HOLIDAYS ARE COMING

Christmas. Some of us love it, some of us hate it, and the sensible ones know that it’s only one day of the year.

I do tend to get a funny, tingly Christmas feeling when I see the lights around the city of Dublin, and in fact, I got more than a tingly feeling when I visited London recently. Winter is my favourite time to visit the English capital. Especially Christmas time. It’s not one of those cities that sells a pumped-up idea of Christmas, you know the ones with pretendy Christmas markets and rubbish mulled wine in the central square. It’s a bit more subtle—misty cold evenings, cosy old pubs with fires.

During my visit this time, I popped into Balans on Old Compton Street for breakfast. A well-known gay café and bar, I remember visiting it many a time when I lived there in the late 1990s for a cheeky Bloody Mary or a pre-Candy Bar tipple. You might see Louis Walsh reading the newspaper (or was it a contract), or you may spot a member of a boy band crying over the same paper (or was it a contract).

I ended up speaking to the waiter who has been in London for 20-odd years. He told me how he has fallen back in love with the city, how things change, how the LGBTQ+ community in London has changed. He reminisced about his time as a singer-songwriter, living in a flat in Stoke Newington with artists and musicians. Today, you couldn’t get a kennel in Stoke Newington for less than a million pounds.

When I started looking back, I instantly thought of the National LGBT Federation and how it has evolved into the organisation it is today. The year is 1979, and the National Gay Federation is established. The same year, a nine-year-old me is skipping along to the Phoenix Park, singing at the top of my voice “Totus Tuus” in preparation for the Pope’s visit. “My god, I am SO going to outshine the other 999,000 visitors,” I thought.

During the first 10 years of the NXF, Identity magazine was published, then Out magazine and eventually GCN made its way onto the shelves, co-founded by Tonie Walsh and Catherine Glendon.

Ireland has changed beyond recognition since 1979. The LGBTQ+ community is different, but no matter what we go through, I can see every day, through the work of the NXF, GCN and the different LGBTQ+ organisations, that we are a resilient lot who support, admire, sometimes get annoyed by, but ultimately respect our community.

I hope we all get to enjoy the silly season, in whatever way we fancy. Things may look very different to 1979, as a nation and as a community, but our strength is in our unity, and that will stand to us no matter what we have to face. Happy Holidays everyone.