Tuesday, January 03, 2017

JUST OVER a year since the first same-sex marriages were registered in Ireland, following the introduction of marriage equality by public vote, a County Wexford expat has established a network to record the experiences of LGBT emigrants who may have felt compelled to leave Ireland as they didn’t feel free to live life as their true selves here.

Social worker Paul Dowling (32), who now resides in Chicago, was one of those to marry a same-sex partner in County Wexford this year.

Since moving abroad in 2010, Mr. Dowling said he has “found the space and freedom I needed to come out.”

One of seven siblings to grow up in rural County Wexford in the 1980s, Mr. Dowling has described how he felt different from his peers as he grew up without a passion for sports or tractors but instead with a hankering to wear his sister’s shoes and grow his hair long.

“In several very important ways my childhood had a great beauty to it,” he wrote of growing up in rural County Wexford, before following up to add, however, that he could not “claim to have been a happy child and certainly not one who ever felt free.

“Growing up gay in Ireland, I spent years being lonely in a very particular way.

“I was surrounded by friends and family but my shame and secrets kept us at arm’s length from one another.

“I never felt connected to them or that they were seeing a true version of me.”

However, he said, he had “very happy memories of Christmases with family and friends in Ireland and would love the opportunity to be with them this year.”

This year, Mr. Dowling and his husband will spend their first Christmas together as a married couple.

“Learning to be open here has also taught me to be open with my family and friends in Ireland,” he said.

“I now live a very open life both here in the US and when I’m at home.”

Mr. Dowling’s wedding in Gorey this year was a joyous family occasion and the very first wedding attended by his “scatter of nieces and nephews”, who are mostly aged six and under.

“The wedding of two men,” he emphasized.

“That day they received a very powerful and positive message (that they possibly didn’t even realise) about what relationships can look like.”

Although his family “have been very supportive”, he is aware that this is not everyone’s experience.

“Younger people are still being bullied and harassed,” he said.

“Mental health among the LGBT community still trails far behind that of the straight community.

“I work with older people and I’m concerned as to whether older LGBT people are being included in this wave of inclusion or whether their story is being told,” he outlined.

Mr. Dowling has begun ‘At Home Abroad’: a project which seeks to collect the personal accounts of LGBT Irish emigrants to better understand their experiences of leaving Ireland and how the immigrant experience might have been impacted by being LGBT.

While the Irish Government, Mr. Dowling said, has made significant efforts to engage members of the Irish diaspora throughout the world, they have not officially recognized minorities among the global Irish.

The County Wexford expat is hoping that the stories collected can be used to convince the Irish Government to officially recognize LGBT experiences in diaspora policy.

“I’d love people to know what the project is trying to do both in terms of collecting stories and trying to make an argument for the inclusion of LGBT emigrants in official diaspora policy,” he said.

Issuing a call-out to people both living in Ireland and to emigrants abroad and home for the holidays, he said all were “very welcome to contribute their own stories to the project.”

Mr. Dowling was inspired to begin the ‘At Home Abroad’ project after reading recently-published articles about young LGBT people who had left Ireland in search of brighter prospects and greater freedom abroad.

“One was about a man who said that he felt he had to leave to come out and the other was from a young woman who felt that London was still a safe haven for those LGBT people who didn’t feel comfortable being LGBT in Ireland,” he outlined.

With the overwhelming ‘yes’ vote for marriage equality and a number of other developments, Mr. Dowling said he feels that “Ireland has made incredible strides in being more accepting of the LGBT community that has always been there.

“The marriage equality referendum was an incredible thing that really gave a sense of Ireland being a place where equality and inclusion of LGBT people mattered to the people of the country,” he said.

The industrious Mr. Dowling did not wish to downplay the importance of Ireland’s achievement in this regard, but described how he has seen many other aspects of society which remain to be made fully inclusive.

“Many people, even as ‘young’ as me, are still carrying around a lifetime of hurt, having been bullied, isolated and made invisible,” he said.

“There is a great deal of ‘internalised homophobia’ where LGBT people have the negative perceptions of LGBT people and harbour a lot of shame around being LGBT.

“The passing of marriage equality didn’t automatically reverse the effect.

“I think we need to stop assuming people are straight.

“I’m asked all the time if I have a wife, or if I mention that I’m married people ask where my wife is from.

“I think a great deal of this is rooted in the old idea that it’s rude to insinuate that someone is gay.

“Even something as small as this can reinforce otherness,” he said.

Changing the habit of people assuming or asking that he and others like him are married to women and not to men, he said, will require “a significant retraining of all our brains, even for those of us who are all about equality.

“I also think we need to remove institutions that pass judgement on a great number of things from controlling public education.

“What message does it convey if the organization the controls how the vast majority of our children are taught is opposed to LGBT people living as themselves?” he questioned in relation to the situation with school’s patronage in Ireland.

“It may sound redundant but it’s only through normalizing the LGBT population that we meaningfully become normal,” he stated emphatically.

For more information on Mr. Dowling’s campaign, or to share your LGBT experience, see athomeabroad.ie.

Read more in the Wexford Echo.