In Limerick City, I left my bag in a clean if dreary hotel room under a faded image of the blessed virgin in an imitation wood frame. I called Noreen from a payphone. I’d met her five years earlier on a tour of Britain and Ireland. She’d been acting in a local play I’d attended about the Irish famine. After the performance, I’d hung out across the street in the back of The White House Pub like my Spartacus guide had suggested. I wore my Silence Equals Death t-shirt, sending out a pink triangle beacon to anyone in the know. The objective wasn’t strictly sexual. I wanted to know what Irish gay life was like. It was easy. In ten minutes, I’d met what was presumably the entire gay scene of Limerick (including Noreen, whom I instantly recognized from the play). The group proceeded to get drunk along with the rest of the city’s population and spent the rest of the evening stumbling flamboyantly from one pub and disco to another. Nothing glamorous or dignified about it. Everyone knew who the dykes and the fags were, and they were treated with all the tolerance and understanding given to a child born with three arms and one leg. One of the queens had a seizure under the table in the disco late that night. This, apparently, was a regular occurrence. The little band of mixed queers was used to taking care of him. They got his tongue away from the back of his throat and got him calmed down and breathing. I was touched by this motley family’s protection of its members. The straights watched on with that mixture of pity and gratitude at not having been reduced to such a horrible existence.
Over the years, there were letters to and from Noreen and Declan, a young man who developed an instant crush on me and who refused to come into my hotel that night for a post-disco coffee because he had his “reputation” to think of. I’d only wanted to continue the conversation and have a coffee. When I left the next day, he presented me with a single long-stemmed Irish rose. His letters would later tell of his various suicide attempts—perhaps a dozen of them over a period of five years.
When I finally returned to Limerick on this visit, leaving my bags under Mary’s hallowed head, Declan was living down on a farm somewhere outside Cork where his boyfriend was recovering from a fag-bashing which had occurred in Limerick on a night they’d been both too trashed to remember. Who’d started slinging the first nasty words? What had the guy looked like? It was all a blur. Anyway, they wouldn’t be able to make it to Limerick to see me, because that was a long, long way from where they were living now…
Instead, I met Noreen in a pub. She was surrounded by an entourage of women, most of them gorgeous. This was a new generation of Irish gay youth. They had lesbian power pins. They were boycotting the White House Pub since one of the boys had been turned away for being too queeny. But as the alcohol continued to flow at an unbelievable rate (they’d each consumed around 10 beers in the space of maybe two hours), the conversation took a turn. Noreen’s girlfriend told me that she found gay men “amusing” because they could never manage to commit themselves to a relationship without having sex on the side sooner or later, and usually sooner. The other girls got into it. They agreed. They were angry about it, I discovered. They’d just gotten finished telling me about the terrible power of the Catholic church in Limerick City and its effect on the mentality of the locals. “The Pope’s an asshole, Don,” they explained as if I didn’t know. But now they were plying me with questions which could have come from the old monster himself:
“If you fancy a boy in Dublin, Don, will you invite him back to your hotel?”
“Uh, I dunno’. Maybe.”
“And what about your boyfriend back in Paris? What about him now?”
“Well, maybe he’s being invited back to someone else’s room at this very moment.”
“Oh, Jesus! You gay men are all alike, y’are.”
Was it just me, or was there was a hostility under the humor? Perhaps they felt that sluts like me were the reason homey dykes like themselves weren’t more respected by Irish society. But were they so respectable? I didn’t even ask them if they fooled around with girls outside their primary relationships, because it was none of my business, and I didn’t really care.
“What about with Declan? Did you have something with him, then?”
“No, Declan and I never exchanged so much as a kiss, in fact.”
“Oh, I was just wondering. I don’t talk to him much anymore. Not since they got into it with the taxi driver. Now I don’t know how it started, Don, but they were pissed off their faces, and as far as I’m concerned they were just askin’ for it.”
It was a small circle they lived in, and one false move meant losing the only support team in the vicinity. Declan had shut himself out of their community by getting fag-bashed. Perhaps he’d had too much to drink and had said the wrong thing to some butch guy he shouldn’t have spoken to. Or perhaps some guy had just creamed him because he happened to be gay and drunk at the same time. Now, he had lost his place in their world.
The courage it took them all to be out of the closet in this, the most Catholic of cities, under the watchful eye of the virgin and the church just over her shoulder, impressed me more than ever. I saw now how transient the support from even the most insular group could be. When a member became a burden to the family, he or she would have to be sacrificed to the threatening, outside world. I thought that perhaps under such conditions they were wise to form families on the Catholic model, for it was a practical survival mechanism in such a delicate, unforgiving society.
We headed out of the pub as it closed around midnight. Over the last couple of hours, Noreen and her friends hadn’t shown a trace of the liquor they’d been consuming. But suddenly, a dozen or so beers after we’d met up, everyone began weaving. We ventured out into the streets of Limerick where there wasn’t a soul who wasn’t doing the same or up to ten times worse. If there had been a competition for walking a straight line, I’d have won the prize by a landslide.
The last time I’d spent a night in Limerick, there seemed to have been some sort of major soccer victory in town, judging from the general pandemonium in the streets. On this visit, I realized that this kind of movement was a nightly occurrence. Bands of thick-necked guys with beet-red faces kicked cans against the curbs and against each other as they sang guy songs in gargling voices. Had there been one such group or even a dozen, they’d have appeared marginal. “Oh, they’ve just had too much,” you’d shrug as you moved to the other side of the street. The dominant sober element would reassure you, providing the perspective necessary to gauge where drunken gestures were stepping outside comfortable safety margins. But here, there was no such standard. The entire town was smashed off its head. It was as if sixty violent, aimless revolutions spinning in different directions had taken over the streets. They’d all end up in jail by morning, just as most of the revolutions in Irish history had done.
“Well, let’s go to Cheers, then,” said one of the people in my group. Or were we still a group at this point? Two of them had disappeared in one direction without a goodbye, and the others were across the street going in the other direction.
“Fuck if I’m goin’ back inta’ that squat. Ya’ know what happened the last time.”
“Aw, it’ll be all right.”
“They’ll fuckin knock the bejesus out of us.”
I was still with Noreen, but her girlfriend was lagging behind with her arm around someone else. In the snap of a second, with those last sips of beer, the other ten bottles had kicked in, and they were gone.
It was the kind of drinking that my mother described seeing in her family. “When I was a kid,” she’d told me, “My mom would put away more beers than I could count. She’d seem stone cold sober, but then she’d have one more gulp and she’d be blitzed. Out would come that Irish brogue, and she’d leer at me: ‘You’re nothin’ but a whore ‘ya are. A cheap little tramp.'”
I was chilled—in part by the cool October air that began to blow right through me; in part by the fog falling over Noreen’s eyes. I felt suddenly that they were entering into a ritual in which I had no part to play. Or else a ceremonial sacrifice was about to take place. I was invited, but I wasn’t meant to attend.
“Yer’ comin’ dancin’ with us, ‘ya are.”
“Actually, I was thinking of going back to the hotel. I’ve gotta’ be in Dublin bright and early tomorrow.”
The rest of the conversation was even clumsier: there were staggering protests, spoken kindly but with a suspicious smirk bubbling up behind the misty surface of my hosts’ eyes: “Why don’t you DRINK with us?” they seemed to say. “Don’t wanna’ show us what you’re really like then, do ‘ya?”
And in fact, that wasn’t far from the truth. I wanted to go to the hotel, alone, and go to sleep with the thoughts which had begun flooding through me: memories of five years ago, when I’d walked back to another hotel along the same streets. On that night, I’d been leaving my new summer holiday friends to return to the USA where friends like Bob and Derek awaited. I figured I’d never see my new Limerick friends or their city again, though surely letters would continue to fly between us. Geographical distances seemed much greater to me then, and death was much more removed. But here I was, back in Limerick with Noreen, suddenly. Bill and Derek were both dead and buried, and I no longer lived in the USA, but here in Europe.
The priests and the friars
are vexed every day
for my loving you, Mary,
although you are dead.
I would shield you from wind
and guard you from rain;
O my heart’s bitter sorrow
you are down in the earth.Give my curse to your mother
from “Who is that on My Grave?” (from An Duanaire: Poems of the Dispossessed, Seán ÓTuama and Thomas Kinsella editors and translators, poem #86)
and the same to your father
and all your relations
left standing alive
who hindered our marriage
while I had you in life
– I who’d ask no more dowry
than to launder my shirt.