22nd May 2015

I am not in Ireland today. More than anything I want to be in Ireland and I want to list reasons (excuses?) as to why I am not, but it is enough to just say that I am not.

Instead, I am here, in New York City, in a Starbucks at the corner of 103rd and Broadway. I am tired from a big work event last night but I have been awake since early morning. I was greeted by a Facebook message from my uncle that he sent at 7:18am to let me know his "yes" vote had been cast. There was an earlier message from last night too, from an old neighbour, telling me of his intentions to do this same.

When I checked my Irish mobile I had a text from my father. "Queue outside polling booth in Dalkey at 7am this morning," it read. "We have voted. X. Dad."

I am in tears writing this. I have been in tears off and on all morning - sitting in the sun eating my breakfast, tuning into the RTE News at One hearing about the high turnouts at the polling stations. Checking my Twitter feed and seeing the stories of so many home to vote. Here, on my laptop in Starbucks.

A friend I saw this morning has been following this in the New York Times, as many of my friends have. "When did Ireland turn from such a bastion of conservatism into a country on the brink of making history with gay marriage?" he asked. I told him I don't know. Because I don't know where this new Ireland came from, is coming from. I am only so very grateful that I am a part of it.

The tears this morning are for many things, I suspect years of things, decades of things. They are tears for the 17 year old me, in hiding, frightened, alone, unable to say the words out loud even to myself and for all the 17 year olds whose lives will be changed by the result of this vote today. They are tears of sadness because I am not in Ireland today, where more than anything I want to be, to use my own vote, my own voice. But mostly, they are for those other voices - the voice of my mother, my father, my uncle, aunts, cousins, friends, former colleagues, clients, classmates, teachers, strangers - voices that will be heard today, voices that are chiming in with mine.

More than anything I hope the outcome will be what I want, what those voices want, that tomorrow we have an Ireland we can all be proud of. But regardless of the result tomorrow, those voices matter.

Because every "yes" is not just saying yes to my right to marry in Ireland.

They are saying: "Yes, we see you."

"Yes, we accept you."

"Yes, you matter."

They are saying:

"Yes, you belong."

What's in a word?

I am in the bank.

“Date of birth?” the cashier asks.

I tell her and she smiles - an action that transforms her from a bank teller into a real person.

“That’s in two days,” she says. “Happy Birthday. Do you have any plans?”

I have plans that involve the cinema, a hidden burger joint and ice cream sundaes. I am 41 going on five, but she doesn’t need to know this.

“Just a few things lined up,” I say. “I’m spending the day with my – wife.”

I don’t know if she hears it – the pause – but I do. Half way through the sentence I’d seen the word “wife” looming and that millisecond of a pause had been my taking the time to decide whether to say it, or not.

For the last fifteen months I have been making that decision, practising using the word “wife” in various settings. I have a strange relationship with the word. I put this down to the fact that for most of my life, a wife was something I was supposed to aspire to be, not something – or someone – I was supposed to want. And yet I did, and yet I do.

All this practice has made it easier, like building muscles. It’s less of a hurdle now, most of the time when I see it coming I jump, glide, soar right over it with hardly any effort. This is New York City, after all, and since 2009 wives have had wives and husbands have had husbands. Walking down the street, hand in hand with mine, it rarely now ever crosses my mind that someone might do a double take or have something to think about that, much less something to say.

But this is a bank. And old habits die hard. 

When I look at the cashier, she’s still smiling, possibly even wider than before.

“My birthday’s at the end of the month,” she says. “My fiancée is taking me to Florida, I’ve never been.”

“That’s nice. What part?”

“Daytona,” she says. “Her friends have a place there.  We’ll stay with them.”

It takes me a second to hear it “her friends” but when I do, I smile too. At the thought of her birthday plans and of mine. At how simple life can be if we let it.

Walking up Seventh Avenue in the sunshine, I am thinking of the interaction in the bank and of the referendum in Ireland, about the focus on the importance of words like “marriage” and “wife” and “husband.” I’ve heard questions posed again and again about why this needs to be called marriage anyway? Isn’t Civil Partnership almost the same thing? Wouldn’t it be simpler to leave the word marriage out of it entirely?

Until you’ve come out, I think it’s hard to understand how frightening this can be, how big it is, how deep it goes. That it’s not something you do once but instead something you have to do over and over and over again. I don’t wear a biker jacket or have a shaved head. I usually save my rainbow T-shirts for Gay Pride week. People assume I’m straight, until I tell them otherwise. When I say I am married, people assume I am married to a man. Every day – sometimes many times a day – I am faced with the choice while doing simple every day things, to come out of hiding or not: I’ll wait for my wife to come until I order. It might be listed under my wife’s name. Not my husband actually, my wife.

This is part of every LGBT experience, it is not unique to people who are married but marriage changes it, or at least it changed it for me. There can be some ambiguity in terms like “girlfriend” or “partner.” But there is no ambiguity when I say “my wife.” There is nowhere for me to hide.

The thing about hiding is that it becomes a habit. And if you were ever in hiding chances are there’s a damn good reason you were there in the first place, that it was scary to be seen. I’ve written about my sexuality in national newspapers. I’ve read from my novels at LGBT events and answered questions from the audience. I’ve talked in radio interviews about coming out. And yet sometimes, like that day in the bank, it is still scary. But then I remember, that when I allow myself to be seen, that tiny action allows others to be seen too.

The “no” side in this referendum want you to be confused, to think that this referendum is about many things, but it is only about one thing: it is about love. By voting “yes” on May 22nd you are validating and affirming the right my wife and I have to love each other, to care for each other, to commit our lives to each other the way a man and woman can. You are saying that you see us and our relationship as it is. And that it is equal to everyone else’s.

Civil Partnership is not the same thing as marriage, in rights or in name. A woman having a child within a Civil Partnership will be registered in Irish maternity hospitals as a “single mother.” There will be one name on the baby’s birth certificate and should anything happen to her, her Civil Partner has no rights over that child at all. Whether we like it or not, words matter, these definitions matter. They define who we are, how others see us and, ultimately, the people we can become.

I am a wife and I have a wife and I want Irish women who want wives and Irish men who want husbands to have that too. I want little girls to grow up being able to imagine their beautiful bride walking alongside them up the aisle, I want boys to celebrate weddings where their uncle or their brother or their Dad is getting married to a man they love. I want to live in a world where the foundation of a family is love and security, not a penis and a vagina.

These might be big things to want, or maybe not. Actually, they feel like simple things. To stand in a bank on a Thursday afternoon – on Seventh Avenue in New York or Dalkey Main Street – and to be able to say “I’m spending the day with my wife.”

Without having to pause.

8 Week Writing Class at Irish Arts Center

OK, so we won't be writing on old fashioned typewriters like this and there are unlikely to be any martinis (unless of course you bring them yourself) but my writing class at the Irish Center starting in April is worth checking out all the same

I discovered a few years back that I love teaching creative writing. It makes sense, after all I love to write and I love to talk about writing.  I've been lucky enough to teach as part of the Irish Times Training Course in Dublin,  at the New York Public Library here in Manhattan and of course my students at Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen, many of whom are homeless.

These classes have had different students at different levels but what they all have in common is an interest and a desire to write, to learn about writing and often, to tell their own story. Writing can be an isolating business and having the opportunity to help people feel more connected with their work and to share what I have learned through writing my three novels is a really fulfilling way for me to spend a Wednesday evening. And a fun one too.

So what will the class be like? We'll cover the basic writer's toolbox - developing characters, writing effective dialogue, scene setting, beginnings, endings and just about everything in between. But I also hope to cover some of the less tangible aspects of writing and thrash around some key questions. Questions like: How do you find your own writing voice? Or how do you know if this is the right story for you? And a big important one - how do you know if you have finished, or if you have just run out of steam!

Classes start on April 15th and run every Wednesday evening from 7- 8:30pm until June 3rd. Rate is $170 for non Irish Arts Center members and of course there's a discount if you are a member of the IAC. Check out the link below and if you'd like more information before committing you can always drop me an email at yvonne@yvonnecassidy.com

https://web.ovationtix.com/trs/pe/9993469

For Connecticut Muffin on Montague Street

1. The WiFi didn’t always work.
2. The vinyl seats – the big ones upstairs, the ones like couches – were pretty worn. Some people might call them shabby.
3. Even though the table next to the bathroom was big, you were better off choosing one of the other ones near the front, because the smell wasn’t always the freshest.
4. At lunchtime or late afternoon, kids came in and clustered six or eight around one table, and it was hard to get anything done, almost impossible, even with headphones.

 I am trying to count reasons why I shouldn’t be sad that Connecticut Muffin on Montague Street has closed down, reasons that should convince me that I will, in fact, be better off writing somewhere else. And that’s as many as I can muster – four.

If I am going to do this properly, be rigorous about it, I should make another list too – a list of reasons why I wish it wasn’t closing. But that list would be full of feelings, and feelings are much harder to describe. And they don’t fit on a list. And sometimes feelings aren’t even real, sometimes you only think they are.

Standing on the street, looking at the newspaper plastering the inside of the windows, my feelings are real. Shock, that comes first - I was only here on Friday.  And it turns out that what they say in books about people’s feet being rooted to the spot when they’re in shock is true, because I can’t seem to turn around and walk away, just like I can’t seem to read beyond the first line of the little white sign that says they’re closed, but I can’t seem to look at anything else either. And even though shock isn’t finished yet – it’s only settling in – another feeling elbows it out of the way. Sadness. And in this city of a thousand coffee shops I am crying. I am crying because this coffee shop has closed.

I shouldn’t be crying. It’s a coffee shop. No-one is dead, no-one is dying. It is ridiculous to cry.

And yet, I am.

If I was to write a list of the reasons why I am crying, a list that would make you understand, I would tell you that a lot of my last novel was written here, and that since I started my new one, this coffee shop has become (had become) the only place where it seems I can write it.  Tuesdays and Fridays are my writing days, and you’ll find me on the 2 train, heading downtown and into Brooklyn, getting out at Clark Street with an excitement even the slowest lifts in the world can’t dampen. Down Henry Street, past my favourite church, onto Montague, and I’m at my “desk” – the big table upstairs in the front– by 9:45am, writing by 10. I have 20,000 words or so now that I’m almost happy with and they’ve all been written here, nowhere else, and standing looking at the newspaper covered windows I can’t help but feel as though my characters are trapped inside.

So maybe after reading that, you might understand a little more. You might cut me a break. And when I told you how I love their Vanilla Chai Tea Latte made with almond milk and that finding one of those –especially a good one - is hard, you might nod. And when I described how Madeline would have this made for me every morning before I even ordered it, how she would start to steam the almond milk while I claimed my table upstairs and have it ready by the time I was at the counter, you would probably see that this place was no Starbucks. You might even begin to see that this coffee shop, a little shabby as it was, was more than just a coffee shop. At least to me.

I like Starbucks, by the way. I write there too. In fact I am writing in Starbucks now, a block away from my old coffee shop. I am drinking a chai tea latte (soy milk, not almond) and their WiFi is working, as it always is. The vinyl in this Starbucks is less than two years old, it’s not worn yet. So relocating here, bringing my characters with me here, shouldn’t be a problem, right? It certainly shouldn’t be cause for tears.

And yet, it is.

Because it’s not just about my book being born in that other coffee shop, or the big table like a desk overlooking Montague Street, or even Madeline and the almond milk chai. It’s all of that and more than that – something else, another feeling, something that doesn’t fit on a list at all.

I’m not from New York. I’m from a place that’s much smaller, a place where it’s not unusual to know the name of the person behind the counter in the newsagents or the butcher’s or the coffee shop. Last month, when I was home, I was in the local Starbucks (we have those too) and the woman working there remembered my drink order and apologised for not instantly getting my name right. I didn’t take it personally – after all it has been three years since I moved away.

And this knowing everyone and everyone knowing you can be suffocating – I found suffocating – and anonymity was just one of the hundreds of things about New York I fell in love with, right from the start. And I still love this. I love how I can get on a subway and not worry about getting stuck making small talk to an old work colleague or someone from school. I love how my business stays my business unless I choose to make it yours too. I love how, running in Riverside Park, listening to Macklemore on my iPhone I can throw my hands in the air at the part of “Victory Lap” where he throws his hands in the air. Because no-one knows me. And no-one will talk about me. And no-one will care.

And yet...

Writing this, as often happens me when I’m writing, I am explaining something to you and something to me at the very same time. And I can see how, after three years of living here, that I have carved out spaces, pockets of the city that have become mine. And how even though I love New York’s density, its energy and its anonymity, its swirl of lives and voices and footsteps, that without having these spaces just for me, I might somehow get lost. That whether life is up or life is down or life is flat-lining, I need these spaces to stay the same, to be there for me. I need people to know my name.

And this little coffee shop that was a little shabby inside, might not have looked like much to you, but it was one of my spaces.

And that, to me, makes it worthy of a few tears. 

Maybe even more than just a few.

Pole Dancing on the 2 Train

Last week I went to a book club where they had read my latest novel. I like going to book clubs. I like to talk about my novels. I like the way arguments break out over the characters as if they are real people because to me they are real people.

I also like that there is usually wine.

     At this book club, towards the end, after we’d discussed Rhea – the main character – and her mother and her aunt and her lover, one of the women brings up something else, something I hadn’t heard a reader say before. “The subway,” she says, “you must love it. The novel is like a tribute to the New York City subway.”

     She’s right: I do love the subway and Rhea does too. She loves to ride from one end of the line to the other and when she’s a little kid she even makes up her own game using an old subway map her mother left behind. Before I made up this game for Rhea, I’d never made up a game with a subway map but I’d thought about it. There’s something that’s always appealed to me about those maps – the colours, the order, the fact that you know where you are and where you’ve just come from and where you will be next.

     This week has not been like that. Two days ago my wife had surgery – surgery that went successfully – and during these long days there’s been a lot of stress and a lot of waiting and a lot of not knowing where I will be next. This morning, I visited her in hospital and afterwards I found myself standing on the corner of 10th Avenue and 59th street, uncertain. She could be released later, but then again that might not happen until tomorrow or Sunday. The day may or may not be empty and even if she didn’t come home there were lots of important things to be done, things I’d been putting off all week. Just because I couldn’t remember what they were didn’t make them any less so.

     Frozen, I couldn’t seem to decide where to start my day. So I decide to start where I often start when I feel like that – I decide to take the 2 train to Brooklyn.

     When the train pulls into the station at 42nd street it is past rush hour and there is a choice of seats but I don’t sit down. I walk to the front of the carriage to the standing area by the door. No-one else is standing so I have the pole to myself. I interlace my hands loosely around it, plant my feet on either side. This is something I used to do when I wanted to get deeper into Rhea’s character. I haven’t done it in quite a while and as the train takes off and my hands pull back against the metal I think I might be doing it this morning to get deeper into my own.

     To Rhea a subway journey is like a fairground ride – a cross between a roller coaster and a ghost train. To get that feeling she needs music – I need music – without it, it just doesn’t work. She plays songs on repeat and I do that this morning too, only it’s not one of her favourite songs I’m playing, it’s one of mine: “Hero” by Family of the Year.

     Being at the front of the carriage is important because you get to see through the window into the carriage ahead of you and the reflection of what’s happening behind you at the very same time. And if you watch the swing of the metal chain that connects both carriages together, you can see the curve of the tunnel right before you feel it in the sway of your hips or the weight in your feet or the way the pole jerks and pulls against your hands.

     My favourite part – the very best part – is when the train picks up speed and gets really fast through the stations where it won’t stop. That’s why it’s good to be on an express train. This morning that was the stretch between 14th Street and Chambers, when it feels like the music picks up speed as well and there’s darkness and metal and lights and a station and darkness again and curves of wall and another station and just when you think it can’t get any faster, any curvier, any jerkier, the train slows down and this time we’re stopping.

     I didn’t used to like stopping in stations, but now I do. The trick to enjoying the stations is not to spend the time wishing the train would move again but to look outside when the doors open – properly look - at the people on the platform, the tiles on the walls, the old mosaic of the subway names. Because once I look at all that, really see it, it reminds me that I’m not just shuttling through tunnels on a train underground: I’m shuttling through tunnels on a train under New York City.

     The last burst of journey for me this morning is between Wall Street and Clark, under the river. No stations to pass through here and it feels a bit slower, slow enough to see the graffiti on the walls lit up by blue lights and the yellow-white ones. The carriage is nearly empty, just me up this front end and I sneak a look at my reflection side on in the grubby window, arms outstretched, swinging back from the pole, the metal warm now, under my fingers.

     At Clark Street I am jerked forward for the last time. The doors open. The ride is over. I jump off.

     As the train pulls away I take a photo of it on my phone – maybe I already have this blog post in mind – but I don’t stand there to watch it leave the station. The rush of energy from the jostling and the swaying and the music is still in my head, still in my body as I bounce up the platform, take the steps two at a time.

     And walking down towards the water, my song is still on repeat, until I get to the bench where I know I am going to turn it off and start to write this, while I still can.  And even without the music, the energy is still there, in the tingling of my fingers from holding the pole, in the place the pen meets the page.

     And it’s still here now – the energy – even though it is slowing down, even though I know that we are getting towards the last line, that we are nearly at the station. And even when I finish, I might still feel it, I think I will. Because I’ll remember that even when I don’t see it, the subway is still there, deep below the ground.

And that even though it runs late sometimes it can always take me home.

To the End and Back

The first time I made the journey was on the train, one of three Irish girls with pale skin and oversized backpacks. Boarding at Penn Station, we’d been nervous, indecisive about where to sit, moving twice before deciding on the four seater nearest the door so we could watch the bags while we stood between the carriages and smoked.

My smoking habit was new, just like the Converse I was wearing that carried the rumble of the train up through my feet and into my legs. If I close my eyes, I can almost feel it, that rumble and the wind that snatched the smoke from my mouth before I even had a chance to inhale.

            That’s over twenty years old, that memory, and when you write fiction for a living it can be hard to trust a memory as clear as that. But this was my first day in America, the morning I’d woken up in New York City after days and months and years of wanting to be there. At nineteen, I was finally here, my life was finally starting and even though the train ran out of track in Montauk, it didn’t feel like the end - it felt like the beginning.

            At the station, a friend was waiting, a friend who already had somewhere to live and a job. Anxious to catch up, we set out the next morning, the three of us, to find work. We started at one end of town, each taking every third bar, restaurant or shop to see if they were hiring. It was an egalitarian system that had its first test when we reached the shop selling live bait. By the time we got to the restaurant where I would end up working, our initial hope had lost its sheen and conversations were on the cusp of becoming disagreements.

I didn’t like the restaurant’s tinted windows, its sign - this wasn’t where I pictured myself working. But it was my turn. I climbed the steps slowly, secretly hoping they were fully staffed.

Inside, a woman in a long dress directed me to a booth and she sat and smoked while I told her about my experience waiting tables back in Ireland. I had no experience waiting tables - in Ireland or anywhere else - and I don’t think she believed me. I didn’t believe her when she said she’d call me the next day.

            She did call the next day, but not on the phone. Walking down main street on our second tour of job seeking, I heard my name, and when I turned around she was there, clasping her dress around her knees as she ran after me. Breathless, she told me they needed someone. A busser. I could start that night.

            It’s funny, looking back, how the trajectory of my life, of other people’s lives, hinged on that moment, as if my response was a pinball in a machine that could have bounced a different direction. If it had, a whole other reality might have happened, a reality without a lifelong friendship that was forged in that restaurant, a reality without a blind date between that friend and another, a date that led to a wedding, to children being born.

            But I’m jumping ahead. Back in Montauk, my nineteen year old self didn’t know any of that any more than she knew that this town would be the backdrop to one of the novels she dreamed of writing. But she knew she needed money. She knew she needed a job.

            I don’t have space here to describe that summer and anyway, you probably had your own summer like that - the summer where your eyes opened and you saw that there were different ways of living, of being, than the ways you’d always known. And by the time I was leaving on the train in early October, I knew that I was taking back more with me than just the money I’d earned, the clothes I’d bought on my trip to New York City, even more than the memories and the friendships. I was taking home the possibility of another version of my life, a life that could look different than the way people always told me it should look.

And I knew that I’d be back.

            That sunny September morning on the Hampton Jitney sixteen years later wasn’t my next journey to Montauk, but it is my next vivid memory of arriving and the first time I was making the journey alone. At thirty five, I was doing a lot of things alone since the break-up two years before that still felt like it should have a capital “B.” I was in New York alone working on a novel that was going to be published as part of a two book deal I’d just signed. I wasn’t far into the novel but part of it was set in New York and that was why I needed to be there to write - that was what I told people and it was true. What was also true was that there was something else I was trying to work out, something that had been bothering me for a while, something about my sexuality. Something that I’d kept hidden for so long, I could hardly see it myself.

            Montauk was quiet that morning. Windy. Standing in the circle, the flag snapped above my head and the benches I remembered always being full were empty. A purple taxi drove lazily by and my history rose up around me in 3D. The drug store, the pub on the corner, the gazebo, the diner where my friend burned her hand toasting a bagel – all of it still there, as if it had been waiting for me. I walked past the restaurant where I’d worked, the sign the same although the owners were different, and around by the Laundromat where most of my rare days off were spent. Across the road, in between the motels, I took the path to the beach, the path I’d taken so many times before. No-one else was around that morning, just the seagulls, still as stone, and before I could think about it too much I lay down, right where I was.

            Lying there, with the wind blowing sand into the pockets of my jacket and the rolled up cuffs of my jeans, I watched the light on the water, the waves. And out of the corner of my eye, I saw my nineteen year old self with her backpack of dirty laundry and her dreams; the dreams about writing books she talked about late at night over bottles of Miller Lite and the other dreams, the ones she was too scared to tell anyone about, even herself. And I took out my pad and I started to write. I wrote in a way that I’ve only written a few times in my life, the type of writing where, when it was time to go, I couldn’t make it more than a few steps without having to stop to capture the words down before they blew away, out into the waves.

            I wrote over lunch in the diner and I was still writing when the Jitney took off, wrote until we were well past Southampton. And when I finally finished, my mind had a clarity, not just about my book but about other things too. Watching the sun sink red and low behind the skinny trees, I made a decision about a woman I’d met a couple of weeks before - a decision that suddenly seemed so simple. And as the sky darkened outside and the bus sped back towards New York, I felt an ease I hadn’t felt in a long time.

That book got written, as books eventually do, and another one too that I went out to Montauk to finish last Thanksgiving, editing over four days to the rhythm of the waves outside my hotel room window.

You see, journeys out to Montauk are easier these days, now that I live in Manhattan. It’s almost five years since the decision I made on that Jitney, the small decision that led to a lot of bigger ones, decisions that led me here, to today, to an apartment on the Upper West Side where I live with my wife. And even as I write that, the magnitude of that statement catches me afresh – how so much change can be wrapped up in only a few simple words.

Now and then, people ask me how come it took so long to figure it all out; what I wanted and who I was and all of that. And I don’t always know how to answer them, how to explain it, except to say that sometimes there is no shortcut. 

Sometimes you need to go all the way to the end and back, to find your way home.

             

Better late than never

The first time I heard the word “lezzer” I was playing a game called “Home Truth.”  My friends and I played every day for years and that day two of us were hiding in a hedge between two gardens. A boy cycled up the driveway behind us. He was a boy we never asked to play and usually he was a quiet boy, but not that day.

“Lezzers!” he shouted. “Youse two are lezzers!”

My first concern was that he had given up our hiding place. But when my friend pushed herself far away from me and made a pukey face, I knew a lezzer must be something really bad. And that my next action was important. “No we’re not!” I shouted and pushed myself so deep into the hedge, away from her, that the branches scratched my arms.  I don’t remember the rest of the game, if we got caught or “saved ourselves,” but I do know that neither of us said anything about the incident to the others.

By my first year in secondary school, I knew, of course, what “lezzer” meant although I don’t remember who ever told me. At lunchtimes, we speculated about who might be one. Apparently one in ten girls were, some people said one in four. That meant there could be twenty five in our year. It seemed impossible that these alien girls could walk among us, preying on us and I don’t know if I fully believed it, but it didn’t stop me hypothesising, safe in the knowledge it wasn’t me.

I gave this detail to my protagonist Rhea Farrell, in my new novel “How Many Letters Are In Goodbye?” Rhea is 17 and, like me, grew up in a small village in Dublin. But Rhea is younger than me and braver than me and has been through much, much more than me. For both Rhea and I, uncovering our sexuality is gradual. There’s no flashing sign, no letter in the post, only a series of small and bigger clues. Rhea is willing to look at these clues. At 17, I wasn’t.

Did you ever ignore something for so long you forgot you were ignoring it at all? That’s what it was like. And if a new clue sneaked into my view, something I didn’t want to bring into the light, it just became something else to hide in the dark. But when my life took some turns at the start of my 30s, turns that I never wanted it to take, the lights came on and they weren’t so easy to shut off again.

Looking back, this period was painful, lonely. I was terrified to speak to anyone – not family or friends, even my gay friends. Everyone knew me as straight –I knew me as straight – and I wasn’t even sure, I had to be sure. I started to go to a lesbian group in Outhouse, creeping up Capel Street with an excuse at the ready in case I was spotted. Sitting awkwardly at the table making small talk, I envied the younger girls - they brought girlfriends, held hands, kissed. They seemed so much lighter, like somehow they’d put down the boulder of shame that weighed so heavily on me, or never picked it up at all.

They influenced my novel, those girls. They helped me to show how naturally Rhea’s sexuality unfolds for her, how pure it feels. Being gay gets tangled up in debates about religion and debates about politics but really, in the end, it’s just about love.

For me, I had to get far away to shed that shame, as far away as New York. I found love there – it found me – and after years of knowing and not knowing, I finally knew. And it felt like freedom.

Love gives you strength, it gave me strength to tell the first person and the next. Once I started to tell people I didn’t want to stop. Each time I told someone, I reclaimed something, a part of myself I’d given away before I knew how important it was.

We live in New York – my wife and I – and the only time people look at us when we walk down the street holding hands is when we march in the Gay Pride parade. It might sound over the top, but after years of silence, there’s something about the crowds, the banners, all that cheering that’s very special, more than special – it’s a feeling I can’t describe.

And I wish that I could bottle that feeling, or make a tape and somehow show it to my 17 year old self. So she could see there’s no reason to worry, there’s nothing to be afraid of, that things will work out.

No matter how long it takes.

This article was originally published in The Evening Herald on Saturday 5th July. It was also published on the Independent Online on Monday 7th July and is available here: 

http://www.independent.ie/life/how-love-in-my-thirties-gave-me-the-strength-to-come-out-30411837.html