a bit of bonhomie

Nuala O'Faoile n on the Marian Finucane Show

Reaction to Searcaigh's RnaG interview on Liveline

Cathal Searcaigh interview in Irish RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta. Labhair Cathal Ó Searcaigh le hÁine Ní Churráin in agallamh fada eisiach ar an gclár Barrscéalta a craoladh inniu Dé Céadaoin 26 Márta idir 1102 agus meán lae ar RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta.

Liveline on Cathal Searcaigh 4th February 2008 Liveline on Cathal Searcaigh 5th February 2008 Blue Diamond Society - Lesbian Gay Bisexual Trangenders - Kathmandu Nepal Gays in Nepal PDF article from 2003. only page 1 though. The rest of article can be found at Globalgayz.com Nepal site. The Fairytale of Kathmandu The Website of the film Fairytale of Kathmandu Review - Variety A silly old twit A blog by a man who has an online petition to free Moors Murderer Ian Brady. He writes about the working class hero Brady: ... all he did was kill 5 kids. Compare his leniancy about Brady with his attitude to Ó Searcaigh. Maman Poulet The Green Party meet lesbians and gay men and talk relationships Suzie's report on the Green Party and gay marriage/civil partnership

There's a moment described in Mark O'Rowe's new play Terminus, where a woman has been battered over the head with a chair. As she comes to, she realises that a man is wanking over her comatose body. That comes as close as I can get to describing the experience of watching this production, the moment I realised the opening monologues weren't just prologues before the real drama began, but the whole dramatic structure. Maybe I was in a bad mood. The audience seemed to like it. The cast were brought back for a curtain call when I saw it in preview. There were moments I admired the language. There were moments, too, when I laughed at the regurgitated dark and comical snippets of modern Irish life. But these pleasantries paled when I realised what I was being asked to swallow. It seems that sexual metaphors are called for, because without using them I cannot describe what I felt. This is a script that revels in sex, grotesque violence, a cold-blooded serial murderer separated from his soul on the run, women betrayed by their men, lesbianism, life after death, Faustian pacts and worm-formed demons and angels. They are fantasy themes that any adolescent lad with half an imagination and a creepy obsession with gory fantasy fiction could come up with. The trouble is, Joss Whedon has already claimed this territory in Buffy, The Vampire Slayer, with a wit, panache and a post-modern irony that redeems the terrain from its pubescent self-indulgence, and with which most under-30s (whom I presume are the intended audience for this piece) are familiar. Whedon blazed a trail in creating popular strong female fantasy characters, who are just as violent as men, albeit with matchstick-like figures. But, even acknowledging the fact that few are talented enough to match his genius, it should be interesting to see what happens if such themes are played out in an Irish context. And indeed, in O'Rowe's Ireland, Toto, we're not in Sunnydale anymore. This is ugly, heartless scissor-sister-land, bleak and irredeemable. That in itself is a worthwhile exercise; apply a genre to a culture, and draw your own conclusions. However, for that to come off successfully on stage, the end result has to be dramatic. But, this was a trio of actors taking turns reciting verse, telling us their stories, rooted to the spot. There is not a moment's silence in the 100 or so minutes - we are bombarded with clever rhyming words. The actors do not relate at all to each other onstage, they take turns to speak, segueing into each other's words without giving us a second to assimilate. The characters turn out to be linked to each other in the plot, in a time-warped elliptical way, but there isn't much to connect them otherwise. One character is a psychopathic persecutor, one a hapless victim, one an insanely foolish rescuer. But this drama triangle is curiously undramatic, because all the action is reported, not enacted. The actors are disconnected, from each other and from us. The fragmented narrative is echoed in the bare set, which is simply a framed fourth wall, a mirror that is smashed as a curtain-raiser, with the actors behind it standing up to say their piece and sitting down again. But the mirror might as well have remained intact for all the interest O'Rowe had in empathising with the audience. For this felt like a manifestation of a particular kind of masturbatory male sexuality, with which I am overly familiar; it's hot to watch sometimes, if the guy is fit, trendy and knows how to put on a display. But if he oozes arrogance and seems to think he's God's gift, and only gets off on the concept that someone is watching him, then the appeal is transitory, as appealing as a quick hand-job in the bushes. There might, conceivably, be a frisson of pleasure if he took the time to arouse me, to invite me to collude in his fantasy, to play the game with him. But such a guy doesn't stand a chance to win me over, if I want to be made love to. I've been made love to in the theatre by playwrights, male and female. I've been treated to foreplay, teasing, encouragement; I've been cajoled and inveigled and persuaded to care, to relax, to trust. Open wide, this will only hurt a little. I've been tickled and stroked and cuddled, and squeezed so tight I could hardly breathe. And I have been right royally fucked in the theatre, in violent, sexual plays like Matt Harris' Jack the Lad and Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking. And if the rhythm is right, the setting is right, the chemistry is right, then actors and audience come together in a climax of emotional impact - whether that be pain, tears, love, shock, horror, laughter or joy. Perhaps, not for the first time, I am asking too much. I did not feel that the production was even attempting to engage my emotions, to relate to me as an equal, although the individual actors tried their best, isolated in their cold circles of light. I felt that I was supposed to be an admirer of his cocky, manipulative, wordy prowess. This is perhaps why I have reacted so negatively. Or, at least, if there was supposed to be pleasure in being dominated and brutalised by a production, then please gain my trust first, and then do my head in. That's informed consent. The programme is the published script, and on perusing it now, it actually reads very well. It should, therefore, be produced on the radio. Eileen Walsh, through sheer force of will, managed to get me to care about her character, and her commitment to tell the story of falling for her grotesque demon lover was impressive. And when Andrea Irvine described her gruesome murderous moment, the audience squirmed and groaned. But if O'Rowe (as both writer and director) was interested in alluding to his motives for making his actors tell such shocking tales of degradation, abuse and butchery, he failed to communicate it to me. Context is all. Is this what's fashionable now in Irish theatre? A meretricious showy sub-Tarantino Dub loquaciousness? Is psychology, by which I mean the curiosity about human motivation, passé? As the dynamic Aidan Kelly reaches the end of his tale, and tells us about his character's eviscerating descent to oblivion, we hear nothing sensible about how he came to live a life of such psychotic depravity. He sings an absurd song - correction, he describes himself singing an absurd song. It made the audience laugh. Well, that's alright then. I am a firm believer in the use of theatre as a safe space for us to explore our shadow. Sure, place as much base immoral and abusive behaviour as can be tolerated by an audience onstage, as long as we are informed of the motives, the agonies, the cruelties, the values, the choices behind it, as long as it is interrogated dramatically, there is light and shade. That way, we can both be shocked by the dark material, and yet also shiver in recognition, and in that catharsis we advance our knowledge of the human condition a millimeter or two. But without that emotional connection to the audience, the violence and the sex and the satanic shenanigans become gratuitous and pornographic. Maybe if I liked porn I'd have liked this show. But I doubt it.

The Crucible is a big play about big themes. It addresses weighty issues such as faith and superstition, collective hysteria and paranoia, the price of integrity, the explosive anarchic power of repressed sexuality, the cost of infidelity, and the way scapegoats serve to maintain social order and bolster shaky notions of piety. Not having seen it before, its reputation as one of the much-studied classics of American theatre preceded it, and so, to be honest, I was expecting an intellectual discourse that would leave me enriched on a mental level, but one where I'd probably have to leave my emotions at home, except possibly for "intrigued". The beginning met my sombre expectations, and I braced myself for a long, worthy night - although the superb new shape of the auditorium happily banished many dreary memories of feeling disconnected from the Abbey stage. A candle flickered into life in the dark, and we were faced with a grey abstract monolithic box, walls like slabs, and a huge overhanging girder, giving the space an oddly anachronistic industrial-era resonance. I doubt one could create a grimmer, more alienating set. The darkness receded under a horizontal shaft of cold white light, to reveal a body laid out in front of us like a corpse. Men and women, dressed in monochrome, brought a pale semblance of life to the stage, as they fretted about the inexplicably comatose girl, Betty Parris, and what she and her friends had been doing in the woods together the previous night, to leave her in such a state. The bleakness had a strong effect on me - I found myself starved for colour, for warmth, for signs of vitality, for some relief. The girl's father, Peter Hanly's Reverend Parris, a neurotic ferret of a man overwhelmed by a terror of witchcraft rumours spreading, set the uneasy tone of the times for us: tense, volatile, unhappy. A queasy helplessness dominated, a lack of ability to be rational, grounded, sensible. We heard the story of Ann Putnam, a simple woman failing to make sense of the pain of having had so many of her babies die in her arms, and how she had arrived at her deeply flawed conclusions, that set in train the events that were to destroy so many people's lives. Intense grief can warp our rationality, and once I had connected with that, through Marion O'Dwyer's goosebump-raising performance, it began to be clear how magical thinking could flourish in that community, like a pale and sickly growth mushrooming overnight on rotting wood, and I knew that I was in for a gripping night of theatre. The frenzied hysteria gathered momentum, and took on a frightening life of its own, and accusations of witchcraft flew around, ensnaring dozens in a cruel double-bind: confess to witchcraft and name others who have walked with the devil, or face a guilty charge, and death. The story became a simple but moving one: how each person struggled to retain their integrity in the face of irrational hate and fear. The Reverend John Hale (Peter Gowen), a witchcraft expert, called in to investigate the girls' disturbing behaviour, led by the manipulative Abigail Williams (Ruth Negga), began by impressing with his calm rationality but he, too, got swept up in the storm, as the cases snowballed and went to trial. A farmer, John Proctor (Declan Conlon) and his wife Elizabeth (Cathy Belton), whose marriage was already frosty due to his having had an affair with Abigail, found that their private troubles became the business of the courts, as they too found themselves accused, and betrayed. Another farmer, the eccentric and wily Giles Corey (played to comic perfection by Tom Hickey), moved heaven and earth to obtain justice for his accused wife. The simplicity and fluidity of this production by Patrick Mason (even though I saw it at first preview) was deeply impressive, because at every twist and turn the emotions of the characters were available to us and instantly understandable. The audience tittered with nerves when the young girls' collective hysteria was at its most disturbing and creepily infectious. When we heard what unhappy fate befell Giles Corey in the last act, so much had he endeared himself to us, the effect was devastating. The strain in the Proctors' marriage was achingly familiar, and the thaw in their relationship, when it finally came, brought tears to my eyes. John Proctor's character, so flawed and passionate and heroic, is proof alone of Arthur Miller's genius as a playwright, but Conlon and Belton's superb performances brought immediacy and heart to his words. This was ensemble acting at its best - clear as a bell, accessible, taut, generous, not a weak link in the chain, not a false note struck in the entire evening. It seemed utterly right that the accents were Irish, unforced, natural. By the end of the night, I found myself still hating the mechanical oppressiveness of the set, the accusing, interrogative, blinding light of each scene change, a hint to force us, perhaps, to question our own capacity to be swept away by hysteria. But I liked the fact that there was no reference to the 1950s and the McCarthy era; the psychological truth of The Crucible is timeless. However much as I disliked the greyness of the environment, the humanity of each character seemed even more palpable as a result. This production worked for me because it didn't have an angle, the director had no high-concept axe to grind, his sole interest and achievement was to allow his gifted actors to tell a great story well. Sometimes we need the plainest of settings to enable us to see gems at their sparkling best.

It's not often that you get a guarantee that you will get your money back if you don't laugh in a show, as John Pickering of the Dublin Gay Theatre Festival promised us, when he introduced The Gaydar Diaries to a full house on the opening night of the festival last night. The show premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 2006, and is now at the charming little New Theatre, at the back of the Connolly Bookshop in East Essex Street, beside the Project, for one week only. It is the brainchild of London-based Dutchman Menno Kuijper, who wrote it along with the five other members of the cast, and the show has a distinctly English feel to it, with distinct echoes of Little Britain and the League of Gentlemen. This is light entertainment, burlesque, slapstick; energetically and slickly performed. It's a sketch show, and as such the reflection it offers us on the phenomenon of gaydar, how it has fundamentally changed the way gay men relate and have sex with each other, is more like that given off by a disco glitter ball than anything clearer or more accurate. It does convey the ridiculousness of what we men can get up to online, and practically every fetish I've come across (ahem) was touched on. Some of the sketches were a bit laboured, however, and, for all the evident talent in the cast, they lacked a certain bite in the writing. The romantic characters, those who yearned for something more substantial, tended to be portrayed as feather-boa-clad sentimental fools, misfits in the world of gaydar. One affecting monologue stood out, a man who had just logged off for good, and was determined to be "a person, not a profile". The simplicity and honesty of those words was then drowned out by more sex slapstick, more barechested lads with gorgeous pecs, and the the argument was lost. As it is in "real" online life. But, did I laugh? Oh yes. Everyone in the audience did, I am sure. It is for this reason that I think this show is a must-see for gay men - we need to laugh at ourselves, and I think there is a real need for us to get a perspective on what we do online. Reflective thinking is really hard to do when our dicks are in control. The conversation my group had afterwards in the bar was, I hope, not the only one of its kind sparked by the show - reminiscences of various online and offline sexual encounters, the absurdity of them, the loneliness of them, the fun of them, the splendid futility of them. A sketch show is too light a vehicle to carry the weight of the deeper, more troubling aspects of online networking - the social isolation, the lack of authenticity, the game-playing; the troubling issues of barebacking and HIV, the age of consent and the protection of vulnerable children. At times, it felt like a mareketing vehicle for gaydar, and perhaps it is, for they have contributed to the show. And yet, there isn't a better way to get you thinking and talking about all these things than by wrenching yourself away from your keyboard and going to a show like this and having a good laugh. Like gaydar and the men you meet through it, it's all just a bit of harmless fun. Isn't it? Venue: THE NEW THEATRE Dates:- MON. 7th - SAT. 12th MAY Time: 9.30pm Tickets: €14 (Conc. €12) Sat. Matinee @ 3pm €10

A lot of people search the web for information about Roger Casement, and some of them end up here on my blog to read about my finding a 1993 BBC Radio 4 documentary on him, to listen to it, and to read the Bootboy article I wrote about hearing it. So I thought I'd add two more essays of mine, for your reading pleasure, both of which were published in Diary of a Man. The first, Roger Casement and Cock, was written in May 1995: We should see the contrast between the ecstatic slavering cocksucker and the urbane, idealistic politician, burning with compassion for the dispossessed and downtrodden. We should see that they are but two sides of the same man. more... The second, Roger Casement's Gaydar profile, was written in 2003: The “struggle of the homosexual conscience” is not a generic thing, it is always individual, and has more in common with any man’s struggle with his desire nature than anything specifically to do with finding men or women horny. The fascinating thing about Casement is not that he had struggles with his sexuality, but that he wrote about them, in quite a dull-witted way. He was no Wilde. Why should he have been? more... Tags: casement rogercasement irish gaydar patriot sex men masculinity queer gay ireland porn

A poem written and performed for "Love Poetry Hate Racism" at Crawdaddy Dublin on 22nd April 2007

This homecoming business is tricky. The subtleties and nuances of Irish life, my new Irish life, are proving to be more challenging than I had anticipated. Although, of course, I should not be surprised. Memory is a trickster. The deeper, more personal reasons why I left in the first place have, of course, not gone away. I should know better, and I do, but somehow it doesn’t help. I no longer have the luxury or the romance of being an exile, can no longer wrap myself in the “wounded Irish Catholic” frock coat, fleeing to liberal godless England to seek solace from the savage wounds of sexual shame and preach smugly from the outside, looking in. There is no one else to blame now, I’m a grown up; no one really has any sympathy. Nor should they. Move on, get over it, get over myself. Get up to speed: Dublin is a confident, brash, fast-moving, aggressive city. Sex is as freely available here as it is in London. Ireland has moved on from all that mournful confessional guilt-ridden melancholy shite, and so should I. nSometimes I feel as if I never left, and thirteen years have gone in the blink of an eye, leaving me not one iota wiser, nor with enough resilience or confidence to define myself comfortably, to find my place here, to know what it is I stand for, to know what on Earth I came back for. At other times I realise that, whatever curing process I went through in London, (as in ham, not in ailment), it has given me a capacity to detach and analyse what goes on here in a way that I would never have been able to do otherwise. nnn Family defines the individual in Irish life, to a quite extraordinary degree, especially in comparison to the English. In naming this, and expressing reservations about this, I may sound like I’m being ungrateful or critical of my own family, but that is not my point, for they have been unfailingly kind and supportive. But my reasons for escaping to the big smoke, apart from the obvious, such as studying and getting qualifications, were to do with subtler stuff, trying to reinvent myself on my own terms. Now that I’m back, and the bosom of my family awaits me, a thirteen-year-old gap indented on it like a morning pillow, my struggle to figure out what I want, and am able for, without reference to them, seems a chimera, an exotic conceit, a self-indulgent whimsy that is the disappointing result of far too much therapy and far too little responsibility. I know I’m not alone in this - many people I know find the issue of negotiating a comfortable distance between members of their families a vexing one. For some, it is a hazardous toxic minefield, for some it is an icy wasteland. When family bonds are too close, when people feel that they don’t have enough space to breathe or be different, there is friction, resentment, rage; sparks can fly. At the other extreme, some families, especially those that I’ve encountered in England, can make neglect and detachment an art form, and it is amazing any of them survive their childhoods at all, for lack of warmth. nNo matter how old we are, we can still feel like we’re six years old when we’re with our parents, with childish reactions that are way off the scale of rationality, and of that I’m more guilty than most. But I guess the challenge is to find a balance that works, and that is kind, and that is fun, and on that score I’m not worried, and am far luckier than most. nI left Ireland, it turned out, to expose myself to the psychic vacuum of reserved English tolerance and distant politeness, to explore anonymity and invisibility and sex and ideas and relationships, to see what happened when all the flabby sentimental guilt-soup stuff was atomised. I’ve been left with the bare bones of me. Coming back into the maelstrom of Irish life, it’s jarring. I need padding, I need something to buffet me, to protect me from the high-volume, high-intensity emotional currents that seem ubiquitous here. And with any strong current, the choice has to be made to allow yourself to be swept along, to follow what is expected of you, or to find the solid rock underneath and stand your ground, or to attempt to swim against it, like salmon up a weir. And I honestly don’t quite know what I want to do. Friends are advising me to wait, to see what happens, that it will become clear in time, and I’m sure they are right. nHomecoming myths aren’t much use to me now. After the traveller returns, there usually isn’t much of a story left to tell. Either it all goes horribly wrong, or it all ends happily ever after. I don’t think either is likely, but it does seem that I’d better start thinking of some new stories. Those of us trying to make sense of the new Ireland, who are making our homes here, either returning émigrés like me or new immigrants, are working on mythological new ground. Now, more than ever, we have to make it up as we go along. nnn n nnnn

Written as Katherine Zappone and Ann Louise Gilligan's case to have their marriage recognised in Ireland went to the High Court. October 2006. nnnnnnn Tags: nnkalcasen nmarriagen ngayn nqueern nlesbiann nmenn nrelationshipsn n

Written for the environment issue of Hot Press, October 2006.n nnnnnnnn Tags: nnenvironmentn nplanetn nfeminismn nmasculinityn necologyn n

A reading of a Bootboy article in the 2006 student issue of Hot Press, September 2006. I've just moved into my new flat in the Liberties. nn nnnnnn Tags: nnbootboyn nstudentn naccommodationn nflatdwellingn ndublinn npodcastn n

I see him standing there, across the tramlines, and I can not keep my eyes away from him. I don't think he notices me staring, but he may have already spotted me, and is just playing it cool. He is wearing my school uniform. He is around sixteen or seventeen years old. He is camp in the way I was at his age - defiant sartorial statements of whimsical non-conformity. With me, it was a giant Tom Baker-like scarf in school colours, knitted patiently by my mother, that swooshed around my neck and went down to my ankles. With him, it is a fussy little keyring on a chain with a toy on the end, and highlighted hair, and a defiant upward tilt of the jaw, at the queeny degree, as employed by Larry Grayson and Julian Clary and Kenneth Williams and Murray Melvyn and Quentin Crisp and generation after generation of angular, delicate men. I see it in myself sometimes, and caught sight of it in a photo of me recently - like a patrician swan. What is it about that set of the jawline, that flared-nostril equine whinny of a posture? It is theatrical, operatic, even. But it’s classless - the fiercest jaw angles I’ve ever seen have been from Sherriff St flats. To call it effeminate is inaccurate, for I don’t see many women queening it around like that. Yes of course there are female divas who glide around as if amidst adoring crowds, but they’ve usually gone to ballet class or had a few singing lessons in their time. Most women, like most men, keep their jaw angles below the horizontal. I think it’s time that masculinity stretched its spectrum a little wider to include this sort of campness, for it is not an imitation of the feminine, nor a mockery of it, it is a body language that comes naturally and distinctively to a certain kind of man. It does imply a self-consciousness, a heightened awareness of some kind, which may perhaps be a result of the experience of being different, rather than a necessary component to it. But there is also a defiance, a confidence, a knowingness. Some of the most insecure men I’ve ever met have been those who have beaten it out of them, forced their body language into a parody of masculinity, an over-muscled butchness that is as recognisably queer as is the regal stare down the bridge of the nose. That’s not to say that the language of the body, indeed the body itself, can’t be a sign of an unhealthy submission to the feminine, to the maternal. There’s a Z-list celeb that comes to mind, known only to people who watched TV in the early 1990s, a precocious bow-tied 12-year-old antiques “expert” who once appeared on Wogan, called James Harries. Now an affected young woman called Lauren, she was the subject of a hostile documentary earlier this year where it was reported that the counsellor credited with “guiding” the young man to gender re-assignment was, in fact, his mother, using an alias and questionable qualifications. This goes against so many ethical codes that it is impossible to know where to begin, but it does seem that his/her attachment to his jailer/mother is so absolute, his desire to become her/impress her so deeply rooted, that to try and separate them would be counterproductive, harmful. They still live together. As a Freudian horror story, I don’t think it can be bettered. But as I look at the sixteen-year-old across the tracks/in the mirror I realise that there’s nothing murky going on, no malignancy, no aberration from the “norm” of masculinity. He is simply himself, shining away. I imagine him smelling of Clearasil and menthol cigarettes, just like I did. He’s on his way into the city, on his own - the other lads from his class are on my platform, mucking around on the tracks, on their way out to the suburbs and home. I was exactly the same - I used to head off into town after school whenever I could, having lunch with my friends at the Hirschfeld Centre, posing in Bewley’s or being bought lunch by Wildean Trinity scholars reading me Proust while dying to get into my tight grey schoolboy slacks. It was all very exciting, somewhat bewildering and confusing, and it did go to my head and affect my studies, no doubt about it. But I wouldn’t have changed it for the world. It’s lovely to see him, a curious synchronistic manifestation of the hypothetical sixteen-year-old that I have always borne in mind when writing this column, the imaginary kid that was me/not me. It’s good when things are exactly as you imagine them to be. Tags: adolescence sixteen sexuality masculinity queer

When they came for the communists, I did not speak out; I was not a communist. When they came for the socialists, I did not speak out; I was not a socialist. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for the Jews, I did not speak out; I was not a Jew. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out. This poem was written by the Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller, a complex figure who was antisemitic and supported the Nazis until they turned against him, and imprisoned him. He became, later on in life, a world religious leader, a respected pacifist until his death in 1984. Its tone is far from idealistic - it is pragmatic, ironic, defeated, the antithesis of idealism. It is a confession. His words are nagging at me, as I try to weave my way through themes of offensive cartoons, violence, religion, blasphemy and free speech. When I was a rebellious teenager, I wore a large metal pink triangular badge, with a version of his poem inscribed on it, that included homosexuals in the list of groups that were taken. It is legitimate to do so, if only because by the time Niemöller was sent to Dachau in 1941, there weren’t many left alive there. They were the lowest of the low in the hierarchy of prisoners. The Third Reich’s Office for Combating Abortion and Homosexuality, established in 1934, had been ruthlessly efficient. Himmler had ordered a “scientific” programme for the eradication of “this vice”. I’ve been to Dachau and seen the exhibition there; the photographs of the “experiments” are in my memory for life. I’m trying to square in my mind the principles of free speech, the right to say anything I want, with the principles of tolerance and respect for people who are different to me. On an interpersonal level, it is a dynamic balance; the person who is truthfully blunt, bordering on psychopathy, saying whatever he feels like, may continually get into fights, and not have any friends. The person who forever dances around other people’s sensitivities, overly empathic, may lose all sense of identity, dignity and self-respect. It is, therefore, an issue of relationships, and the inevitable working compromises that people must make in order to get along. People may be willing to die and kill for their ideals, but only if relationships have broken down to such a sorrowful extent that a rallying cry is necessary to bring about change. Vincent Browne in the Irish Times rightly mentioned the Gay News blasphemy case as being relevant to the current furore, when Mary Whitehouse successfully prosecuted the newspaper for publishing a lusty, pungent poem by James Kirkup called The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name. Not only is it about a centurion having hot sex with a queer Christ, it’s a centurion having hot sex with a dead queer Christ. “I kissed his mouth /My tongue found his /bitter with death /I licked his wounds /the blood was harsh.” When I wanted to write about Jesus in Hot Press in 1994, I suggested that they republish the poem in full to accompany my piece. It didn’t happen, I quite understood why, and nothing more was said about it. I honestly didn’t feel like going to the barricades over it. Sure, the poem has a queer shock-value, even to a pagan like me, and it highlights the suffering that queers endure(d) when they love(d). But, perhaps, Kirkup’s words were just too far ahead of their time. The poem was more like an angry hot poker stabbed into the painful Christian flesh/spirit wound, rather than a criticism or lament. We lost a damn fine newspaper as a result. The same issue has been exercising Christians again, recently, in their campaigning against the showing of Jerry Springer, the Opera - it has resulted in thousands becoming more politicised in defence of their faith, protesting against it being shown in theatres and on TV. They believe the show mocks Christianity in its comical depiction of a man in nappies believing he’s Christ and is a “little bit gay”. The campaign is working, apparently, in keeping crowds away from the touring show. I passionately disagree with the activists, and do not believe the show’s intention was to offend anyone; indeed, I think the show has a distinctly refreshing and rudely healthy moral stance. But I believe they have a right to do what they are doing. They have been hear-no-evil see-no-evil prigs, but of the non-violent kind. The Mohammed cartoons are also Google-able. They, too, have a shock-value - if I were looking at them, and had an Islamic faith, I would be outraged. But you don’t need to be a believer; just have a capacity to empathise with someone who holds some things sacred. I winced when I saw them. Especially as everyone knows, or should know, that in Islam, graphic portrayal of the human (let alone the divine) form has a taboo potency and meaning that is very different to that of the liberal European Judeo-Christian tradition. It’s down to relationships, and how they have gone sour. The newspaper that published them in Denmark is the largest newspaper in the country, and is relatively conservative. It decided not to publish cartoons of Jesus Christ in 2003, on the grounds that its readers would not “enjoy them... they would provoke an outcry”. Two years later, it did not care about provoking an outcry among its Muslim readers. But, in this day and age, one has to suspect that there was a conscious or unconscious desire to do exactly that, by publishing the cartoons. The editor refused to apologise then, nor could he express his appreciation the level of offence that Danish Muslims experienced. “Religion shouldn’t set any barriers” to the expression of satire, he said. The paper has since issued an apology, but too late. Too much hurt, humiliation, projection, and mistrust. Then, it became an issue that got politicised and globalized, and hot-headed young men lose their lives in the great World Split between Islam and the Infidels of the Godless West. It starts local. It always does. If we attend to our interpersonal and inter-cultural relationships in our own neighbourhood, community and city, and come to some working arrangement with each other that shows we have respect for other traditions and that we don’t intend to offend, then we can ensure that something like the Danish Cartoons episode doesn’t happen in Ireland. Oh, yes, I know why I’m thinking of Niemöller now. The violence on our streets at night, against gay men, is not being taken seriously by the general media. Recently someone has been arrested and charged with several assaults over the past year in the Christchurch area, including that of someone who was left in a coma last year. This good piece of detective work has gone unreported, apart from the local and gay press. I don’t know whether there are any attacks on other minority groups happening to a similar degree. When I was at Kevin St Garda station after my attack in 2002, they told me that the assaults they dealt with had been usually racially motivated. Is this a pattern? If the main newspapers don’t report on a vicious serial attacker being arrested ,whose victims were gay men, then how do I know whether or not that the same sort of focussed hatred against other minority groups is happening or not? Are they feeling victimized or are they enjoying life in Ireland? Are they scared to go out at night? Do they know people who have been attacked? It matters enormously because we need to know if there’s a problem with violence on our streets and intimidation before people in minority groups start getting angry as a community, and losing trust in the authorities, and picking fights. That’s when the real problems begin. Fire needs to be put out when it springs up, before the winds of world politics fan it into something unmanageable and chaotic. Before people get killed. 17th February 2006 Tags: fundamentalism mohammed cartoons christianity blasphemy danish homophobia islam ireland minorities fascism dublin queer gay glbt podcast

My last weekend here was a bit of a blur. The nearby town of Montisi has a jousting tournament, the centrepiece of a week-long festival. The town is divided into four contradas, or quadrants, Piazza, San Martin, Torre and Castello, and competition between each is intense. The whole town decks itself out in contrada colours, flags and emblems that have not changed since medieval times, and each contrada puts on an extravagant street party and meal before the jousting. Because my friends are in Castello contrada, I dined with them, and was then baptized with wine into the contrada. The meal was long but delicious, and our table snaked itself down through the curved narrow streets of the innermost section of the old town. Loads of singing and Mexican waves and table-thumping and cheering. Afterwards there was a disco, and the disdain that most Italians normally have for drunkenness is abandoned in Montisi, for this weekend only. It was cheerful mayhem. The following day, Sunday, the four teams parade through the town and to a field outside. There was thunder and lightning about but it didn't rain. There was competitive banner waving and throwing to begin with, won by Piazza, and then, after an ambulance took someone away who had collapsed in the crowd, the organizers, in a flurry of guidebook reading, realised they had to stop everything and wait for the ambulance to come back before they could continue with the tournament. It didn't take too long, though. The jousting was fun, and dramatic in a very Italian way; one horse's shoe fell off, and had to be replaced, to vociferous complaints from the other contradas. In the competition, a disputed zero point judgment from the jury in round three had one rider storming off in a tantrum. He had to be practically dragged back to ride, in the fourth and final round, to clinch victory for the Piazza contrada. Tags: montisi jousting festival cretesenesi toscana

As I wasn't blogging a year ago, I'm republishing the article I wrote after the bombings on the 7th July 2005, a day I'll never forget. Silent Pillows8th July 2005 Late at night, I can hear two things, usually, that remind me where I am, give me a sense of place. If the wind is right, the sound of Big Ben drifts over the West End, and reaches me through my open window. The other, more regular noise, is a soft rumbling, when my ear is pressed to my pillow: the Piccadilly line underneath me, between Kings Cross and Russell Square. The day before, I’d discovered something about my relationship to London, through a Freudian slip. I was with a client, and I heard cheers from the office next door. "Oh," I said, "we've won the Olympics". Then, I said, bemused, having heard myself, "Oh. I said 'we'." My client smiled, having noticed it too. This Irishman is a Londoner? Could it be, after years of resistance, in spite of everything, and in particular in spite of myself, just as I’m planning my getaway, that I’ve adopted this city, or allowed it to adopt me? I was genuinely pleased, though - the London games will be excellent, and I think that Stratford, an area I worked in for 3 years, and whose people I grew to love, will benefit enormously from the games. I like the multicultural aspect to the bid - for I believe that it’s authentic. London manages its enormous diversity well, probably better than any other city. I get the papers, which are full of London’s celebrations, and hope for the future in Edinburgh and the G8. In particular, Messers Geldof and Bono are doing Ireland proud, pricking the world’s conscience, articulating a humane passionate logic that Blair is allowing himself to champion, forcing the most powerful men in the world to engage with it. I switch off the radio news at 9am to do some writing, just as the first bomb goes off. The helicopters are annoying. But there are often helicopters around town. The sirens on the police cars are unusual though, in such numbers; and the speed with they thunder through our local sidestreets is very unusual. Then the phone rings, and my friend Ed says “hi” and I say “hello” and I settle down for a chat. He is surprised. “Haven’t you heard? ” he says, in that tone of voice. “No, what’s happening now? ” I say, and I begin walking and reaching for the TV remote, in that curious automatic way that is familiar since 9/11 - a heart sinking, a preparation to surrender to the monster that is 24-hour disaster TV. Then I enter a curious half-world, and I don’t think I’ve come out of it yet. My neighbourhood is there on TV, the bombs are exploding around me. I’ve not heard them, which I can’t understand. But on the screen, I’m looking at my local post office, my local tube stations, my local bank and bookshop and coffee shop, and the route I cycle every day. One of the buses I would take into town has exploded around the corner from my local fish and chip shop, in a street it shouldn’t be in. It’s powerfully disorientating. I hang up on Ed and call home. My Dad, cheerfully ignorant of the news, answers, so I am relieved that the folks are spared the panic. I try to call my sister but she’s away and the mobile network is down. All of London is trying to text or call on their mobiles, and the system is dead. The police say: “stay where you are”. That’s the sort of advice I realise I need to hear. OK. I stay where I am. I do not know how long the bombs are going to continue exploding. No one does. I try to contact a client who I’m supposed to see later but his mobile is down too. I realise I’m in the middle of a triangle of bombs all within a few hundred yards, or that’s what it seems like, for the first few hours. Later, a more macabre truth becomes clear, that it’s just been two bombs in my area, the bus being five minutes walk from me, and the Piccadilly tube carnage just a few hundred feet away, underneath my feet. On TV, its location is represented by a little orange explosion symbol, and it covers my street. My landline rings, repeatedly. My friends ring to check up on me. I am loved. A friend rings from Boston. I called her on 9/11. Is this what marks the twenty-first century? Is this how it’s going to be, from now on? We call each other at each terrorist outrage, checking that we’re safe? I worry about the lack of a mobile network. I want to text everyone. I can’t get hold of anyone. It’s not till 5pm that it starts beeping into life, and the texts start coming through the bottleneck, continuing through till midnight. I go out and wander around, and it’s eerie. Within five minutes, I see three separate cordoned-off areas. People are wandering around in a strange way, you can hear everyone talking because there’s no traffic - and I realise that they have all been decanted from the buses and the mainline and tube trains into an unfamiliar area, and they are not sure where they should go. Everyone has a mobile in their hand or pressed to their ear, trying to get a signal. There is a massive, authoritative, calm, police presence. The helicopters never cease battering the air above. I choose not to go near the police lines, don’t want to see any horrors, and retreat to the safety of my flat, and plug back in to the media. I am lucky. Nothing’s happened to me. As the numbers of dead and injured rise by the hour, I realise I’m not really taking it in. I know what a packed deep-level tube is like, stifling hot at rush-hour. It is hell enough. in the summer. To imagine a bomb in that crowded hot space is just not possible for me. A new feature in the news coverage, however, is the amateur mobile phone video, presaging what I imagine will become a very familiar way of covering disasters in the future on TV. From now on, nothing will be unrecorded, eye witnesses will have their phones to confirm their stories. Perhaps we will never have to imagine horror again. The twenty-first century is breathing down my neck. In the evening, stupefied and claustrophobic, I wander out for a take-away. A full twelve hours after the bombs, an ambulance rushes past, some poor creature having been presumably prised alive from the mangled train beneath. People are milling around the streets still, nowhere to go, no buses or trains, packing the pubs and restaurants. Queues form in my local late-night shop, snaking outside the door. American tourists are piling into the internet café next door to email home. A policeman gently escorts a man down the road. "You have no idea what we’ve been through today", he wails, in a Cavan or Monaghan accent, slightly drunk. "The screams!" he moans. That’s when my tears well up. I so want a hug. I want to get away from the area. I want to have sex, physical contact. I get none of those things. There’s nowhere to go. I sleep on silent pillows. The next morning, I dream that I wake up and see that the door to my bedroom has been bricked up, and I can’t get out. Then I wake up. *** There is something grimly predictable about this attack on London. Ever since Blair took Britain into war, these attacks and other attacks like them have been inevitable. Emergency workers, well-rehearsed for disaster, have said they have been "lucky". The way the city authorities responded to these attacks is something that Londoners are, rightly, very proud of. Through its popular mayor, Londoners categorically opposed the war, and can be rightly proud of that, too. But the Westminster imperial ruling class decided to follow Bush, unquestioningly, and lied to Londoners, and the rest of the British people, to ensure it happened. This is the inevitable result. The causes of terrorism are complex and bitter and are well known to Blair, through his intelligent grasp of Irish politics. But he has chosen to disregard them when it comes to dealing with fundamentalist arabist/Islamic terrorism, choosing to follow instead the US policy of simplistically claiming all that is good to the West, and projecting all that is evil on to the enemy. This is unforgivable. I hated his choice to go to war, lamenting the wound inflicted on the Arab nation, the insult to the United Nations, the ripping up of the Geneva Convention, the cynicism of Guantánamo, the humiliation of Fallujah, the ushering in of complete, terrifying anarchy, and the countless lives lost. I hate the wound inflicted on the city of London, now, the deliberate attack on ordinary innocent people, the spreading of fear, and the lives lost. But the bombers are not lunatics, they believe themselves to be soldiers in a war. As long as the West appears not to care for the lives lost and the blood shed and the daily fear that Iraqis and Palestinians now have to deal with, then, as ye sow, so shall ye reap. In psychology, boundary violations are the most painful (and often the most unconscious) wounds that we carry. It is when, as children, our emotional and bodily integrity is not respected, when someone more powerful than us interferes and invades us with inappropriate actions or thoughts or feelings, often covering them up with lies or deceptions. The rage that naturally follows is often impossible to express when we are young, but it’s the jet fuel for violence in adulthood, directed inwards through addictions or suicide, or outwards, compulsively and often criminally, against society, or others weaker than us. It is exactly the same for weak or undeveloped or divided nations, when impossibly powerful and bullying nations violate their integrity, and behave illegally and - most crucially - dishonourably. (I am not saying Arabs are children here - the argument is about responsible use of power, not psychological maturity. Abu Ghraib, anyone?). The rage against injustice, against humiliation, against lies, against hypocrisy, against indecency, is what fuels these wounded men to do what they do now. It perpetuates the hatred, widens the split between the West and the Arab world, and this is going to dominate the rest of this century’s politics. And Blair, of all figures on the world stage at the moment, must bear a large responsibility for it, precisely because he knows better. What Londoners have been through in the past 24 hours is what people have had to live with in Northern Ireland for decades. But the path to the uneasy (yet increasingly settled) peace there is the same awkward, painful, painstaking, teeth-gritting path that must be taken in bringing peace to the Middle East (and by extension, the rest of the world). The longer it’s avoided, the more people are going to die, the more days we will have like the 7th of July, 2005, in London. Tags: 7/7 london bombings terrorism blair kingscross underground tube fundamentalism 7thJuly

A piece I wrote and recorded a year ago on the 7th July, when I was living over the Piccadilly Line in London's Kings Cross, when the bombs went off.

3 minutes checking in. Thanks to Conn Ó Muíneacháin

letters written - moving from UK to Ireland

Easter, Duned.

No snake. Photography. Last night's concert. Photos.

Snake

Balloon - Berlusconi - smithy photos - self-absorption - morning pages - sowing seeds

Election result - desk clearing. April showers.

Starting the week by getting the name of the day wrong. Great.

I read that podcasts are more like voicemail or telephone answering machine messages and so I thought I'd leave you a few messages on a daily basis to see.

The renowned countertenor James Bowman sings in the garden of Senesino's villa in a concert organised by the "Friends of Musical Events" on 10th June 2006.

First really lovely Spring day...

The renowned countertenor James Bowman sings in the garden of Senesino's villa in a concert organised by the "Friends of Musical Events" on 10th June 2006.