DAVID NORRISreveals in this extract from his autobiography how he came to fight for gay rights in a hostile society
I WAS born a criminal. From the moment of my arrival on this planet, my essential nature defined me as such. There was simply nothing I could do about it, since homosexuality is a natural but minority variation of the sexual instinct.
As the American author Wainwright Churchill points out, homosexual behaviour occurs “throughout the mammalian order, occurring in frequency and complexity as one ascends the phylogenetic scale”.
So if such activity is fully natural for a large minority of life on this planet, I sensed that there had to be some reason for the antagonism leading to historic human taboos. The source for this scapegoating of 10 per cent of the population, I discovered, was politico-religious, as it remains.
... In Ireland it was an austere era, and I was an outsider in every way. I was Anglican in a deeply Roman Catholic society; I was half English in a narrow and negatively republican state defined more by hatred of England than love of Ireland; and I was homosexual when you could be jailed for being so.
I knew I was an outlaw, and that my life wasn’t real, which was the reason I didn’t get into politics until much later. Politics was for the real people, and real people went to dances in cricket and tennis clubs, got married, bought houses and ran for election while their wives sat on the platform beside them.
Even as a child I was confronted with this unreality. All Irish schoolbooks concerned Daddy being at work and Mammy, as provided for in Mr de Valera’s Constitution, in the kitchen; and in fiction, the lucky hero and heroine overcame all obstacles and ended happily at the altar. I had no external reality, it was all internal.
Gay people were non-people who lived in a concealed and hidden world. We had to stay in the shadows, keeping our presence under the radar, because if we became real we would be noticed, and that was dangerous. As a result my entire youth was stolen from me.
Towards the end of my schooldays I started to explore a little.
I had a kindred spirit in school, and we occasionally visited a city centre bar called Bartley Dunne’s which was a notorious haunt of the homosexual demi-monde.
It was an Aladdin’s cave to me, its wicker-clad Chianti bottles stiff with dribbled candlewax, tea chests covered in red and white chequered cloths, heavy scarlet velvet drapes and an immense collection of multicoloured liqueurs glinting away in their bottles. The place was peopled by lots of theatrical old queens, with the barmen clad in bum-freezer uniforms. While not being gay themselves, as far as I know, the Dunne brothers were quite theatrical in their own way.
Barry would hand out little cards bearing the legend “Bartley Dunne’s, reminiscent of a left bank Paris bistro, haunt of aristocrats, poets and artists”.
Whatever about that, Saturday night certainly resembled an amateur opera in full swing. There only ever seemed to be two records played over the sound system: Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien by Edith Piaf, and Ray Charles’s Take These Chains From My Heart.
My friend and I were just flirting with the notion of being gay, and enjoyed the camp theatricality of this gloomy bar. We never really discussed our sexuality with any great seriousness but we both fancied the same rugby players and would spend our Friday nights traipsing across from Bartley Dunne’s to Davy Byrne’s and The Bailey in search of a glimpse of our latest out-half.
There were, of course, hundreds of thousands of other gay people in Ireland at the time, and if you accept Kinsey’s reckoning of 10 per cent, then there were perhaps close to half a million. They were almost all in hiding, and as they didn’t have blue ears or any other indicator, you wouldn’t know one if you met him or her on the bus.
There was no doubt about the man I met in the public lavatory in Capel Street on the way home from a social event, however. He flashed at me, and winked. I was in my early twenties and it was the first time I was confronted with the fact that I was not the only real gay in Ireland, and I was delighted. I was less delighted when he asked was it my first time, because when I said yes he dumped me. I call it my George Michael moment!
There was a hugely active sexual life in Dublin in the 1950s and 60s, but it was concentrated in public lavatories, because that was where society corralled gay people. I find it hard to imagine that nobody seemed to think it extraordinary to have a queue as long as you might see outside a cinema along Burgh Quay, and at the corner of Capel Street Bridge and Ormond Quay, every weekend evening. Every so often the guards would go in and fish an unfortunate pair out, but the general populace averted their gaze. Irish people just couldn’t be gay, so what they could see with their own eyes could not actually be happening.
But there were intelligent people who had to have known that by making sexual relations between men a criminal offence they were just driving it underground. I’ve come across judges, doctors and clergy of all the churches who were queuing at the lavatories of Dublin in the 1950s and 60s.
No one could afford to sustain a relationship, because if you were visible you were vulnerable, and the full force of public odium, police, courts, disgrace and joblessness would become a horrible reality. All society did was to deprive gay people of dignity and drive them into these situations.
Most of my age cohort was psychologically damaged by the experience. Some became really neurotic and self-hating and, a bit like J. Edgar Hoover, they sometimes projected their hatred on to other gay people. But, astonishingly, amid all that hatred and oppression, love did survive. I am proud to know gay couples who met at this time, some of whom have stayed together for up to 55 years, a record that would put a lot of modern marriages to shame. It was a shocking reflection on the Ireland of those days that a hurried encounter in a public lavatory was all that was offered to gay men.
I was picked up on one occasion by a kerb crawler, a handsome young man who wore sunglasses even though it was evening, driving a fast car. He said he was an airline pilot, and took me to a hotel where I was effectively raped. I was so innocent that I wasn’t sure if I could refuse or even protest: after all, he had paid for the room. It was horrible, but that is what that society did to people like me.
The alternatives I was presented with were to be completely celibate, to rely on finding people for sex in lavatories, or to engage with strangers who might be physically violent. That was an appalling set of options, so when I read Plato’s Symposium I realised there was a more civilised approach, albeit in a time and place far from Mr de Valera’s Ireland.
I felt very strongly that gay people were entitled to decent treatment like any ordinary citizen, not to be bought off by official Ireland occasionally turning a blind eye to the farmyard sexual activity that went on in public lavatories and parks.
I had learnt that being gay could be dangerous, so I internalised it for a time and it became a source of great difficulty.
...I went to the founding meeting of the Southern Ireland Civil Rights Association in Regent House in Trinity in 1970.
The group, headed up by Fr Enda McDonagh and Kader Asmal, had been formed to show solidarity with the beleaguered Catholic population of Northern Ireland, who were suffering discrimination in employment and housing. I listened as speaker after speaker castigated the Stormont Government for its repression of Roman Catholics in contrast with the favourable treatment of Protestant minorities in the Republic. The atmosphere was positively radioactive with self-congratulation.
It was a mood I felt an inner compulsion to rupture.
I hadn’t planned to speak, but the pent-up electricity of repression that I had carried discharged itself in a flash of anger.
I rose to my feet and said that while I accepted what they said about the Republic being a safe place for Protestants, nevertheless as an Anglican I also knew that this was as much a matter of self-interest as altruism.
We were as a community numerically small, financially powerful and politically almost masochistically mealy-mouthed in our toadying to the pseudo-Gaelic establishment. The smiles of sophisticated amusement at my remarks melted away when I continued by pointing out the hypocrisy of the speakers in not referring at all to the presence of a genuinely harassed minority to which I also belonged.
The initial response from the platform was rather patronising, and I vividly recall being told that the law that criminalised homosexuals was a dead letter and that if I minded my Ps and Qs and kept quiet, little harm was likely to come to me.
However, I argued the point and one or two people, including that splendid champion of human rights the late Bridget Wilkinson, stood up and said, “No, this is an injustice”. I am glad to say that the Southern Ireland Civil Rights Association thus became the first Irish organisation to include homosexual law reform on its agenda, although it was never a campaigning matter for the group.
... The Irish Gay Rights Movement (IGRM) was publicly launched at a meeting in the South County Hotel in June 1974, when 30 people turned up and we formed a steering committee.
I helped to give the organisation its name, and argued strongly that we needed to make a bold statement by including the words “Irish” and “gay”, which at the time was a shocking contradiction as society had decreed that you couldn’t be both.
... Most people at that time refused to believe that Roger Casement or Padraig Pearse could be homosexual.
Casement was a hero to me for his absolute commitment to human rights in Congo and again in South America for his work with the Putamayo Indians. The famous Black Diaries were no forgeries, and of course he was wildly promiscuous, but how could he be anything else?
Society’s strictures ensured he couldn’t set up home with his true love, a bank official from Belfast who later married and lived on into the 1950s in retirement in Greystones, Co Wicklow. There is no record of his attitude to Casement’s life, execution or the subsequent debate about the diaries.
Other heroes of Irish nationalism were also less than 100 per cent heterosexual ... An elderly man came in one night who had been visiting Sinn Féin’s headquarters three doors down.
He had fought in the Civil War more than half a century before and claimed to have been one of Michael Collins’s principal boyfriends. I mentioned this to a well-known popular historian of the period, who confirmed that this was generally known in certain republican circles, who were deeply uncomfortable about it. Well, if Michael Collins was gay, or bisexual – so what? Who cares? It shouldn’t matter as it is just a neutral fact. It certainly isn’t a slur, and the vast majority of the Irish people no longer regard it as such.
Anyway, this all lessened the surprise when it emerged recently that another absurdly macho figure, the leader of the Blueshirts, General Eoin O’Duffy, had been embroiled in a long affair with the great Irish actor Micheál Mac Liammóir.
The Irish nation had its first glimpse of a real live homosexual in July 1974, when I made an appearance on the summer magazine show Last House, presented by Áine O’Connor and John McColgan, which went out at 10.20pm. It was suggested that I do the interview in shadow, with my back to the camera and my voice disguised. I told them that if they did that they could do it without me, because the whole point I wanted to make was that I was a perfectly normal, ordinary person – and if I appeared on the air looking furtive then it would destroy the whole message.
... I had never been in a TV studio before, and excitedly gazed around at the cameras and the make-up artists. It was a very simple interview, and Áine started it by asking me were homosexuals “sick people”? So I said, “Well, I had a cold last week the same as everyone else, but I don’t feel otherwise sick at all.”
One startled viewer complained to RTÉ that as some American group of psychiatrists had held it to be a disease, and it was still against the law in Ireland, I wasn’t entitled to say that I wasn’t sick, as I could be held to be thereby inciting criminal activity.
The Broadcasting Complaints Commission bizarrely upheld his complaint.
Áine asked in what way Ireland had failed to cherish me. I replied: “I was brought up in ignorance of the facts of my true nature. The word ‘homosexual’ was barely known in Ireland, and not breathed in polite society, and I was allowed to grow up through my adolescence believing that I was possibly the only homosexual in Ireland, not knowing there were possibly thousands of other similarly isolated people here. I thought there might have been one or two in England because I had heard about the curious goings-on over there, but I did not realise that I was part of a very large but isolated community in this country.”
It was the second most watched programme on RTÉ that week – behind the detective series Kojak – and in its way was a significant event.
Copyright David Norris 2012. Extracted from A Kick Against The Pricks, published by Transworld Ireland