Ireland Is Completely Fine with Homosexuality

The most-read story in the Irish Times the other day is, as is often the case, an installment of the relationship advice column, “Ask Roe.” The headline is, “I’ve been with my partner exclusively for 18 years, but he’s been in an open relationship.”

The photo above the story shows two men in bed, one on his phone, the other pretending to sleep.

I’m old enough to remember when a photo like this would have been catagorized just south of pornography. What a wonderful world of stock photography we live in now. 

Reading this column left me conflicted. Male homosexuality was criminalized in Ireland until 1993, or thirty years ago. (Homosexuality was decriminalized in California fifty years ago.) Female homosexuality was never criminalized, for fear of giving young women impure thoughts. The marriage equality referendum changed the constitution of Ireland in 2015, and my marriage in California was accepted without question by Immigration Department bureaucrats.

Ireland remains the only country to confer marriage equality by popular vote, not legislation. 

As a married lesbian couple, we’ve experienced absolute indifference to our legal and private life. We don’t even hear of distant gay relatives as one used to.

As Roe McDermott’s columns usually are, her answer is even-handed:

I’m intrigued by the dynamics described in your letter, and I’m curious about what discussions or acknowledgments – if any – have happened around you partner sleeping with other people. 

…

It’s also interesting to me that you don’t explicitly describe this as cheating, nor do you refer to you both as having an open relationship, just him. This feels accurate to the dynamic that you have both created, where you have tacitly accepted this as part of your relationship for this long without and addressing or setting boundaries around his behaviour – but also don’t feel that the relationship is a fully and consciously open relationship because you have never talked about it.

…

You have silently accepted your partner’s behaviour for 18 years and it’s important to explore this part of yourself.

…

You have, through your silence, contributed and created this dynamic. I don’t say this to blame you or to undermine your emotions, but so that you can open up an important exploration of how you and your relationship dynamic led to this point – so that you can start to consciously change it. 

It’s worth reading her entire answer, if only to verify one significant aspect: at no point does she mention that this is a relationship between two gay men. “Gay” or even “man” or “men” does not appear in the column. 

And there’s where I’m conflicted. Popular advice columns convey schadenfreude, and the best ones, like this one, promote empathy. The answer would be helpful to this man, and helpful to anyone in the same situation. That’s the point of advice columns. 

But her answer implies that norms for straight and lesbian relationships could be applied to two men together. The article, for all its expected acceptance of homosexual relationships in modern Ireland, makes this a gay relationship invisible. Two gay men in Ireland are not the same as an Irish man and woman, or even two women. Gay men's lives are enriched, influenced, distorted, determined by other gay men in their daily lives—and by gay men’s culture worldwide and over time.

It must to be just as incorrect to elide gay relationships as it is to slander them.

There have always been two wings to the "gay liberation movement." There are those who believed that there is no difference between straight people and homosexuals, but "One." This is why the first homophile magazine so named itself. The other wing believes that homosexuality changes everything, that a life lived so contrary to the norms and restrictions not only liberates the individual, but can set everyone free. I have to say I'm on the side of freedom.

Enchanted Forest

A few weeks ago on my birthday I decided to try to find the Fairy House again, the ruined cottage we visited on a history walk around our neighborhood in April.

I wanted to see it without a crowd of people, and I wanted to make a pilgrimage to a place I'm sure was visited by Ella Young. There are no records that she visited, but the timing would be right, and I can use my imagination.






 

As I wrote before, the Fairy House was on the Marblehill estate. According to Charlie Gallagher, my neighbor, Lotta Law had it built for her children, but her friend George Russell sometimes lived in it.

The Law family posted some photos of the Fairy House interior.

This photo is from a different time because the drawing is changed. This one is obviously painted by AE. The others probably are too.

I found the Fairy House easily. It's there behind the rhododendrons. 

That dark hole is the fireplace, and the crumbling wall next to it is what's left of AE's painting of A Lordly One.

The cottage once had a view of the sea, but monster rhododendrons have taken over.

Other people visit here on pilgrimage. I turned over a stone, and found a ten-cent piece under it. This account, by historian Brian McKernan of the AE Appreciation Society is similar to my experience discovering the Fairy House. He notes that the blue post caught his eye, and he's right, seeing the post in the wood reminded me of Narnia.

Near the front of the cottage, about where photographer of the   above stood 100 years ago, I found a white triangular stone, turned it over, and to my surprise there was something underneath it.









I didn’t dig further, for fear of finding a dead cat, desecrating a relic, or falling through a fairy door.

Then I noticed a thin brownish-golden stone, of a type still used to build houses here. Someone had left it leaning against the bottom of the front wall.

When I picked it up, I thought I could see a face in it.
 

Can you?

 

I’ve been visited many shrines of Saints in Ireland. Some are ruined oratories, some are cathedrals, some are wells, some are a pile of rocks. They never last forever, except in our imagination. 

I imagine the rock shows Ella's face, and it will forever live in me because I left it there. 

I stepped away from the ruin and lay on my back in the woods, listening to distant robins.

 It was a perfect summer afternoon and it was my birthday.





I got up and wandered, until I realized I'd gone beyond all paths, and all sign of any other humans in this place.

I did not see what AE saw, or maybe I did.

I wandered until I got lost.




As an offering, I sang a few songs to the fairies. Then I found the way home.  

On the way, I climbed over a wall and into a pasture beyond. I noticed this foot-high tunnel, which I learned later is a "rabbit smoot," not a Fairy Door–unless you want it to be.

We watched the summer swallows prepare for the evening.

 I will return to the enchanted forest as often as I can, just like AE did. I want to know it in every season, every light, every birthday.

Rainmaking in Ireland

The woods around us are dry. Very few mushrooms yet. We sleep with the windows open, and the sheets dry in half a day on the line. The drought of the world will eventually come to Ireland, although so far we’ve been spared.

This week a flagstone in the River Suir in Tipperary was exposed for the first time in ages. Locals immediately set it on fire.  

You can read the entire RTE story about it, and see a video here.

Michael Coady, known for his poetry and antics on the river Suir, was interviewed for the story. 

"It's a river tradition and my interpretation is that it's associated with drought," local historian and poet Michael Coady said this evening.

"In a drought, this stone has sometimes been exposed at low tide. God knows how old that tradition is.

"There used to be fishermen vying with one another to light a fire and lighting a fire in the middle of the river is a kind of a rain-making ritual."

…

This evening, a crowd gathered along Carrick's quays to see local fisherman Ralph O'Callaghan, who lives a stone's throw from the Suir, carry on the tradition.

"It came to be known as Leac na Tine, the flagstone of fire. In the past, and this is one of them now, there were times when it was exposed."

"We're long connected with the river, as is everyone in Carrick, we cross it every day," Mr O'Callaghan said.

"We're fishermen, boatmen, we had the last working barge on the river. So there's a deep connection to it."