The haze of a velvet honeymoon
The catharsis of an ecstatic referendum result settled into something uneasy.
Written in May 2020, on the fifth anniversary of the Marriage Equality referendum.
At the beginning of the century Norra Djurgårdsstaden, an old port area in Stockholm, was transformed into a green district. The skeleton of a decommissioned coal silo now stands beside dreamlike apartment buildings, on car-protected walkways that weave and extend to the wooded slopes of the National City Park.
Colleagues and I stayed there in 2016 while attending a conference. We drank beers in an apartment filled with sunlight and fresh forest air. Far from home, we talked about Irish culture and politics. It wasn’t long after the Marriage Equality Referendum had amended the constitution to permit marriage without distinction to people’s sex.
Most straight people I know speak of the referendum as an overwhelmingly positive watershed. Not only were LGBTQ people granted something that was wrongfully denied to them, there was something symbolic in bringing them in from the cold, while expelling the embarrassing remnants of Irish theocracy to the past. My own feelings weren’t easy to define. We drank beers, and one colleague, who is straight and in favour of marriage equality, said one of the most profound things I’ve heard about the vote. She articulated feelings I shared, but, as a canvasser involved in the campaign, sometimes felt guilty expressing. “That was a bit fucked up what we did,” she said.
For many, to be a proud gay man in the mid 2010s was to support marriage equality. I moved to Dublin in 2012, one year after I came out. The city was trying to regain its footing after the Recession, and bars and shops were often empty. But the silence wasn’t deafening. Late at night, South Great George’s Street hummed with synths, the glittery electronics of Calvin Harris and Flo Rida vibrated from nightclubs. Donna Summer kept the disco ball turning on Copper Alley.
There was also a glimmer of activism in the nightlife. Colm Tóibín once said that gay people in Ireland have no history, no wrongdoings of the past written down in popular ballads. “The discovery must be done by each individual, as though alone, as part of the road to freedom,” he said. In smoking areas, between lighting cigarettes and making flirty conversation, I listened to stories I never heard before. The most saddening was the homophobic murder of Declan Flynn in 1982, whose attackers were given suspended prison sentences, despite a jury verdict of manslaughter.
Same-sex marriage was being discussed in a constitutional convention, but there was lingering bitterness over the recent Civil Partnership Bill, which had caused a rift that many felt pointless and detracting. The lobby group GLEN pushed for civil unions, while the Marriage Equality group — formed out of Katherine Zappone and Ann Louise Gilligan’s court case for recognition of their Canadian marriage — called for fuller rights.
To a wider public, the main survey of allies and enemies was honed by Rory O’Neill, the drag queen known as Panti, when he named the Iona Institute, a Catholic pressure group, as homophobic on a TV chat show. Threatened with legal action over the interview, Panti was invited to participate in the Abbey Theatre’s post-show oration “Noble Call” series, and performed a stirring testimony of gay shame, a snapshot of homophobia in modern Ireland. Footage of Panti’s performance was widely acclaimed but also powerfully galvanic. Many realised that the system was the same as it ever was, run by bullies and fanatics, and it wasn’t just the LGBTQ community who wanted them out.
Regarded with suspicion by the establishment for so long, there was something exposing but liberating about seeing our emotions in the public light. Around then, the theatre director Wayne Jordan staged a touching, modern production of Twelfth Night, Shakespeare’s comedy about shipwrecked twins, in Dublin. It was sensitive to the fragility of the LGBTQ lovers’ affections, the cruel ruse of the play’s tormenters. Set designer Ciarán O’Melia placed the comedy’s accepting subtitle What You Will on the back wall of the stage, but it had become punctuated by an upside-down question mark. Looking back, the whole strange period seemed to take place under that question mark.
Ireland would be the first country to pass or deny marriage equality by referendum, or popular vote. During the lead-up it was as if the needle spun off the barometer. Most people I knew were feeling the pressure. The opposing campaign had opened a window for any diehard to peep in and express their contempt for LGBTQ people, whether on the radio or on your Facebook page. Often comforted by being able to straight-act through most situations, I found myself knocking on doors during canvasses, feeling exposed. But the campaign had a reassuring sophistication. Marriage Equality directors Gráinne Healy and Brian Sheehan led with a clarity of purpose, informed by the good counsel of political adviser Noel Whelan. Advocates such as Una Mullally and Colm O’Gorman skilfully confronted opposing arguments in media debates. I canvassed with doctors, lawyers, accountants, communications specialists. Many had waited a long time for this moment, and had shown up prepared.
In a way, the most anxious times where when you tried to relax around people who didn’t share your grim concern about the referendum being lost. But it wasn’t any easier for some straight people to understand my complex history with rejection than it was for me to try articulate it — the refusal I had felt from peers at an early age, my nurtured distrust of my natural instincts. I had gained a pride since coming out, but fears of rejection now crept back into my life, by the sweeping hand of the entire nation. I wasn’t sure how I’d survive rejection on a scale like that. It seemed like an airdrop of napalm that would engulf me in flames.
On the day of the referendum count I was in PantiBar, in the company of good friends. We watched counties around the country vote in favour of the amendment, and I felt immense compassion, the surprise of discovering allies hiding in plain sight. Across the Liffey, people waited in Dublin Castle for the result, including the politician Leo Varadkar, who recently came out as gay during a radio interview. His name was chanted by supporters as he arrived.
When the result was declared, it set off a celebration that extended across the city centre. Roars of elation intensified into something deeper, the ecstasy of a kind of liberation. People danced uncontrollably in the street, wrapped in rainbow flags. Every vehicle in the metropolis seemed to form one large choir, serenading people as they passed. The revelry of the afternoon settled into a warm May night, and friends were reunited under an evening air of soothing, exhausted gratification.
Something had shifted. The LGBTQ community, through its messages of love and acceptance, had confronted the country’s guilty secrets and won. A portal opened onto somewhere clerical extremists couldn’t follow — the dream of a world-class nation for everyone, garlanded by wedding flowers.
***
One winter night in 2017, I attended a party in a friend’s house in Galway. Late in the evening, I drank wine beside an open fire and talked to a straight couple. They both came from upper-class families and had well-paid jobs. He was funny and athletic, she was intelligent and stunning.
“Wasn’t the vote something special,” he said, cheery with alcohol. Truthfully, I often found it difficult to string a sentence together about the referendum. It had been a cathartic victory, and a testament to people who had worked tirelessly for years. It felt like the closest thing to an apology from the nation. But that idea of validation sat uneasy with me. The honeymoon period had a strange haze that wasn’t easy to see through. Even some appreciation for the succeeding Gender Recognition Act (a more important development in my mind) seemed to get lost.
I told him I was relieved by the referendum result, but it didn’t fix everything. I still heard stories about co-workers being afraid to come out, young people being kicked out of their houses. The referendum had recklessly put the rights of a vulnerable minority up for grabs, and had set up people for a potential mental health crisis. It wasn’t an act of good will, a political decision that caused a nation to peer inside its heart. It was the cowardice of an establishment that should have found another way to make it happen.
As I made my case, the couple smiled vacantly at me. It was as if they recognised nothing in what I said. They may have been spared that turmoil all their lives. And now, marriage equality as a neat fix was too attractive an idea to pass up, its flash of modernity too intoxicating. Equality had dressed up the sentence “I am Irish” in fetching colours. I found a smugness to the way he raised his glass to me, as if saying “Don’t worry. We did it”. The velvet underground had apparently become a velvet nation.
In some analysis after the referendum, commentators talked about the radical act of coming out. It is likely that Ireland passed marriage equality because LGBTQ people had made themselves seen in every corner of the country, to their families and neighbours, and it’s difficult to hate who you know. They expelled toxic myths in permitted spaces that had been left unchecked. But there didn’t seem to be any serious conversation on why those town lands and country roads were corrosive spaces in the first place.
It is something of a truism in psychoanalysis that one member of a family can carry the unconscious secrets of the whole family. For who does the LGBTQ community, and their uplifting victory, carry the can? By exorcising the religious ghosts of the past, the ushering in of marriage equality feels like the embodiment of a new Irish dream, an advanced country where Leo Varadkar can even become Taoiseach. That’s a sheeny, attractive place for both straight and LGBTQ people to live. But the dark side of that dream is that the demons haven’t gone away.
My life became less giddy after those early years in Dublin, but no less meaningful. I grappled with the pain and rewards of adult relationships, and uncovered my own bad habits. I had an aversion to confronting issues head-on, and a preference for silence. I fought off suggestions of going to therapy. After spending my youth learning to live my life in two parts, in straight reality and gay fantasy, I had become able to split off brutal things I did — the freeze-outs and betrayals — and pretend they were acceptable.
At the same time, I detached myself from important aspects of LGBTQ culture. I lacked interest in ACT UP, the grassroots organisation working hard to improve the lives of people with HIV and AIDS, and their campaign for the introduction of the prophylaxis PrEP. The Dublin Pride parade swelled depressingly with corporations, their showy floats dwarfing the community groups who had long been on the ground. When someone pointed out that a holiday I planned would make me miss Pride, I said: “Good”.
In The Velvet Rage, an illuminating book about gay male shame, psychologist Alan Downs says that gay men’s lives are sometimes shaped by the avoidance of shame rather than direct engagement with it. “Our lives become solely focused on avoiding shame. Almost everything becomes an avoidance strategy,” he said. I had fooled myself in thinking that by dancing in clubs, having sex, going on political canvasses and having a relationship, I had defeated my shame. But then again, there was fuel to the idea that there wasn’t any more gay shame in the dreamy Ireland after marriage equality.
On May 22nd, 2015 the LGBTQ community in Ireland were granted rights that were wrongfully denied to them, but only on the basis that the country’s straight population decided to validate them. There was no wound fully healed, no new rewrite of history. Nothing true about what the referendum means, and what impact it will have, has been written. Because we’re still on the honeymoon.
In the meantime, you can take notice whenever an LGBTQ person admits that their shame is real. You can be aware of the illusions created, and see through them. Allowing yourself to feel your pain, and take control of how it shapes your life, is one of the most transformative social actions in this country right now.
In 2018 I returned to Stockholm to write a book manuscript. I visited Norra Djurgårdsstaden, and I sat in the grass on a warm summer evening. Children, women and men stepped outside their homes and into the serene woods on their doorstep.
Norra Djurgårdsstaden is a brownfield development, meaning that its soil had been contaminated during the time it was an industrial area. Remedial methods were needed to redevelop it, such as excavating soil and groundwater, and volatilising dangerous chemicals. The pollutants had to be removed before new building could begin.