I got married in a small church in New Zealand, shared between different Christian faiths. I guess there was no storage room because you'd see the detritus of each congregation when you visited. The Methodists would leave behind an overhead projector, which always looked odd in a church. The Presbyterians would scatter stern looking hymn books around the place and the Anglicans were fond of flags relating to dead Anzacs.
We Catholics liked to add the occasional crucifix or morbid statue.
I chose my sister to be my best man, because she was best friend and because I could. I got married without having to worry about tradition or venue. I took all of this for granted as straight men tend to do. Only our shyness and ineptitude with the opposite sex stops us from getting married. Society and the law put no other impediments in our way.
Unfortunately not everyone is so lucky. The marriage equality referendum in Ireland made me realise a lot of things about the gay community. While we tend to only notice the most flamboyant members of the LGBT community, there are thousands more living quiet lives and desperate to be as ordinary as the rest of us. That includes marrying the person they love and spending the rest of their life watching box sets and doing house work. Most of the world denies them this ordinariness. And the few countries that have allowed gay marriage have done it grudgingly.
That's why I have never felt more proud to be Irish than I did last weekend. That was when Ireland became the first country in the world to legalise gay marriage through a public vote. The significance of this is that gay people in Ireland can now get married knowing that the vast majority of the public think nothing about it. In countries where the government brought in legislation, there must be a suspicion that the public still look at it with a strained eye.
I got strangely emotional during the campaign and don't think I've been as motivated about an issue since I stood for class representative in 3rd year and launched a passion fuelled campaign (I won on third count after the teacher imposed a single transferable vote procedure). The issue seemed so black and white to me, but I also sensed a new mood in Ireland and I wanted to surf on that wave.
I'm not sure when I met my first gay person. It was probably in primary school, although I didn't realise it at the time. He probably didn't either as sexuality wasn't discussed at that age. At least not in the Ireland that I grew up in.
I do remember the first gay person I definitively met. He was a friend, called Michael, that I knew when I was about 19. Michael didn't drink and owned a car. Two things that were as rare as hen's teeth when I was 19. The best night clubs where in country hotels set in idyllic countryside miles from town. Michael was happy to drive us there, observe our wild alcohol abuse and mainly futile attempts to shift (for that was the parlance of the day) members of the opposite sex. And then drive us home.
While we had a poor shifting record, we did all manage to find a girl occasionally. Michael never did but we passed no remarks of this. We all needed to achieve a delicate balance of inebriation. Just enough to get you jolly and to help you forget about your insecurities around girls, but not so much for it to turn you into a gibbering wreck. Most nights, we fell on one side or the other of this delicate nexus. But when it was achieved, it was devine.
We called it Dutch courage and assumed Michael's lack of success with the ladies was because of his deficiency in this area. Then he went to Sydney for a year and came back gay. Or more to the point he came back from Sydney with the courage (and it wasn't even Dutch) to tell us that he was gay.
I remember the night that he told us in the pub and how little impact it had. We were only concerned about whether he could still give us a lift to night clubs.
The truth is that while most gay people in Ireland in the 1980s would have been nervous about coming out, the reaction they would generally get amongst friends and family would be positive. While the Church still exerted far too much control over people's lives, in the real world Irish people have always been understanding and generous. The best thing about last week's referendum was that it finally gave the Irish people the opportunity to express this.
I emailed a friend during the week expressing my pride in the election. He agreed and mentioned that his brother's civil union in September could now go ahead as a full wedding. I've known this guy for 17 years and never knew he had a gay brother. Now we can talk about these things as easily as saying that we have a sister with red hair. The ordinariness of the situation is the best thing about it.
I don't know where Michael is these days. While he discovered himself in Sydney, I hope he's not there now. While I love a lot of things about Australia, its social backwardness is sometimes shocking. They haven't even got around to legalising civil union yet and their Neanderthal Premier has set his stall out against gay marriage.
I hope Michael is still in Ireland or in one of the other countries that treat gay people as full citizens. We live in an often cold and unfriendly world. On May 22nd, 2015 Ireland opened the blinds and let a little warmth in.
