I started the campaign to rename the park after Oscar Wilde,  (which has thousands of members now) and it’s received a fair bit of media attention. The idea was not mine, it’s been suggested before, by Rory O’Neill and others, but Ryan’s fall from grace gives Dubliners a window of opportunity for it to happen. But the idea has met with fierce opposition from some Catholic quarters.

Colum Kenny wrote in the Sunday Independent about the proposal: “(it) seems strange… calling it after someone who frequented London rent boys and secured youngsters for sex in North Africa (whatever Wilde’s undoubted literary merits) is not the best option.”

“We can’t name city park after Wilde who ‘hunted young boys’ for sex” screamed the headline in the Evening Herald: “Writer’s activities no different to church abuse says professor”. The professor in question, Joseph S. O’Leary, a Maynooth graduate who now writes and blogs on literature and theology, and teaches in a university in Tokyo, was reportedly “amazed” at the suggestion to name the park after the writer. “Ryan is accused of lacking vigilance in preventing the very behaviour that Wilde and Gide indulged in without scruple”, he said. “How does this make Ryan a villain and Wilde a hero?”

I suggested online that, at the heart of the objections to honouring Wilde, there seems to be a reluctance to observe the crucial distinction between consensual and non-consensual sex, and that, however much sex one has, it does not make one an abuser. In response, O’Leary wrote to me saying that, according to my logic, my disapproval of Archbishop Ryan should lead to the removal of Wilde’s statue from the park as well. “In both cases the good that the men did is overshadowed by the evil of which they are accused.” After indicating to him that I would rather not engage in private discussions on the matter, that I’d favour open debate, he then sent me the most astonishing message:

“Busy archbishops may have trouble keeping track of deviants in their clergy and handling complaints from people like Andrew Madden (whose statements in the Irish Times today suggest that he must have been very difficult to satisfy) but dizzy queens obsessed with and addicted to the most louche and lawless forms of sexual behaviour (thinking that they were liberators in advance of their time) are sure to find themselves in a far deeper quagmire than any archbishop.” He also noted that Wilde and Bosie were never prepared to “justify” that phase of their existence, so “they cannot be held up as NAMBLA-style martyrs of free love either”. He ended his message with an entreaty to “take warning from the from the experience of the Dublin clergy; any appearance of collusion with “paedophile” offenses is now exposed to grimmest media and police scrutiny!”

The value judgments in this correspondence from Professor O’Leary need to be deconstructed and understood. Not because I’d lose sleep if the park was eventually named after someone else, but because these attitudes are still widely prevalent in Irish society and are judgmental and destructive. I’ll deal with each one in reverse order:

His final warning to me is redundant. I have already paid the price for an “appearance of collusion with ‘paedophile’ offenses’” when I heavily criticized the film “Fairytale of Kathmandu” and the way it portrayed Cathal Ó Searcaigh as a child abuser. The vitriol aimed at me personally was quite disturbing, so I cannot imagine what he has had to endure. I know the nature of the attacks, and I know also that they are misguided.

There is no necessity to put “paedophile” in quotation marks. Generally, paedophilia is understood to refer to sexual attraction to prepubescent children, and there are no quotation marks necessary to apply that label to the priests who abused the children in their care. It is a crime and should remain so; indeed I believe that a convicted paedophile who has received treatment in prison, and then goes on to re-offend on his release, should be permanently deprived of his freedom. It is that bad a crime. The damage done can be devastating and long-lasting. At the root of the trauma of child sex abuse is a deep sense of loss of trust and safety in the world, and a lingering sense of impotence, the result of someone in authority having taken advantage of them. There are also the complex and often nightmarish effects of early sexualization on an adult survivor. But a particularly odious element to clerical abuse is the way in which the child is pickled in a toxic shame, because of the way Judeo-Christian religion works using internalized guilt as a method of mind-control. It can take a long time for a survivor of child sex abuse to shake off the belief that they are wicked to the core. When a child’s faith in goodness and god is destroyed, and when the institutions and society that allowed this psychological and spiritual carnage to take place turn a blind eye, it is quite remarkable how some survivors grow up to be such wonderful rounded people. And quite understandable if they find themselves full of rage and continue to suffer for their whole lives.

Wilde was not a paedophile. As to the ages of the young men he had sex with, it seems that most would have been over our current age of consent, while some were younger, and at least a few were fourteen. In a recent UK poll, nearly a quarter of all fourteen-year-olds have had a sexual experience, and one in three fifteen-year-olds is sexually active. I cannot imagine that it was any different in Victorian times, especially considering that the lads that Wilde found attractive tended to be working class, and independent, either holding down a job or in search of one. Wilde flattered, cajoled, persuaded, dazzled, bribed and paid his many young “panthers” for sex. But he did this in an era when all same-sex activity was condemned and criminal, and the notion of there being an age of consent for it was nonsensical. The power Wilde exercised was financial, social, sexual and charismatic. He held no other power over them; he was not charged with their care or pretending to be something he was not. However, as he found out to his cost, the young men he had sex with could turn the tables and blackmail him, and exploit the power they had over him.

Modern laws relating to the age of sexual majority are designed, naturally and sensibly enough, to protect children. I have written in this column, three years ago now, how, when an Irish 14-year-old went looking for sex on gaydar in 2006, I was disgusted with the older men who agreed to have sex with him, and praised the men who turned up to meet him and then sent him packing, when they could see for themselves how young he was. Despite media coverage at the time, there was no paedophile ring, because there is a big difference between men who seek pleasure in the company of sexually active young men, and those who seek to despoil bodies and souls that are not ready for such an experience. It is a fine line, I know, because each person matures at a different age. But here’s a question: should a quarter of all fourteen year olds face a criminal conviction, because they have had sex?

I would be very interested to know how the young Irishman in the gaydar scandal, now aged 18, is faring, and what he makes of his experiences. Around the time of the scandal, a number of young men told me of their own sexual experiences when they were younger. Some were delighted with the sex they had when fourteen or fifteen; some were sad that it had happened so young. Most were philosophical. But not one of them ever expressed anything remotely like the suffering that has now become all-too-familiar of those who were abused by paedophiles. It’s a very different phenomenon.

If Wilde and Bosie were alive today, they would, perhaps, be civil partners. They loved each other that much. But they would also be cruising together and having lots of sex, together or separately, with lots of men. They would, no doubt, attract the same tabloid attention that George Michael and his lover do. I imagine that two crucial things would be different, however, between the Victorian era and ours. (Homo)sexuality has changed so much in just a century. They probably wouldn’t have to pay their lovers, and they would probably stick to the law, because they wouldn’t need to break it.

If a modern Wilde had sex with a fourteen-year-old now, I’d be disgusted, because we now have the rights that he never had, to live a life without shame or self-hatred or the threat of the ruination that, sadly, he had to endure over a hundred years ago.

We have no way of truly knowing how Wilde treated his lovers in intimate circumstances, but rather than make them feel cheap or dirty, he seems to have put them on pedestals, and showered them with gifts. There is no evidence that Wilde ever brutalised any of his lovers, or went against their will, or shamed them, or abused their trust. We can never truly know whether the motivation for youths blackmailing him came from their hurt feelings, or if it was an inevitable result of Wilde being rich and having sex with people who needed to survive and pay the rent. But Wilde worshipped them – or, to be perhaps more accurately, Wilde worshipped cock. Bosie was a rakish “top” whose hunt for passive youths certainly led him to test the ethical boundaries of any caring human being. I suspect I’d have disliked him intensely. But Wilde was sexually versatile (in modern terms, we take that to read: “bottom”) and therefore his sexual pleasure derived not from subjugation or possession of a youth’s body, but of inviting young, virile and testosterone-charged men to subjugate or possess him.

The emotional repercussions of a promiscuous lifestyle are still as complex as they were then, but at least now it is out of the reach of a cruel and unjust law.

Mentioning NAMBLA in any discussion about Wilde muddies the waters disgracefully. The North American Man/Boy Love Association is a society that props up the wicked delusion held by recidivist paedophiles that children, when they seek affection from an adult, are “asking for it”. In my eyes, these views are on a par with those expressed in the pro-anorexia websites, where young anorexics are told how to get as thin as possible. Disinformation rules, horrifying destruction is revered or, at best, ignored, with a malevolent self-serving sophistry that is sick and disturbing.

The comment about Andrew Madden reveals O’Leary’s true colours. Only an apologist for the Church would say that. But, happily, a Church is only as powerful as the numbers of people who belong to it. And such remarks have no power over someone who has left it, in a secular society. The (Roman) Emperor has no clothes. The old and clever shame-inducing mechanisms do not work any more. The Church can never satisfy Madden, not because of any flaw of his, as O’Leary tries to impute, but because the Church has lost all credibility with rational people.

As for “dizzy queens” having lots of “louche sex” – it amazes me why people froth at the mouth at this phenomenon. Is it envy? Sex is simply mutual pleasure. Why it is demonized as evil is simply beyond me.  It may be lots of other things – distracting, crazy-making, risky, chaotic, anarchic, but shared physical pleasure between two people who freely engage in it is a beautiful thing.

It is the following particular statement by O’Leary that astounded me the most, however. “In both cases (Ryan and Wilde) the good that the men did is overshadowed by the evil of which they are accused.”

Ryan’s job was pastoral. It was to care for his flock. His responsibility was, indeed, first and foremost, not to be “too busy” to take the trouble to “keep track of deviants in his clergy and handling complaints from people like Andrew Madden”. The fact that he didn’t see how protecting children is the most important responsibility he had, is a disgrace. I don’t believe in the concept of evil but I hate hypocrisy, and I detest the mindset that prioritizes the  reputation and authority of an institution over the lives of suffering children. What could be more villainous?

Wilde was an artist. A magnificent artist. He was true to himself and to his values and his passions. He devoted himself to beauty, and he paid the price for it, a thousand times more cruel than any bishop or archbishop or Pope will ever have to endure. And yet, their crimes are far greater. Could you imagine Wilde, after a passionate and mutually enjoyable tryst with a young buck, ever committing the obscenity of making his lover say the rosary in penance? Leave that to the master mindfuckers, the priests.

It is the heightened sensibility and sensitivity that the fallen Wilde displayed in his last masterpiece, De Profundis, that reveals his breathtaking humanity. It is his tragic flaw that makes him, in my understanding of the word, heroic.

If we, as Irish people, allow his all-too-human flaws to overshadow his unparalleled gift to the world, his art, because we still can’t get over our hangups about sex, then we should be ashamed of ourselves.

Further reading: The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde by Neil McKenna

There is a paradox about the creative process that I’m wrestling with now. Well, now more than ever. Mid-life, adolescence, it’s all the same really. What am I here for/What’s the point?  You know the score. Same as it ever was. It is that, essentially, there is a necessity to isolate, to go within, to be completely self-absorbed, in order for something to emerge that is authentically yours. It’s very narcissistic, it needs a capacity to navel-gaze, and a belief that the fluff you find there is something special, unique. The paradox is that, in order to be successful, you have to then embrace something very unpalatable to a narcissist: convention, tradition, rules, the mediocrity of other ordinary people with their mundane agendas, their commercial instincts, and their knowledge of what sells in the marketplace.

You have to communicate what you’ve come up with to others, according to “how things are done”. You have to step down from your grandiosity, your sense of specialness, and accept that you are just another wannabee artist/writer/singer/musician/poet/film-maker/actor and get in line: join the queue. Be judged, be evaluated. Risk hearing that you’re average, that you’re merely competent, that your precious idea/novel/song/project has been done before, is derivative, is boring. And you know what? It may well be. You have to expose yourself to that potentially annihilating experience to get steel in your spine, to learn about what other people value and are willing to pay for.

It’s a painful process for many, especially those with a good sense of revolt in their blood. I believe that a good proportion of drunks, especially in this country, are those who have given up on the second part of this process, can’t stomach it, and choose to play the role of misunderstood genius. They blame the system, their agent, their art college, the recording label, their parents, their ex-partner, anyone but themselves, comforting themselves with a self-indulgent bitter rant about their lot to anyone who will listen, before they fall off the bar stool.

In practically every art form, there are barriers to overcome that may appear to stifle originality, uniqueness, genius.  The traditional consensus on how things are done in a particular art form is a very powerful force to contend with, and, most times, is heavy with a dreadful inertia. You can’t call yourself an artist unless you’ve been to art school, so they say. So often, such establishments and conventions are anathema to the anarchic spirit, and are populated with serried ranks of self-imposed gatekeepers whose job it is to say “no”, whether they are literary agents, A&R executives, trade unionists, TV executives, media buyers, gallery owners, publishers, or teachers.

Tracey Emin spent a lot of time in her bed in that isolated, painful state of being. But she had the bright idea of presenting it in My Bed – and now it is totemic. But in order for her to know how good an idea it was, she had to know about all the other good ideas that had happened in art before her, if only to inform herself about what conventions she was choosing to break.

I may come up with all sorts of original tunes when I’m singing in the shower in the morning, and think I’m the bee’s knees, but I have no musical skills to communicate them to anyone else. Sadly, there’s nowhere you can ring to leave a melody where someone will get back to you to buy it. (Is there an app for that?)
A film-maker told me the other day: “never underestimate how disinterested commissioning editors are in your idea.” In other words – self-interest is the rule, no one is ever going to reach out and make it easy for you, no one is ever going to respond to your need and be your knight or dame on a white charger coming to your rescue – unless there is something in it for them. Once you enter the business of selling your creativity, you have to accept your self-obsession is not unique in the world. And you have to give up the “tortured artist starving in the garret” mode, and do what is necessary to make your creativity pay.

Belly-button fuzz, that accrual of intimate detritus, the personal gunk made up of the stuff you need to protect you from the elements, is not remotely interesting to others unless it’s worked on and spun into something meaningful, put in some enlightening context, given the right frame. Skill and craft are required. You have to win the business people over. You have to get your hands dirty. You have to play the game.

The world, sadly, does not owe you a living.

In the push for equality, as epitomized by the campaign for civil marriage for lesbian and gay people, I have been unequivocal in my support over the years. But lately, my flag-waving hand has begun to droop. Not because of the campaign itself, which is dynamic and effective. (See the brilliant YouTube ad).

And it’s not because of my frustration with its progress. The Green Party and GLEN failed to realise how unpalatable enshrining the principle of inequality into legislation is to LGBT people, no matter how progressive the Civil Partnership Bill is, no matter how much easier it might make the lives of so many people. (Fianna Fáil of course doesn’t care about principles). Since its publication, I believe the Greens have received that message loud and clear, especially after the 5,000-strong march against it in its current form. (If you are legislating to benefit a particular group, surely the opinions of that group matter?)

I am hopeful that the argument for putting the issue of gay civil marriage to a referendum is gaining ground (if, of course, it is constitutionally required, which is uncertain) given that I believe the debate would be good for society.

I am phlegmatic about whether or not it would be passed, though. Maybe, maybe not. California passed Prop. 8 last year, which outlawed gay marriage. However, one of the criticisms of the failed opposition  campaign there was that it didn’t focus on ordinary gay/lesbian people’s lives. That could never happen here. Ordinary people telling their stories on Liveline or on the Late Late is one of the main ways Irish social policy changes. Given a debate between a couple of pained, condescending Catholic moralists and a cheerful lesbian couple surrounded by their kids, I know who would win. Whatever about the shadow side to abortion and divorce, and there are valid arguments in opposition to both, the truth is, gay civil marriage harms no one. It is a symbol.

This is not to underestimate the power symbols have in Ireland. A referendum on gay civil marriage would flush out, for (hopefully) one last curtain call, those Catholic ideologues who dare to believe they know what’s best for other people. (A reminder of this corrupt mentality came on the radio other day, in a discussion commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Pope’s visit to Ireland. His Holiness, the panellist reminded us, was flanked by two “single fathers” – Bishop Éamon Casey and Fr Michael Cleary).

We in Ireland are well used to holding referenda on fraught issues of sexual morality. Each time, they result in a greater understanding of the complex issues raised, and a greater familiarity with the people directly affected by the issue. However painful it may be, it is a positive process in my book, one which few other countries have undergone.

In a referendum on civil marriage, given the legal requirement for debates to be even-handed, lesbian and gay people would be all over the media, in a way that hasn’t happened yet in our society. Invisibility has always been the enemy of gay rights. Perhaps that’s why Fianna Fáil are so opposed to a referendum.
My weariness in waving the rainbow flag is more to do with my desire to fast-forward to the stage after equality is finally enshrined in law. A healthy community engages in self-criticism and reflection, and adapts and changes accordingly. But if that community is discriminated against, by the law in particular, there is a tendency to keep such criticisms or reservations private, in order to not let the side down, to avoid handing the bigots any ammunition. It leads to a censorship of sorts, a defensiveness, and accusations of betrayal of one’s community if one raises thorny issues.

Feminists rightly say that full equality for women will have come to pass, not only when the women in power are just as numerous as the men, but when they are just as boorish, slovenly, and ignorant. Full equality for LGBT people will have come to pass when we have completely moved on from a sense of prickly victimhood and have gained in confidence enough to talk openly about how difficult our lives can be, how fucked up we can be, how lonely and insecure we can be – just like everyone else. The political necessity to present only our good side to the world comes at a price.

The longer I live, the more I realise that gay and heterosexual men are far, far more alike than is commonly supposed. In fact, when it comes to sex and relationships, which supposedly are the significators of gay identity, I find that lesbians and gay men vastly differ in their approach and behaviour. Indeed, they are as different from each other as… the sexes.

One only has to survey an online chatroom for cruising guys. It is unimaginable that women would ever talk to each other in a similar way, in such vast numbers. Many women, indeed, would be shocked at the number of men online who freely admit they are married or partnered with women, who are looking for “no strings” sex with other guys. It doesn’t make them gay – it’s simply that they are men, trying to get as much sex as they can, without emotional attachment. It’s what a hell of a lot of men do. But in Ireland, it is hardly ever talked about. Irish men, generalizing hugely, lack the emotional literacy to discuss these matters. And, despite our supposed sensitivity, this counts for gay men too. And when we don’t talk about problems, they don’t go away, they tend to get worse.

Too often, in this country, I hear of a young gay male couple breaking up over a night of indiscretion, and it breaks my heart. (Simple reason: I know far, far too many single gay men in their forties). It’s as if the values of traditional heterosexual marriage have been adopted unthinkingly to apply to their relationship. No account has been made for the fact that they are male, that gay male culture is sexualised and commodified, and that sex is effortlessly accessible. They can, if they so choose, let go “mammy’s morals” and come up with their own rules, their own standards, their own mechanism for keeping trust and love alive, to make their relationship work. But for that to become commonplace, there has to be a level of mature discourse in our community about the drawbacks of being men who love men, an acceptance of the difficult  realities, and not stay attached to a frequently unsuitable and often ultimately self-defeating ideal.

If and when marriage between men becomes an ordinary reality, then, and perhaps only then, will it become obvious how much work we have to do to make them work. I’m just weary waiting for “permission” from the government, before the conversation begins. We could start talking now, lads.

It’s tough to articulate it, because although it may be a common experience, it is also largely unconscious. And trying to dig up what’s buried in your psyche is an unpleasant business, it’s like hunting for a corpse by following your nose. Something stinks, it’s unnerving, but it’s not obvious. It’s a low-grade anxiety that you catch a whiff of every now and again.

I once was woken up every other night at 3.01am, and I couldn’t figure out why. I am blessed with the ability to sleep usually, but for a few weeks the experience dominated my life, because sleep ceased to be guaranteed. But it was intermittent, so after one night’s full sleep I’d forget about it, only to find myself a couple of nights later being dragged into consciousness to stare at the clock saying 3:01. I tried to figure out what was the cause, but in the middle of the night my head isn’t the clearest. Was it the central heating kicking in on a timer? A neighbour leaving for work slamming the door? Couldn’t figure it out. Gradually, the knowledge that I was not heading for a guaranteed full night’s sleep took its toll. I couldn’t drift off, I couldn’t relax. I became sort of dishevelled inside, and tetchy, and out of sorts. Eventually I figured it out. I set my alarm for 2.55am, and listened. Sure enough, at 3.00, a very low beeping came from somewhere in my room. It was a travel alarm in my suitcase at the bottom of my wardrobe, set at that time to wake me to catch a plane home from the last time I had been away.

It’s as vague as that, as intermittent, the disquiet I feel about the internet. Not the practical stuff, the banking or the plane tickets or the news. And research and entertainment is fun too, the youtubes and wikipedia and the googling. All that is wonderful, even though there is so much bile and venom and chaff to sift through.

It’s about my interaction with others, through social networking, instant messaging, online chat, and dating sites.

On face value, such interactions add to my life. I share a joke or a video online with my friends, it’s instant and fun. I go rooting around the 1911 census online and share my discoveries with others, who then tell me the stories behind their ancestors and what they’ve discovered. I ask in my status line if anyone wants to go see a movie or go to a show, and I get responses. I hear about parties or festivals and exhibitions online, and I go to them, and know who else is going. I keep up to date with the news from my cousins, spread all over the world. Friends who are travelling on the other side of the planet might as well be next door, I can see how they are getting on every day, and see their photographs almost as soon as they are taken. On a sadder note, I’ve learned about people’s deaths online, and passed on the news to people who hadn’t heard.

So far, so good. It’s all so plausibly social.

When it comes to dating sites, I’ve given up on them, however. And my problem with them is a concentrated version of the flaw in online social networking with friends.
It is this: what did we do before the internet? What was so wrong with it? What have we lost in the transition? Because socializing and keeping in touch used to be part of everyday activities that served us perfectly well for eons.

I’m not a Luddite. But with every advance in human civilization, there is a drawback. And  we only really notice what we’ve been deprived of when it begins to hurt – like not getting a particular vitamin in a new diet that tastes amazing. Over time, something begins to go wrong with your health, it’s vague and unsettling and hard to pinpoint.

Keeping in touch with people used to be done in company. Whether it was in a pub or chatting with neighbours or simply chatting on the phone, the information we swapped was part of a matrix of interactions that only happens when you are actually talking to people. Our tolerance levels of other people’s personalities and idiosyncrasies had to be quite high, but we never noticed it.

You’d never walk into your local and have only one request on your mind, that you would announce as you came into the pub. “Who wants to see the Tarantino with me tonight at 7.30?” If you think of it literally happening, it seems quite absurd. Would you turn on your heels if no one wanted to go with you? If you found someone who did want to go, would you leave together right there and then to see it? No, you wouldn’t. The very idea would be absurd. You would be meeting your friends to spend time with them. Chatting. About the weather, about NAMA, about the X-factor,  their latest break up or holidays or anything else. The primary purpose is, of course, truly communal: taking people as you find them, and seeing what happens. You’ve no agenda, but you’re meeting a basic human need, to hang out. And if a friend is being a bit of a bore, or a bit down, you still pass the time with them. They’ll be in better form next time. It’s a basic kindness, a basic generosity of spirit. You give of yourself your actual presence, and you get the same in return. What comes out of a night such as that might be a pleasant surprise. You might meet a new friend of a friend that you like – you might even want to ask them out. It happens organically. Naturally.

Of course I still have nights like that. I’m not a complete geek. But I know if I didn’t have the internet, I’d be out socializing much more. And I think I’d be far more content with myself and my life.

The internet seems social, as I say, but it’s actually a way of controlling your life and your interactions to such a degree that ordinary “passing the time” socializing seems too much like hard work. When it comes to dating, it gets quite grotesque. Relationships are built not on a negotiated checklist of sexual preferences, but quite simply on a sensation of ease that you stumble upon, when you meet someone and there’s a mutual attraction. If it feels easy, and the body language is good, and you can have a laugh together, you will want to spend more time discovering the person, and, hopefully, vice versa. It’s a slow, tentative, gentle process, because it has to be. Not for everyone, I grant you, but for me. For all the fact that I used to be a webmaster and still design blogs for my friends, the internet is just plain wrong for me when it comes to dating. I need time, plenty of time, to get to know someone. And the internet just doesn’t offer that – it’s all about the instant moment, scratching an itch.

The internet allows us to control our interactions in a way that is impossible in the “real” world. We set the agenda, and it is based on our want, our need, our taste, our hunger. There is one thing that is guaranteed to magnify our desire, our sense of lack, our need for connection, and that is when we focus on it, to try to satiate it. Desire is an ourobouros – a snake that eats itself.

Online, we ignore those who don’t immediately satiate that need, respond to our joke, reply to our message on a dating site, or like our facebook status update. We can spend an evening interacting like that and by the end of it we’re still on our own. We’ve been mentally stimulated, but emotionally we’ve been in a vacuum. It’s a curious, subtle deprivation. And the only symptom of it is an unease, a restlessness, an anxiety. A tiny alarming sound in the middle of the night.

Here’s one written for Hot Press on 21st August 2009, just after Caster Semenya won her gold medal, and before any official “results” on her sex-testing. And before I attended the Electric Picnic Leviathan debate on gay marriage, with Senator Ronan Mullen and others. More than once, he said that “God doesn’t make hermaphrodites”. I had to correct him.

Central to the Catholic ethos is a notion of the “complementarity” of male-female relationships, and this notion of public policy being conservative for the “greater good”. And yet the current civil partnership bill, by ignoring children of same-sex couples, does exactly what Catholic teaching has always done – sacrificed the well-being and family security of children at the altar of dogma. Catholic teaching punishes children. And by Mullen saying that “God doesn’t make hermaphrodites” I was left aghast. On average, there would have been thirty people at Electric Picnic who would have been incensed had they been in earshot of his pontificating. Not to mention hurt. But Mullen immunizes himself against how his words hurt people’s feelings by telling himself and others he believes they make for a better society.  If Catholicism could point to one example of its teaching on sexual morality that had been proved correct or for the greater good I’d like to know about it.

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As we go to press, the “results” of the “sex test” for 800m gold-medal winner Caster Semenya have not been released. However it turns out, the way the organizers of the world athletics championships in Berlin have treated her is nothing short of shameful, by making the process a publicly humiliating one, instead of employing a modicum of discretion and tact. And the way that South Africans have rallied around her in support is a matter of pride for her and her country.

As Germaine Greer pointed out in the Guardian recently, in the 1992 and 1996 Olympics, genetic testing was required  for all female athletes. After more than 6,000 tests, no one was found to be a man masquerading as a woman, but quite a few women discovered they had developmental sexual disorders that they weren’t aware of before. It succeeded only in embarrassing a lot of people, and was discontinued.

Evidently, the authorities have decided to bring back testing (this time involving a whole panel of “experts”) because of Caster’s unique winning physicality. The South Africans naturally put it down to envy. (However, the envy may be a manifestation of another kind of suspicion, to wit the none-too-subtle comments in the press about her “recent dramatic improvement in performance”, which is usually code for “we think someone’s been doping on the sly”.)

Notwithstanding that particular thorny issue, she is a striking woman, and indeed with her low voice and masculine physique, she does make one wonder about how the binary construct of male and female in our culture fails to describe adequately the variations that occur naturally in our species. Her family, from an impoverished village in Limpopo province, affirms that she was born a girl, and also that she was a classic tomboy, loving soccer and showing no interest in girly things. In other words, her story is not of a young man deciding to cheat and enter the girls’ races so he could win; her narrative is one that many women the world over can identify with, and certainly, I would imagine, a large proportion of women who are sporty. While many tomboys grow up into lesbian or bisexual women, it is course not reliable to infer sexual orientation by the degree to which one displays “masculine” or “feminine” attributes. That is, to fall into the binary trap, to see everything as one thing or the other. Human beings have always been somewhere in the middle. Aren’t you?

Neither, it seems, is it reliable to infer gender by appearance alone. Statistics are easy to manipulate, but it is fair to say that somewhere between one in a thousand and one in a hundred people are born with a certain ambiguity in their gender. (This figure of course is multiplied many times if one includes those that aren’t 100% heterosexual). This may manifest in something as obvious as being born with genitals that are a mixture of both male and female, or something less clear cut like a very large clitoris or a small penis, or it may only manifest in adolescence, when things don’t turn out the way they are “supposed to”. The variations from the binary norm can manifest in our genes, in our hormones, and/or in our genitals.

Intersexuality is separate to the experience that is classified “gender dysphoria”, in which a person in adulthood comes to the realisation that they were born into the wrong sex, in the wrong body.  And indeed this is also separate from the experience of growing up gay or lesbian, in which one’s chosen love-object is not the cultural norm. In many societies, being a gay man is synonymous with being effeminate, such as the ladyboys in South-East Asia.

Any of these natural variations can lead to a deep questioning about gender, about sex roles, about what is expected of us as a man, as a woman, as a human being. For many of us it is a journey of self-discovery that is like trying to work out a puzzle, to which there is no solution. Because the problem is society’s, not the individual’s.

In wealthy families, or families with good public health systems, the parents of children born with ambiguous genitalia are often offered early surgery to “correct” the “abnormality”. This is why we don’t hear so much about intersex adults, certainly in Ireland or the UK – the “correction” is made early on in life, and as long as adolescence proceeds without a problem (I mean without more than the usual problems), then the natural variance in body shape remains a private matter. Of course, the awful possibility exists for parents that they choose the “wrong” sex for their child, ie one that the child eventually decides is wrong for them. However, in Caster’s case, her parents had no such recourse. Presumably, therefore, her body as a little girl raised no suspicions or fears.

One in a thousand Irish people works out at around 6,000 people on this island. It is of course impossible to know how many of them as adults were informed about their surgery in infancy, if they had it; I would guess that, so embarrassed are we about sexual difference, many Irish parents have chosen to keep such matters as secret as possible. Parents have an understandable wish to protect their children from feeling like outsiders; but, sadly, the more they do so, the less likely that things will change for future generations.

The limits of a circle define it – by which I mean those who test the boundaries of human experience create more of a sense of security for those who find themselves comfortably in the middle. But we tend to demonize and scapegoat those on the edge, as opposed to show them gratitude or respect for the difficult path on which they find themselves. Because we fear difference, it unsettles us. And those who are most fearful, most suspicious, most hostile, tend to be the ones who have their own secret fear of letting their differences be known.

That said, I had a great time. Musical highlights: Madness, the last 20 minutes of Chic, Brian Wilson, Laura Izibor. As ever, Dublin Gospel Choir on Sunday morning lifted my spirits. Cuckoo Savante and Reader’s Wives both gave excellent gigs, on a smaller scale.

Found the Leviathan tent consistently interesting. Bob Gruen the photographer was cool.  The Emergency were really, really good, and very funny.  David McWilliams hosted excellent debates on the economy on Saturday, and on gay marriage on Sunday, and they were passionate and thought-provoking.

Food as ever was great. And it has to be said that, despite the conditions, the organization was excellent, at least as far as I was concerned. Muck was everywhere, but the showers and toilets were much better this year than last, at least for me. But hey, I’m a guy.

But for me the unmistakeable joy of the festival was Arcadia; every night the music was impossible to ignore, the visuals breathtaking.

My maternal grandmother, Mary, was one year old. Her dad, Denis, was a “General Labourer”.  Her mother was Julia, née O’Reilly. They lived in a room in a tenement block with her infant brother in Smithfield North Side, Dublin. (Probably within a stone’s throw of the Cobblestone pub.) There were five other families living in the same house. This is Denis and Julia’s wedding photograph, c. 1908/09.  My great-grandparents.

Denis and Julia

Mary, or Mamie, was to marry a “Master Carpenter”’s son, Dermod, who was five in 1911. (I’m named after him, so his name definitely was spelled Dermod, but weirdly he’s listed as Dermot in the census, in his own father’s handwriting). He lived in Drumcondra with his parents Michael and Elizabeth (née Smyth) and paternal grandmother Jane, née Hambrook, (who spoke Irish, the only one of my family in this census to claim it), and his two younger sisters.

All my mother’s side of the family are Dubliners and Catholics.

My paternal grandmother, Mai, was born in Ballinasloe, Co. Galway, and was Catholic. She had a troubled upbringing, her father Michael died when she was an infant. I must find out more of the story. She was aged 17 in 1911. She and her older brother, (as well as her younger half-sister and half-brother who were born in South Africa), were all taken in by their mother’s sister, who lived in Dún Laoghaire.  Poor Aunt Annie, so the story goes, worked herself to the bone to look after four children who weren’t her own. She’s listed as single, and a “Boarding House Keeper and Landlady”. Two lodgers are listed as living in the house.

My paternal grandfather Henry was 22 in 1911, and was born in Boyle, Co. Roscommon. He was single and living in lodgings in Athlone, while he worked in a bank. He is listed as “Church of England”.

He was following his father’s footsteps, who, in 1911, was manager of a bank in Scarriff, Co. Clare. In those days, bank managers travelled around wherever they were appointed, and they used to live above the bank.  (My dad lived above a bank or two when he was a boy).

Henry Senior, my great-grandfather, was 55 years old. He was born in Limerick City. He was living with his second wife, Elizabeth, in 1911. Also in the household was Emily, the 24-year-old daughter of Henry and his first wife (my great-grandmother, who was also called Elizabeth, née Black. She died  in 1897, when my grandfather was 9 years old). There was also their own 9 year old daughter, again called Elizabeth*. Their religion is listed as “Church of Ireland”. They lived well enough to have a 16 year old Catholic servant girl living with them. Also called Elizabeth!

All these people are my ancestors. And they are all so different. I like that.

*I am lucky enough to be able to trace Henry’s lineage right back to the 12th Century, thanks to the work of Elizabeth’s son. The Mores or de la Mores were a “noble family” of French origin, and settled in England after the Norman Conquest. Then they came over to Ireland and the family became the Moores, Earls of Drogheda. I am not directly in line to anything, but Henry Street and Moore Street are named after them, and one or two of them are buried in Christchurch Cathedral. Must have a wander.

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