It's been impossible to post links to those pieces because the paper is not really online, but some clips are here.
Today the Irish Echo printed an Irish Queers op-ed. Given the effort to silence Irish Queers and sanitize queer Irish history, we really appreciate it! Here is the original version, which includes a few bits of history that didn't make it into the Echo.
Maybe you remember: the early 1990s were a time of queer
political rising, much of which was centered in New York. I was growing up in
New York then but I didn’t know much about it. When ACT UP protested Cardinal
O’Connor’s campaign against condoms, I was in ninth grade about 40 blocks away,
oblivious. A year later the Irish Lesbian & Gay Organization marched in the
St. Patrick’s Day parade, unwelcomed by the parade committee but invited by a
breakaway AOH Division 7. ILGO, joined by Mayor David Dinkins, were assaulted
and taunted all along the parade route. I did hear about that. My grandmother
had given me a t-shirt and I’d been wearing it to shreds – it said Life’s
Too Short Not To Be Irish! On the back of
it, in pearlescent fabric paint, I lettered it “I.L.G.O.” It was just in
solidarity. Grown people tittering and panicking over the gays, and then bullying
them on the street! I was indignant. Our English teacher, Kathleen somebody,
raised her eyebrows high as I passed her in the hallway. That was the extent of
my participation in the New York queer explosion of those years.
I landed in Belfast in 1994. I’d dropped out of college and
needed to go somewhere. My family had roots in the North. By then I had come
out myself. ACT UP, ILGO, and the Lesbian Avengers – all home to queer Irish
émigrés who had worked in republican and pro-choice and feminist movements at
home in the 1980s – had been churning out the queer Zeitgeist. Although I
missed it in New York, I had finally caught it in college. Knowing nothing about
the Irish queer political currents that carried me, I arrived in Belfast a
queer activist.
When the term ended and I was leaving, again no one would
lend their name to the group. We brainstormed. We eureka’d: a telephone number
without a name was just as good, as long as someone could always answer it. A
telephone needed to be somewhere – we needed a space. We could do that. If we
disbanded now, no worries at all. We’d gather our resources and meet back up in
a year, and then we would make it happen.
I came home. Giuliani was mayor, Bratton was police
commissioner, and together they were attacking poor people, people of color,
people with AIDS, and any activists who protested. This particular time in
Ireland – on the heels of feminism, the frustrated abortion rights movement,
and the ongoing power of the Catholic church; and in the North, following the
Hunger Strikes and Save Ulster from Sodomy
– saw many politicized queers exiled to New York. Here they had formed Irish
Lesbian and Gay Organization, joined ACT UP, and cofounded the Lesbian
Avengers. ACT UP was at a fever pitch trying to build and protect public
supports for people with AIDS, and fight the biases used to justify letting
them die. The Lesbian Avengers were challenging the erasure of lesbians from
history and school curricula, with the slogan “I was a lesbian child.” ILGO had
decided it should march in the St. Patrick’s Day parade, the biggest
celebration in the world of Irishness and the Irish diaspora experience. All
three groups shared the logic that making queers invisible did violence both to
the past and literally, daily, to queers. The parade organizers, representing
the closed, church-bound Ireland from which they had come, could not bring
themselves to admit that Irish queers were real, much less a central part of
Irish life and history. The parade had become a flashpoint for struggles over
queerness, religion, policing, immigrant community politics, and the City’s
complicity in homophobia and violence. In truth, Irish politics and queer politics
had never been separate; only the connections obscured. Now the ties were laid
absolutely bare.
I went to an ILGO meeting early in 1995 to ask whether ILGO
could help fundraise for a queer space in Belfast. It’s a joke now, that
memory; fundraising was never going to happen, ILGO was not that kind of girl.
But I was drawn in. The meetings were more than planning sessions. They were
multigenerational in-gatherings of queers that taught politics. They broke with
good manners in the face of crisis that was killing queers. They rejected the
idea that dialogue and demands always had to be reasonable, and that peaceful
activism couldn’t express rage toward people who were responsible for terrible
things. They taught collectivism, building ideas and plans together, sharing
responsibility, and passing along skills, difficult as the meetings often were.
They taught that it was important and possible to do things without funding –
we never stopped hearing that the Lesbian Herstory Archives bought its Brooklyn
townhouse with $1 and $5 donations mailed in from lesbians everywhere – and
that queer groups especially always had people with an incredible range of
experience, skills and access. Most critically, they taught that it was
possible to do things that sounded impossible: add queer history and sex ed to
the NYC public school curriculum, or force the US government to invent better
medications for HIV. (No one dreamed it would be easier to make the US
government deal with AIDS and homophobia than to get an Irish gay group into
the Irish parade.) Later, when I’d left that space, the exact same things felt
less possible; it had been a communal effect.
In 1997 I was in Belfast again, as promised. I’d raised no
money, but had bought boxes and boxes of used and remaindered books from queer
shops. I started meeting my old friends for coffee, and they found other people
to join in. We deliberately talked about the community space project as if it
were already happening. (That was advice from Dermot Burke, who had opened An
Béal Bocht in Riverdale a few years before. It was fantastic advice.) We made a
primitive website announcing the project, and put up signs. More and more
Belfast queers came to planning meetings. There were more musicians and more
waitresses, social workers and civil servants, an East Belfast taxi driver, a
witch, a student union president, a disproportionate number of Jews, students,
more revolutionaries, a farmer, and many, many queers without an occupation.
Before long the whole thing was real.
Queer Space opened in January 1998, in a space rented with a
small loan, at the bottom of Botanic Avenue. On a crowded pre-opening workday
we painted it purple, and someone drew a mural in the style of Keith Haring. We
set up a coffee pot and a donation basket. Two women from the Shankill took on
the task of keeping both full. Emma Donaghue sent a set of her novels to Queer
Space that week, and we unboxed them along with the tattered books I’d brought
over. We hung a bit of handkerchief art painted by a queer republican prisoner.
Two West Belfast women delivered a huge amount of comfortable furniture. We
were home.
Queer Space was intensively modeled on the direct action
collectivism of the New York groups. To publicize the opening, we sent a press
release; the reporter called Ian Paisley for comment, and the article generated
a short controversy. In that way our publicity was taken care of and visitors
streamed in. We made a mission statement and rules by consensus, and settled on
the name Queer Space after hours of
debate in a packed room. We took up direct action, wheatpasting Belfast with
signs about lesbians, protesting Newt Gingrich’s visit to North Belfast,
convening queers and Asian immigrants who had started to come under attack, and
truly I can’t remember what else. The coffee box paid the rent, and it paid
back the start-up loan less than a year after Queer Space opened its doors.
When Matthew Shepard was killed and queers in New York City
were standing off against riot police on horseback, I came home. Some of the
other Queer Space folk moved on to more official politics, especially when the
Good Friday Agreement made queers a protected minority. Queer Space carries on
these 16 years later. I would claim that it changed everything in Belfast; that
it opened up possibilities at a time when people were ready for a change, and
other stars were aligning too. Queer Space still turns out Belfast queers for
antiracist action, most recently in support of Anna Lo, the Stormont MLA hounded
out of office by anti-Chinese racism. Queer Space always comes out for Irish
Queers on St. Patrick’s Day parade protests, although Belfast queers are
incredulous that we’re still not allowed to march. Funny how the tables have
turned.
The story of Irish queers and the parade is really the story
of the transit between Ireland and New York of ideas about liberation. It’s the
story of how Irishness hasn’t been only Catholic or white or male, nor especially polite, nor limited to venues marked
“Irish.” These are true and important stories whether anyone likes them or not.
When the parade exclusion comes up, we’re often told we’re not really part of
the Irish community, as if it’s that – rather than homophobia – that keeps us
out. It’s a pitiful attempt at diversion, but there’s something in it. After
two decades of being shoved out of Irish history by the New York parade, why at
all would Irish LGBTQ folk stick around the official Irish American community?
We have not. Our communities don’t do dinner dances, nor play golf, nor elect Irish
American candidates to office. Just as queers have made their own spaces
forever, we make our own worlds here. They are Irish worlds in spite of
begrudgers’ wishes to the contrary. The transit between queer Ireland and queer
New York is as vibrant as ever. Look for it.
