London Irish LGBT Network are proud to invite you to this FREE event. What a perfect way to finish Pride month. We’re delighted to announce that we will be joined at our virtual meet up on June 28th at 8pm by Tonie Walsh, Archivist, journalist and activist.
Tonie Walsh, has been at the forefront of LGBT civil rights on the island of Ireland since 1979.
He cut his teeth as a journalist at Out magazine, Ireland’s first commercial gay periodical, and in 1988 he co-founded GCN magazine.
Join us and other member of the Irish LGBTQ diaspora for ‘Out in The World‘, a new exhibition, which will be hosted in Dublin by the EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum, in partnership with the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs.
The online launch takes place on June 8th at 6.30pm and will feature our Chair, Vanessa Monaghan, speaking as a voice of the Irish LGBTQ diaspora. You need to register for your free ticket on Eventbrite.
You can visit the exhibition EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum in Dublin from June 8th to December 1st 2021. Here’s the fun part: ‘Out in The World’ will also tour to select locations across the world in 2022. Hopefully London will be one of those stops!
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 the first of these stories but first, grab yourself a cuppa.
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.
