Stand Together

35 years down the line, the Ireland I came out in now seems like an alien planet. It was a fiercely hostile place for women: the Eighth Amendment had just been inserted into the Constitution, 15 year-old Ann Lovett had died alone at a grotto having given birth to her stillborn baby, we had to bear witness to the appalling treatment of Joanne Hayes, while Eileen Flynn lost her job as a teacher because she had a baby with a man to whom she wasn’t married.

I could go on, and on. For women, the rule was head down and knees together except within the sacred confines of marriage (no such thing as a registry office in those days). For even a married woman to speak about the pleasures of sex was inconceivable. If you dared put so much as a toe over the sexual and/or reproductive line, you were institutionalised, ostracised or on the boat to England in the blink of an eye.

The mere fact of being a woman guaranteed you inferior, second-class status. To fail to bow to convention and tradition was risky in the extreme, while feminists were seen as a disgrace and as danger incarnate.

To be an out lesbian in that bleak and brutal place was outlandishly beyond the beyonds of permitted womanhood: to be lesbian was to be scandalous, even monstrous to the point where the word never sullied the lips of Irish citizens. I was in my 20’s when I heard the word for the first time and eventually met real live lesbians. When I came out over a decade or so later it was only to other lesbians (who had already spotted me anyway), and the few gay men I knew. Nobody else wanted to know, and even if they did, they couldn’t utter the word.

Unlike gay men, lesbians were not criminalised, prosecuted, or imprisoned. No law was necessary because we were unthinkable and therefore both unspoken and unseen. For lesbians of my generation in Ireland and no doubt pretty well everywhere, there is a bitter memory of being treated like a pariah species. It would be hard to overestimate the price so many of us paid for living our lesbian lives. Some – many – lost jobs or never even got a job in the first place and had to emigrate; many lost the comfort of their family; some of us lost our children. Most of us lost, at least for a time, our ability to trust the world we lived in. None of us enjoyed the respect, justice and equality which is our due as human beings.

All of this was horrible, but not at all surprising. After all, lesbians are the real live kicking and shouting embodiment of the rejection of heteropatriarchy! We were, back then, and many of us still are, hell bent on the destruction of that dangerous, freedom-denying social organising system.

The human price of pain and hurt and damage paid by so many at that cruel time was immense as we now recognise to our eternal shame as a nation. We must hold on to that and never, ever let it happen again, to lesbians or to anyone else in our LGBTQ+ community. We must resist it with all our might when it is inflicted on others. I’m acutely aware of how urgent it is at the present time for us all to join together and stand up against the violent hatred targeted at queer people generally and at trans people in particular, along with the never-ending onslaughts of misogyny. We must stand up fiercely against vicious racism, misogyny and ableism and against the targeting of all marginalised groups, whether that’s the Traveller community, migrants and asylum seekers, disabled people or anyone else. We know how to do that in our amazing and extraordinary diversity as a community.

I’m sometimes asked if I’m proud to be lesbian, and the answer is no. Being lesbian isn’t an achievement for me, it’s who I am. I love it, and I love loving women. But I am very proud indeed of the bravery of lesbians over the decades in refusing to be cowed and browbeaten and of the immeasurable contribution we have made to the LGBTQ+ community, to feminism and the women’s movement, and to Ireland as a whole. Despite the stigma and silencing, we have been prime movers and leaders in propelling Ireland out of the darkness of a grim past to a place where we can see more clearly what a society needs to do to ensure freedom, equality and justice for all.

Ailbhe Smyth

Portrait by Hazel Coonagh