Bernárd’s Story: From Ennis to New York To London Pride 2021

For Pride month, we asked some of our members if they would like to tell their story and why they are proud. If you would like to contribute, please email londonirishlgbtnetwork@gmail.com

Here’s another story for you but first, grab yourself a cuppa!

From Ennis to New York To London Pride 2021

By Bernárd Lynch

After over forty years of activism in the LGBTQI+ community I look back and see that as a gay man the trouble with a secret life is that it is very frequently a secret from the person who lives it and not at all a secret for the people he encounters. He encounters because he must encounter the people who see his secrecy before anything else. They drag his secrets out of him with often dire consequences. The aim of the dreamer, after all, is to go on dreaming and not to be molested by the world. But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp.

At school in Ennis C.B.S. the boy I was best pals with I fell in love with. He may have loved me as his pal, but I was in love with him. And although I didn’t know it at the time, I felt it with every bone in the soul of my body. This was the prevenient and perineal truth of my tortured adolescence.

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Our Life Stories

Hannah’s Story: Life would Be Boring If We Were All The Same…

For Pride month, we asked some of our members if they would like to tell their story and why they are proud. If you would like to contribute, please email londonirishlgbtnetwork@gmail.com

Here’s another of these stories but first, grab yourself a cuppa.

Life would Be Boring If We Were All The Same…

by Hannah Doran

I always knew I was different. And I thought I knew why. None of my friends had Irish blood, none of them were dragged off to church on a Sunday, nor were they aware of the mythical lands that are the County Mayo. I had somehow escaped being sent to the local Catholic schools. That’s why I knew I was different, oh and being the product of an act of parliament but that’s another story. And I conned myself into believing that because that was the easy way out even through it didn’t address the simple fact that I wanted to be a girl.

My childhood at times was quite lonely, yes I had friends but few of them were really close. I struggled to fit in at times simply because I didn’t fit in. I knew that I would have been much happier French skipping with the girls instead of half-heartedly chasing a football around at Junior school. And then there was that small question of why I was on the only ‘boy’ who didn’t mind wearing a dress in the school play. Oh and that other question that kept coming up…”Why couldn’t I have just been born a girl?”

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Our Life Stories

Aaron’s Story: Plastic Paddy

rainbow colours of paint, in little blocks, sitting on a surface smeared with paint.

For Pride month, we asked some of our members if they would like to tell their story and why they are proud. If you would like to contribute, please email londonirishlgbtnetwork@gmail.com Here’s Aaron’s story:

Plastic Paddy

by Aaron McCarter

You might say I was late to fully appreciate my Irish ancestry, as a child, born in the Yorkshire town of Keighley to a Northern Irish immigrant, I was never able to fully appreciate my Irish roots as my father was born in Derry during the troubles and moved to the north of England as a child. The scars of that trauma as a kid stayed with him for a long time and he was always wary of taking us ‘home’. I always loved hearing my dad speaking with his 8 brothers and sisters in that wonderful Derry accent where I never realised the word fuck could be used so commonly as a verb!

I understood I was a little ‘different’ at an early age when my older brother would be playing football and fighting, I would be playing dress-up and performing with my little sister for home concerts. My Irish granda sadly died of cancer when I was a baby, but I always looked forward to seeing my granny, a rather stoic woman, full of love and warmth, but tried her best to hide it. All I remember as a kid was a thick Derry accent, with NHS prescription glasses and nylon dresses. She would always ask for (in that wonderful accent) ‘a cup of tea and a wee slice of bread’. This woman was an enigma to me as we didn’t see her often, but when we did I was always excited to see her. Years later (a month before lockdown), I would find out that ‘she always thought of me fondly and worried about how much I got bullied at school’.

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Our Life Stories

Aindrias’ Story: Mo scéal (agus bréaga eile)

Mo scéal (agus bréaga eile)

le Aindrias MacT

Creepy Christian Brothers feature, of course, when I consider my childhood, along with the motley parade of pervy priests and nuns inevitably involved with my education. A very near miss with rape by a local hard-man when I was about 9 and the usual clutch of cliches of repressed Irish small town life apply also. Yet none of these factors figured much into my formative sexual identity, at least as far as I can tell.

I suppose I was always a bit different. Some of that was from the classic combination of being obnoxiously good in class and bad at sports (though I compensated to some degree through sheer bulk). And some from the fact that my mother was English, which had real resonance in early ‘70s Ireland: I do remember being asked as a 7 year old – by an adult – which side would I take in a civil war. My father died when I was young so my mother was working long hours and both my brothers were much older (not very subtle code for my being a menopausal accident) so I was a bit of a loner, by force of circumstance mostly, rather than choice.

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