In pursuit of queer joy and resistance
Books — Activism — Ireland
Belong To co-founder Michael Barron released a new book earlier this year, offering a unique study of the impact of LGBTQ+ youth civil society on Irish policy change. Fellow activist Tonie Walsh spoke to the author about the publication and his trailblazing work over the past three decades.
Michael Barron, academic, youth worker and self-styled social justice warrior, has form. He co-founded Belong To in 2003 and, as pioneering CEO, served with distinction for many years at the hugely respected NGO, followed by stints at Equate and the Rowan Trust.
His recent book, How Ireland’s LGBTQ+ Youth Movement was Built, is a masterful exercise in not only historicising Belong To’s reign as Ireland’s pre-eminent queer youth organisation but also offers a manual of sorts for best practice in civil society engagement.
I sat down recently with Michael to talk about the genesis of the project and themes he felt he had to explore while writing it, following the completion of his PhD during Covid lockdown.
Approached by his publisher, Policy Press (an imprint of Bristol University Press), he initially thought about expanding the PhD into a book, but considered it too much of a formal academic exercise. His focus was primarily concerned with the great socio-cultural and legal dispensations that flowed from decriminalisation in 1993, which Belong To was well placed to harness and progress all the way to Marriage Equality in 2015.
“I tried to transfer the PhD into a book, but something in me wouldn’t let me do it; it was not where my mind was at anymore. And the world had changed dramatically between 2020 and 2024, you know. So I changed it a lot. I went back and interviewed new people, and all of that.
“On recording Belong To’s history, I did feel for a while that it should be documented. There were certain manuals that came out of Belong To, like how to do certain things in schools or elsewhere, but the overall story of the organisation and how it came about, I did feel was quite unknown. And I do think there was a certain audacity to Belong To that maybe people would be interested in knowing about. There was a particular audacity around taking big issues head-on and even setting up like a queer youth group through the Department of Education, because that’s how we did it!
“All that was quite brazen in a really good way. It was kind of a futurist-looking brazen thing to do. And a lot of the time, we had never really spoken about that, because we were always trying to make sure we were talking about LGBTQ+ young people and what was going on for them. Also, we tried to, as much as possible, step away, as in the people like myself and Anna and David and Caroline and all the people involved, tried as much as possible to step into the background. I always felt like the politics of Belong To was really important, and that was something we never got a chance to talk about.”
Michael reminded me he came out in New York in the mid-1990s, returning to an utterly changed Dublin going through the throes of what I refer to as the Septic Tiger. It was a period of great socio-cultural and political intersectionality. Belong To’s coming of age dovetailed neatly with this new, bold Ireland. Opportunity was everywhere.
“We learned a huge amount from organisations like Pavee Point and some migrant rights centres, which were setting up at the same time. A lot of what we did was modelled on what Pavee Point was doing, a certain level of audacity I mentioned earlier. And ballsy-ness. It was a period of great cross-pollination; minority groups were coming together.
“At this moment, there definitely was a real determination and a strong social justice ethos amongst groups. People were happy to work with each other during that period. Sadly, stuff got much more siloed later on during the Great Recession.”
We’re talking about the period post-decriminalisation and the legacy of criminalisation, something that is rarely addressed. Michael has a term in his book to describe that legacy, something both individual and collective that has been inherited by LGBTQ+ people.
“A ‘haunting’ is a queer literary term I came across a few years ago, but it’s also something I’ve really felt in my bones. It’s something that just keeps reappearing over and over again, from generation to generation.
“Like the actual fear of violence is so real for so many queer people, including myself. You know, I think it’s something when you talk to a teenager now, and you talk to an 80-year-old now, they have very similar, I believe, kind of fear of violence, of exposure, of ridicule, all of those things. And for very good reason, you know, because we have experienced all of those things, especially a corrosive educational system that maintained this incredible oppressive cloud over queer youth and continues to do so.
“I think it’s improved enormously in recent years, but it’s still there, and I think it comes down to the Catholic education system being set up with the primary purpose of indoctrinating children and young people into the Catholic faith. I mean, that was the primary purpose.
“And even though there’s been shifts and changes in that, I mean, that’s a multi-generational thing to change, it’s not something that will just change overnight, if we accept that’s been its purpose for hundreds of years, it’s going to take hundreds of years for us to wash that out. And in my time in Belong To, which was well into the 2000s, we were coming in contact with young people who were experiencing real, extreme violence in schools.”
From the very beginning of Belong To’s work, the damage to LGBTQ+ youth from the education system and the culture of bullying and violence in schools became an urgent focus for the organisation. Its smart strategising and head-on approach may have been well-served by the small island it found itself in and consequent close proximity to the civil service and politicians, but advocating for the needs of queer youth, then and now, involves dismantling any number of hoary old stereotypes about predatory gay people, corruption of youth and so on.
Expanding on this observation, Michael agrees that “The needs of LGBTQ+ youth were definitely more politically inconvenient for politicians than the LGBTQ+ population overall, for all the reasons I mentioned earlier about the church. But then also, the fears of parents, the status of the family in Irish society… all of those fears were within politicians, and it did take a lot of convincing, notwithstanding the election of 2011 when a good number of politicians came out.”
Michael and I both share a rural upbringing in adjoining counties, me in Clonmel, Co. Tipperary, he in Carrigcloney, Co. Kilkenny. He’s the youngest of six children who grew up on a farm. I suspect his upbringing was infinitely more rural (and brutal) than mine. He’s spoken in the past about Kilkenny’s macho, homophobic environment and the difficulties that presented, even though he had access to a great circle of friends, many of them like him, an outsider.
Unsurprisingly, this theme of being an outsider, of living on the margins, is one that percolates the book. It also informed practical considerations in Belong To, as the organisation grew in strength to the point that, 20 years on, there are now 90 queer youth groups scattered across the island, thriving in some of the remotest parts of the country.
For anyone who has yet to read How Ireland’s LGBTQ+ Youth Movement was Built, the book’s subtitle, ‘Civil Society in the Pursuit of Social Justice’, alerts the reader to the current malaise we find ourselves in. Part cautionary tale, part manual for survival, Michael is at his most thoughtful and generous in offering suggestions to face down the corrosive impact of negative messaging across social media platforms and the weaponisation of regulation by ‘bad faith actors’ like the far-right and other extremists.
Observing the increasingly compromised role of civil society and the difficulties in driving public policy reform in a modern democracy, Michael argues the necessity for a radical and empathetic kind of solidarity in challenging systemic structural inequalities in society—think ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, health, economics. Moreover, doing all of this with hope and a very necessary dollop of ‘queer joy’.
To quote his closing thought in the book: “The most profound change comes from the power of marginalised communities working together - not just to resist harm but to reimagine what is possible. When we align our struggles, we amplify our strength… Love, Organise, Resist.”
Is there any more writing on the cards?
“I wouldn’t mind writing something more personal. This is personal to some degree, but I wouldn’t mind writing something even more so.”
How Ireland’s LGBTQ+ Movement was Built: Civil Society in the Pursuit of Social Justice by Michael Barron is published by Police Press, Bristol.