A Matter of Pride
8 minute read
It’s Pride Month here in NYC just like it is in Ireland and two weeks ago I was part of a panel talking about what it means to be Irish and Queer. If, as a teenager, I’d seen this sneak preview into my future I would have been horrified. I would have thought something in my life had gone disastrously wrong.
Queer is a tricky word for me to fully reclaim because I heard it a lot growing up. I don’t remember the first time I heard it but I do remember the first time I heard another word: “lezzer.”
“Youse two are lezzers.”
The moment for me will be forever captured in time. I am nine or ten, playing a game on our road, hiding behind a hedge with my friend when an older boy runs into the garden and yells this at us for no reason. We both erupt simultaneously into cries of “No, we’re not!” that cause our hiding place to be rumbled. I don’t know what “lezzer” means and I bet my friend doesn’t either, but I already know I don’t want to be one. The game, by the way, was Home Truth and the irony of this only hits me years later.
On the Queer and Irish panel when I was asked about growing up in Ireland in the 1980s, I said no one was gay in Ireland back then. That got a bit of a laugh because clearly it wasn’t true but it felt true to me. Teenage girls liked boys. You met them at discos or the DART station or every now and then in unruly gatherings up Gorse Hill that these days would shake Dr Tony Holohan to his core. Our obsession with boys was mirrored in the books and magazines we read, the films and TV shows we watched. Lesbians, on the other hand, were people occasionally on The Late, Late Show who were either women’s rights activists or nuns. They had biker jackets and shaved heads. Their lives had nothing to do with me.
Until that Brookside episode. If you’re around my age, you might remember the romantic storyline between the two young female characters, but chances are that unless you’re gay too you probably don’t remember it in the same vivid detail I do. It was January and I was taking down the Christmas tree, when suddenly, right there in the television in the corner of our sitting room, there were two girls kissing. Not a peck - properly snogging. I stood there transfixed. I was 19 and I didn’t know how to feel.
Looking back, that was a moment that could have prompted some searching questions, but honestly, I wasn’t interested in asking myself those questions because I was too terrified of the answers. It was a red flag that I painted a bright shade of green and sailed on by.
Not too long after that, a girl in college came out, a girl who I’d been in school with. Everyone was aghast and it was the topic of conversation for weeks. There was analysis, speculation, it was clear no-one approved.
I’d like to say I was at the sidelines of these conversations - urging people to mind their own business - but that’s not how it was, I had to talk like everyone else, be like everyone else not to be suspected myself. It wasn’t until I ran into the girl in question at a local nightclub that I found myself talking to her one on one about it all and - several bottles of Budweiser in - mustering up the courage to ask what it was like to kiss a girl. She told me it was nice, softer than kissing a boy. But when she gently asked if I thought I might be a lesbian too, I denied it hotly. A few months later, I got into a relationship with a boy that would last over a decade.
In hindsight, I can’t help but wonder if part of my motivation was to avoid any more of these pesky red flags, to close down the unasked questions in my head entirely. I’m not saying I didn’t like this boy - I loved him - and I wanted to follow the rules, I was, after all a good rule follower. And besides, one episode of Brookside and one interesting conversation wasn’t enough to counterbalance the millions of ways I was told in no uncertain terms that there was only one way to be. People today don’t remember using the word queer with a lowercase q or my old favourite, lezzer, but these words were used with abandon back then - in “jest” of course. I know this because I used them myself and a little part of me shrivelled up inside every time I did.
Eventually, the relationship with the boy ended and not in any big revelation on my part but in the quiet, sad way that often long-term relationships do. I would have married him – I wanted to, I’m a rule follower, remember?– but the ending I had dreaded became the beginning of something I hadn’t expected: getting to know myself.
I know now, that this is called individuating but at the time all I knew was that living alone for the first time I asked myself questions like whether I really liked the CDs on my shelves, or, cooking for one, what was it I actually wanted to eat for dinner? Small questions led to bigger ones, questions I enlisted the help of a therapist to answer. I took up yoga, I committed myself to my writing in a deeper, more disciplined way. Eventually, the questions led to one I’d been afraid to look at before, one I hadn’t been willing to see: the question of my sexuality.
By then my world had expanded to include lesbians and gay men and when my therapist asked me why it was okay for them to live their lives and not me, we both sat in the silence of her boxy white room, waiting for my answer that never came. All day her question stayed with me, and that night too. It was there in my head the next morning when I got up to do the run I’d grown to love in Sandycove, even my music couldn’t drown it out. I found myself stopping before the end, clambering down over rocks to be close to the water. And sitting there, I saw my teenage self, so afraid of everything - of being shamed, of losing her friends, of simply being different. I could understand and I could forgive her – of course, I could forgive her – but I knew I had to make a different choice.
Once I saw the truth – my truth – I wasn’t able to unsee it and more importantly, I didn’t want to. As I’ve experienced so often in my life since then, once I was ready to take a step forward to meet the universe, the universe stepped forward to meet me right back. A friend I’d known for years came out too and her I saw happy, in love, accepted by our friends. After a year of rejections, my first novel was picked up by a publisher who offered me a two-book deal. The following month, I took some time off to work on novel number two in New York, where, 3,000 miles from home, I went to a lesbian book club. Afterwards, a cute girl with a great smile asked me for my number. It turned out she was a late bloomer too, it turned out we could bloom together.
The rest is history, or herstory in this case. Love, it turns out, is stronger than fear; love can give you the courage to do things you never thought you could do.
Love brought me to New York and empowered me to write about my story in newspapers and magazines and sit on a panel with the word Queer in the title. Love inspired me to write a novel with a teenage lesbian heroine that brings me into email exchanges with young LGBT readers tragically living the experience I did 30 years ago.
If I had to go back and do it over, I’d do the same thing again, I wouldn’t want my life any other way than how it is today. But if time travel were a real thing and I could shuttle back to show my teenage self a tiny sneak-peek, just one moment of our future, I know which one I’d show her: my wedding day, arm in arm with my wife-to-be, walking down the aisle to our chosen song from the Rent soundtrack, Seasons of Love.
I’d show her all the people who’d travelled to Long Island from Ireland and the UK and Florida, the people who were standing, clapping, taking photos - the people who were crying - and I’d let her feel it, the love that emanated from them all, so strong it felt almost like a physical thing, carrying us along.
And I might cheat and tell her one other thing, that in 2021, I have a face mask that says Love is Love on it with a rainbow on it and that whenever I wear it, I get a compliment. She’d probably ask why I’m wearing a facemask but I’d skim over that to the most important part, which is that if someone were ever to point at me while I’m wearing that mask and ask if I was a lezzer, I would smile and I’d stand tall and I’d say:
“Yes, yes, I am.”
Yvonne Cassidy, June 2021
what do you think? Tell us in the comments below…
join the conversation
share and comment below, we’d love to hear your thoughts…