Just Say Yes
6 minute read
It’s June here in New York, which means that from the shops on Fifth Avenue to the lights of the Empire State Building, the city explodes in rainbows. Pride is no longer just one day, or even one weekend, but a month long celebration with everything from parades to panel discussions, disco to dating, readings to romcoms. Over the past few years there’s been debate about whether it’s become too commercialised with some people choosing only to support grass roots events focused on LGBTQ rights, while others take it as an opportunity to revamp their wardrobes with the latest rainbow T-shirts, sunglasses, runners, bags, even workout wear. As a member of the LGBT community here in the city, it doesn’t really matter how you take part in Pride, just that you do.
Occasionally, I will hear someone ask whether we still need Pride, arguing that everyone should be proud of their lives, their sexuality, not only those of us who are gay. That, of course, is true, but just as some responded to the Black Lives Matter movement with signs declaring All Lives Matter, it stunningly misses the point. Of course, all lives matter, of course everyone should be proud of who they are, but the fact that these movements have had to come into existence at all demonstrates that something can be obvious and not necessarily be true. Chances are, if you are heterosexual, you are not attempting to rebalance the scales after decades, no, generations of shame. Even if you grew up in Ireland.
I’ve written here and in other places about what it was like to grow up gay in Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s. If you haven’t read my writing on this topic before, I’ll summarise it here: in the 80s in Ireland, basically no-one was gay and who could blame them? Not only was engaging in same sex activity a criminal offence (until 1993, when I turned 19) you could also count on being shunned, scorned, ridiculed and possibly physically assaulted. Oh, and there was the whole Hell thing to contend with as well. In my south county Dublin convent school we giggled and speculated about lesbians as much as anyone but I don’t think any of us actually knew – or at least knew if we knew – a real-life lesbian.
Today, we are committed to the idea – especially for women and girls – that to see something is a critical step in believing you can be it. It turns out that the opposite of that is true as well – to never see anyone who might represent who you are is equally powerful, not to mention confusing.
The Q in LGBTQ these days largely stands for Queer – a term that Millennials and Gen Zers seem much more comfortable reclaiming than midlifers like me – but before then, it commonly stood for Questioning. Questioning is something I got mixed messages about. On one hand, questioning was a good thing – being curious about and challenging political thinking, academic texts, even authority was held up as an important way to mature and settle on your own beliefs. But questioning of other things – like the Catholic Church for example – wasn’t exactly encouraged and questioning your sexuality didn’t seem like something you could do at all.
And despite that – despite the shame and silence – I can remember moments of my own questioning, of course I can. As an early teenager, I can remember the moment where I questioned if other girls my age were as drawn to looking at “Page 3” girls in the tabloid newspaper my granny got as I was, and later, at a rugby club disco, questioning if it was normal to feel as upset as I did when one of my friends was furiously getting off with one of the boys during a slow set. The answer to these questions seemed to be “no”, but I didn’t know what to do with that “no”, just like I didn’t know what to do when I had a suspicion on the same rugby club dancefloor that kissing my then boyfriend, I was supposed be feeling something different.
By the time I was 20, I knew one woman who had come out as gay – a brave soul a year or so older than me who I knew both from college and school. Late one night, after a few bottles of Budweiser, I asked a question out loud for the first time; I asked her what it felt like to kiss another girl. She was thoughtful and kind in her response and after she’d answered, she asked me a question of her own – if I thought I might like girls too? I remember the shock of that – of hearing her say that. And I remember how emphatically, I answered “no”.
For me that was a hard “no”, a “no” that shut down any more questions for almost a decade. It wasn’t until my early 30s after a monogamous heterosexual relationship I’d been in for over a decade came to an end that I became willing to ask them again. Sometimes people ask if I regret that, if that circuitous route to being who I ultimately am today feels like a waste, but I always tell them that it doesn’t. I know now that homophobia isn’t just an external thing, that it can grow inside you. Shame and silence create the perfect breeding conditions and if you fertilize with a healthy dollop of scorn you’ll end up with a healthy perennial crop. In my latest novel I’m just finishing, one character is ashamed of being in her mid 30s and still not “out”, but my protagonist reassures her “you get there when you get there” and I believe that to be true for me, for all of us. For me, belonging – being part of a group or family or community of people I love – has always been one of the most important things to me. At 20, I wouldn’t have jeopardised that for anything and back then, to me at least, it seemed if I was rejected there was no other group I could ever belong to.
The story of how I opened up to myself – my true self – is too long for this piece, but what I can share here are some of those other moments that came later, questions that I asked myself where I answered “yes” instead of “no”. Walking down Capel Street, worried that someone would see me going into Outhouse, wondering if it was really worth it to come into town on a Thursday night for their women’s group and sit with a bunch of people I didn’t know. One sunny Saturday morning in Sandycove after my run, looking out at the water, wondering if the risk of potentially losing friends was worth the potential gain in being true to myself. Looking into the eyes of the woman from New York who would later become my wife, when she asked me if I wanted her to kiss me.
These “yeses” and many more besides became the building blocks on which I’ve created my life today. Looking back on that time – on how frightened I was, how confused – I think it’s too simplistic to say I was afraid of being rejected by the people I love. Sure, that was a huge part – I can’t underestimate it – but there was something else; a deeper, more insidious fear that being gay would somehow cancel out all the other versions of myself that I worked so hard to be.
Yvonne, the daughter, the friend, the writer would somehow be trumped by “Yvonne the lesbian” – that my identity would become all about my sexuality, that no-one would be able to see past it and in some way that those other versions of me would cease to exist at all.
Spoiler alert, if this is the fear of anyone reading this – it’s not what happens. From this vantage point I can see with absolute certainty that by finally embracing my sexuality I’ve come into a stronger, more solid version of myself than I ever was before. Not only am I still Yvonne the daughter, the friend, the writer, I’ve been able to grow into Yvonne the partner, the wife and a whole host of other versions of me besides. And I am better in each of those roles because I’ve been able to show up for all the relationships in my life in a better way. I’ve been able to do this because being fully, wholly who I am has enabled me to nurture my most important relationship: the relationship with myself.
So in Pride Month here in New York City and all over the world, it is a time to celebrate, a time to say “yes”. Yes, to difference, yes to inclusion, yes to joy, yes to being seen, to being visible, yes, of course, to love. And yes, to pride – to being proud – to be exactly who we were meant to be, all of us. To be exactly who we are.
Yvonne Cassidy, June 2022
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