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.