesbian night upstairs in the Trinity pub run by her friend Patricia Carey. “It was just incredible because it was my coming out, and I was seeing this room full of women and lesbians and it was like, ‘I’ve arrived.’ I just felt so happy. You knew they were kind of undercover. And it was dark. And it was just groups of women huddled together and chatting. And there was Jackie the DJ, who I went out with for a few months. Jackie was cool. You would dance on the carpet on the end section of the pub and she’d play the slow set… You’d ask somebody up... I remember speaking to women who had just left their marriage or were still in a marriage. I think everyone loved it because it was a safe space... It was incredible.”

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Then she moved to Edinburgh, where the gay scene “was 20 years ahead… I was working in a gay cafe and loving every second of it. There’s just a fabulous scene and festival and you can have a gorgeous time, and I saw these older queer people in the gay cafe I worked in just doing what they were doing every year and I thought, ‘I need to get out of Edinburgh and do something.’ That’s when, at 26, I decided to apply for university. Because it wasn’t ever an option in Ireland.”

She suggests going out to the garden for a cigarette. “I don’t really smoke,” I lie.

“I don’t either,” she says. “I went to see a woman about my menopause. She was like something from a 1970s detective series. A load of questions. ‘Are you smoking?’” Nolan wiggles her hand to indicate “sort of”. “She said, ‘It’s okay, you’re just perismoking.’”

We both have a cigarette. We look out at the allotments that run along behind her garden and the grounds of St Patrick’s Athletic football team, which can be seen beyond them. Down below where we’re sitting, there’s a vegetable patch Nolan started that she has now “rewilded”.

She takes up the story again. She moved to London to pursue a music technology degree, after which she worked in a skateboarding store. She was working there when she saw that they were casting for the first season of Big Brother. “There’s a part of me that’s a little bit entertainy. I have this thing, ‘Look at me, don’t look at me. Look at me on my terms.’ I saw the documentary about the Dutch version [of Big Brother] and at the end it said, ‘If you’d like to apply for the UK version of this show, please apply.’ It was a ‘Why not?’ moment.”

She seemed very calm on Big Brother. “I did feel calm most of the time… Coming from a household with nine people living in a small house, and then convent life, I was okay with sharing a room with strangers. That didn’t faze me at all. I rarely got upset. I was even fine with the conflict around me, when people were getting really angry, seeing for the first time how English people deal with conflict. There’s a phrase you hear mainly from English people. ‘You disrespected me.’” She laughs. “It’s such a funny phrase.” Irish people, she says, are more inclined to wonder “Why aren’t you disrespecting me?”

Bake Off was fun. The structure of that show is just so lovely. It’s all so positive

There were few supports for the contestants afterwards. “When we left that night, there was a psychologist in a room, and because you’re on a high having had six glasses of champagne, and he’s going ‘Are you okay?’ You said, ‘I’m okay. Wheeee! Let’s get back to the party!’… I think the effect of being on a reality TV show unfolds over the years. For the 10 of us who are in it, I would say three thought it was great. I felt it was great and enjoyable. But immediately afterwards, I definitely went through a kind of depression, because of that spotlight being put on me and then it being completely taken away. For the majority of people in that first house, there were huge repercussions. No one could really go back to what they were doing. Everybody had had to do a massive shift in their life.”

She was suddenly very publicly gay. “I could feel the reaction to that. Whether that was people being happy, in a good way, that there was a visible queer person on television, or teenagers on the street [saying] ‘f**king lesbian’... It made me very aware that I was a lesbian. But I was okay with that.”

She started working as a presenter. She made a BBC series called Anna in Wonderland in which she went around the world meeting extremists. “One was this guy called John Abbott, who ran a fathers’ group in Australia but did the most horrendous bullying activities to the women… Then they sent me over to America to hang out with Pastor Phelps and the Westboro [Baptist] Church. These two men, when I was with them, one-to-one, were charming, but their goal in life was to go after extremely vulnerable people… To experience that first-hand in the early 2000s was really interesting – scared angry people can gather and form a group and build momentum… I was out of my depth… It was placing a lesbian in a situation where they knew there’d be clashes… I didn’t know well enough how to come back at them. I didn’t have enough information. I was just not smart enough and a little bit too laid-back.”

She’s very self-deprecating about her presenting skills. I thought she was a really likeable presenter. She has over the years worked on a vast array of shows, including Would You Believe?, Celebrities Go Wild, The Afternoon Show and The Great Irish Bake Off. “Not a lot of them worked for me,” she says. “Bake Off was fun. The structure of that show is just so lovely. It’s all so positive. It’s people trying their best to bake cake. That’s it… I was fine. Some presenters just have it. Dermot Bannon has it. When I’m working with Dermot, he will want to talk to people… As a producer said to me, ‘If they gave you a TV chat show it would be called Silence. And you would be there saying nothing and that person would just talk.’ Dermot lights up.”

Why did she decide to move behind the scenes? “The presenting thing was coming to an end,” she says. “I was weighing up lots of different options, ranging from ‘Will I become a massage therapist?’ to ‘Will I look into that music degree that I have?’ And then I went to a guy called Philip Kampff [who] was making Operation Transformation. I said to him, ‘I want to produce this show’… [RTÉ] weren’t keen on me, just because I hadn’t produced before. But he came back and said, okay, ‘So you’re going to do this and if you do well, you’ll do well. And if you don’t, you won’t be a producer again.’ He gave me a break.”

She loved it. She loved helping to tell people’s stories. “Behind camera, you can just take your time, you can make them feel at ease. They’re the ones who’re the main focus.”

You hear radio discussions of trans and non-binary issues and there isn’t one person from the trans or non-binary world there... It’s spilling into trans and homophobic attacks…

She eventually moved to Coco Television and now she’s their head of development. She has produced an array of programmes from Room to Improve to Generation Dating. “I love getting inside people’s houses, and getting people to tell their stories, playing around with formats… Irish people are much more open now to being on television than they used to be. When I started filming in America, you’d have to pay somebody not to be on television, but Irish people were so reluctant and shy.”

A few years ago, she was asked to join the board of NXF, which is the oldest LGBTQ+ organisation in the country. When, more recently, she was asked to be chairperson, she had to think about it for “a long time”. “I was looking at my life and going, I have a grand old life. I’m working and I’m healthy. My involvement with the queer community had kind of been on the periphery. I’ve always had this guilt that I wasn’t doing enough. Being a face, a broadcaster, I’d get phone call, ‘Would you turn up for such and such a photoshoot?’ Or ‘Would you be the spokesperson for this?’

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“I could kind of dip in and out, knowing full well I hadn’t done nearly enough… I felt I had benefited so much from the activists in the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s, 2000s, who had put their lives on the line literally, and who were so vocal and visible. I definitely wanted to do more to give back to the community.”

She was also increasingly conscious of a rise in anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric online and in the media. Much of this has been focused around trans identity and gender non-conformity. In the US, there has been a wave of laws outlawing trans healthcare, drag acts and LGBTQ+ education. Nolan believes that many of the anti-trans talking points recycle old homophobic tropes that paint a vulnerable and marginalised minority as predatory or misguided.

“Anytime there’s some sort of discussion on social media or in the media about trans issues, toilets will be brought up, people feeling spaces aren’t safe,” she says. “People used terms like ‘grooming’ or ‘paedophile’… When you look at the young trans and non-binary kids at the moment, you just want them not to read what’s on social media...

“You hear radio discussions of trans and non-binary issues and there isn’t one person from the trans or non-binary world there... It’s spilling into trans and homophobic attacks… There are so many trans kids and non-binary kids out there who are getting bullied, who are feeling scared, who are really, really vulnerable. By protecting our trans kids and non-binary kids, we’re protecting all kids.”

While I stress and worry about what’s happening with the far right, I just look at the young people in the LGBT community and think they’re brilliant

Libraries and school sex education programmes have also been targeted by far-right activists for providing information about LGBTQ+ issues. “When I was a young lesbian, there was no mention of LGBT people, never mind sex education,” says Nolan. “I knew that I was different from probably seven or eight onwards. If I had been given that opportunity to even discuss it, to be aware of it, for it to be mentioned, I think my school years would have just been so much more enjoyable. Talking about gender identity with children is not going to do any harm. Someone who isn’t trans isn’t going to become trans because they’re discussing trans people, non-binary people, LGBTQ+ people.”

NXF runs the publication Gay Community News (GCN) as well as the GALAs (the LGBTQ+ awards). Nolan and her colleagues want to explore ways to connect LGBTQ+ organisations and to find ways “to care for young activists and campaigners… to develop some sort of strategy or course or space for them, so that they can keep going into their 30s and 40s and 50s.”

She is hugely heartened by the bravery of young LGBTQ+ activists. “They are so inspiring. They are so strong. Did we ever think people would be constantly taking to the streets, activists and campaigners, marching and putting themselves out there? To see that today compared to 10 or 20 years ago, it’s kind of phenomenal. So while I stress and worry about what’s happening with the far right, I just look at the young people in the LGBT community and think they’re brilliant.”

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Is she personally worried about the future? “It is genuinely frightening. But I’m also optimistic about it. We’re such a…” She pauses and smiles. “It’s so funny saying ‘we’ but I love saying it, because I love being part of the community. There’s such resilience there. I love when older people in the community feed into these discussions because they’ve been there before, and they know that it’s possible to get through it… Being gay was illegal before 1993 and we got through that. We got through the marriage referendum. And we’ll get through this as well.”