Product Description

This collection of gay stories covers whole lives as well as snapshots, positive and negative experiences. They deal with issues surrounding coming out to yourself and to others and also choosing to remain in the closet. Stories of growing up and family feature, as do experiences of relationships and spiritual issues. For many gay people there are complications surrounding partnerships and the law and the Revenue; difficulties relating to church. Other concerns include illness and bereavement. Such themes run through this anthology. This collection is published for gay people and their loved ones, in the hope that in reading about the experiences of others, they will recognise their own tales. The spirit of the collection is one of affirmation and hope, of encouragement and welcome. 'He said to me: "If you were free to choose right now would you choose to be a gay or straight man?" I waited for the response to arise from deep within me. I did not know what it would be. And then the simple answer came and I replied: "I would choose to be gay because that is who I am." That was an epiphany for me.' - Anonymous. Royalties form this book will be donated to the Irish Queer Archive and the Irish Cancer Society.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #537380 in Books
• Published on: 2003-11-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 308 pages

About the Author
Glen O'Brien is a pseudonym. His first book Praying from the Margins: Gospel Reflections of a Gay Man (Columba) was published in 2001.

Excerpted from Coming Out: A Gay Anthology by Glen O'Brien. Copyright © 2003. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Foreword by Colm Tóibín

It was 1998 in Sydney, Australia. The entire city was getting ready for the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. There were going to be parades and parties and poetry readings. The big parade, which more than a million people would see, is the largest dollar earner for Australian tourism, with many men and women flying in from the west coast of the United States, and from Europe, to take part in the proceedings. It is where love stories begin. The dressing up is beyond belief.

Everybody in the city has their own story about the best float in the parade they’ve ever seen. A friend describes a float the previous year with twenty gay men dressed up as the Australian politician Clover Moore, complete with her customary make-up and big hair. Everyone laughed and applauded as their float passed; some of the imitations were pure perfection. ‘And then, can you imagine,’ my friend said, ‘the next float actually had Clover Moore herself. It was really her, waving and joining in the joke. People couldn’t believe their eyes. It was all so good-humoured. Next year maybe we’ll have John Howard.’
This year, however, there was controversy. The gay and lesbian police were going to march in their uniforms as usual, dressed proudly as themselves. But some people thought that they should not be paid for this, that it should be done in their own time. I followed the arguments as they unfolded on radio and television and in the newspapers. It was all about money, public spending. Since there were cutbacks in other areas, people asked, why should taxpayers’ money be spent on this? No one once mentioned that the gay and lesbian police should stay at home, however, or not display themselves so openly in their uniforms. No one once said that they should be ashamed of themselves or be transferred to some remote outback. Sydney seemed at that time, unless you were a public servant looking for a raise in salary, a most liberal and wonderful place.
It was not always thus. 1998 was the twenty-first anniversary of the gay and lesbian parade and a useful time to remember what happened in Sydney when a few brave men and women took to the streets to celebrate their sexuality for the first time in 1977. They were not only arrested and held overnight in prison cells, but they had their names published in the newspapers and some of them lost their jobs. The authorities, in their efforts to stamp out sexual freedom, thus managed instead to create a very angry and determined group of lesbian and gay activists who worked each year to make the parade bigger and better and louder and more fun.
Slowly, gradually, but certainly, then, the annual parade became part of the civic life of Sydney and then its main carnival. Parents who lived in the suburbs brought their children into the centre to see it. Families who did not have a gay son or daughter, aunt or uncle, I was assured in the heady days and the slightly drunken nights before the parade began, longed for one; mothers dragged their sons and daughters by the scruff of the neck out of the closet and onto the floats. Or so it was said.
Over one decade urban Australia became liberal and easy-going about homosexuality. The change was more sudden and far-reaching than the change in Ireland, which was more subtle. But it was only when you spoke to people away from the heady hedonism and hilarity of the Mardi Gras that you realised that while every country fought prejudice and changed laws under different pressures and for different reasons, what happened to all of us as gay men and women has been similar. What happened to us when we were alone and vulnerable — the fears and the uncertainties — remained the same the world over.
This book is a testament then to the lives of gay women and men in Ireland over the past few decades. It is a testament, some of the time, that contains fear and pain, lives maimed, decisions postponed, secrecy and shame. But it is also a testament to those organisations and individuals who offered help with such selfless ease and care when help was desperately needed by gay people and by those close to us. These powerful and moving stories are useful to us now, not only as history — what the search for love and sexual self-realisation was like in a dark time — but part of what is happening all around us still, as, in the silence of the self, and in the society we have built, young people come to terms with who they really are and who they might become.
Just as Irish identity or Jewish identity would be impossible to imagine without a sense of history, however gnarled and disputed that history might be, so too our past is important. The thin faint line that connects us with those of earlier generations, who lived happily despite everything or suffered in silence for the sin of being themselves, is a line we need to trace with greater definition on our road to liberty. It is essential for us to say what we are. Most people can define themselves without a thought. It is easy to say ‘I am Irish’ or ‘I am a civil servant’ or ‘I am a politician’ or ‘I am a member of the Gárda Síochána’. In the future, following the example of the men and women who tell their stories in this book, it will, we hope, be just as easy to say: ‘I am gay’ and ‘I am lesbian’ and then, without difficulty, join the parade in Ireland and live and love in greater freedom.

Colm Tóibín
Dublin
July 2003