Building a queer ireland, pt.2

- Episode 17- Transcript

Georgie Williams, voiceover: What does a queer future look like? When we think of how societies are built, we often reflect back upon what was established before us; the foundations of our cultures and communities. But what happens when we are positioned to establish the values and ideals of a society yet to develop?

Ireland is a country well-positioned to begin devising such plans. In part one of this two-parter, Building a Queer Ireland, we learned much of how LGBTQ+ rights were forged in the face of great resistance. Now, as we stand on the foundations of that social change, we must ask the question, what changes going forward? What is left to build for a Queer Ireland? Welcome to Episode 17 of /Queer. You’re here with me, your host, Georgie Williams. 

In this episode, we return to our conversation with infamous Irish queer rights activist Tonie Walsh, who, in the previous episode, spoke to us about the beginnings of the queer and gay liberation movements in Ireland, his involvement with the organisations behind the movement and the long standing fight for the rights and recognitions available to Irish queers today. If you haven’t already, we at /Queer would strongly encourage you to take a listen to the previous episode before continuing here.

The queer history of Ireland is complex and is by no means linear. Today, we explore issues of rural queerness, ageing queers, the importance of maintaining access to a queer history, and pathways for the advancement of LGBTQ+ politics in Ireland. We begin where we left off, with Tonie and his discussion of what queer community means, and what it might look like moving forward.

Tonie Walsh, in interview: There’s a question you asked about notions of community – and I’m struck by how too often we treat the LGBT community, it’s a term I hate, as some sort of monolithic construct. And I think actually where we have created, we’ve shaped a monolithic construct because it actually suits sort of certain intellectual arguments and posturing, cultural posturing, and social posturing. But of course you and I actually know there’s no such thing as an LGBT community, there are several communities within what we like to sort of, notionally … imagine as a rainbow society. You know? And sometimes we even have competing interests as well, you know, and oppositional interests. Whether it’s you know, I’m thinking of, say, commercial pride… I went up to Derry Strabane Pride there, it’s called Foyle Pride, a couple of years ago- and it’s the only Pride festival in Ireland that continues to be non-commercial and I think they take their non-commercial constitution very seriously. But it’s uh really interesting to sort of like, it’s really interesting to see how… I’ve forgotten what I wanted to say there. Scratch it! [Laughs].

Georgie, in interview: Well I think what you were potentially referring to was the question where I was saying you know, are there any misconceptions about LGBT and queer culture in Ireland that you wish to dispel, and how does it differentiate to the culture and communities in other parts of the west?

Tonie, in interview: Well actually, the first significant difference I think that I see is that we don’t have a commercial scene of the order magnitude of many other urban cultures. I mean I’m thinking of all the large urban centres. You can take it as a given the world over that LGBT people, indeed all marginalized people, tend to gravitate towards larger urban centres because that’s where social infrastructure is usually better embedded, and the choices available to people. So, people tend to gravitate. I don’t necessarily think it’s always a good thing because you know, we strip small towns and villages of their… we strip them of something essential and necessary. That queer world view, that queer humanity, you know? And just be stripped of a small village if we don’t find ways for LGBT people to lead meaningful lives in places that they chose. 

I’ll give you an example like, I was born in Dublin, and as a child I moved to Clonmel, County Tipperary, a small town in the gravitational pull of Waterford in Limerick. Beautiful countryside.  I grew up in Clonmel and then once I did my leading search I hightailed back to Dublin to do university and lost my head and my heart to activism and then many many years later in my 40’s moved back down to Clonmel to be a full-time carer to my mother. And when I moved back down in 2007 I would’ve been 47 or something yeah? And I’d actually just become HIV positive as well, so a weird situation. When I found myself as a middle-aged gay man in this small town, and Clonmel… one of the fatal presumptions that many Dubliners make, especially the lazy media, is that urban life ends at the M50, and of course It doesn’t. I mean… most of Irish life is actually distinctly urban, in every single way- culturally, physically, it’s urban. And Clonmel It’s 19,000 people its surrounded by 60,000 people- its culture is distinctly urban, it’s not provincial. It’s just a smaller version of Dublin. It has its Marks & Sparks, TK Maxx, and it’s bad planning, suburban planning, not unlike Dublin, Belfast and Cork. It has social alienation, it has not enough of opportunities for teenagers, it’s got major drug consumption that’s a result of boredom, it’s got all the million problems that are part & parcel of urban life. Except on a smaller scale. But I’m saying that because in the 10 years that I was down there, I found myself really lonely, because I don’t use dating apps or anything like that and I never have and I found myself really lonely and just, it was, once you get over not having sex which I did for a couple of years, I mean that was actually quite easy, what I really really missed was intimacy, and it got me thinking about how we frame intimacy and the structures we need to put in place for people of various cultural sensibilities and age backgrounds. The systems need to be put in place for people to avail of intimacy. 

That led me down some thought track about growing older, as a gay man, as a trans man or woman, as a lesbian, growing older in a place like Clonmel. and actually you could extend this to heterosexual men and women for whom heteronormativity was never a choice. Heterosexual men and women who also decided not to get married, and have children, or not have their life simply validated through the relationships they had and the children they had or not, so it got me thinking and I know I’m rambling a bit here but what I’m trying to say is that I thought long and hard about the things we need to do and how necessary it is for us right now, to have conversations around, what It takes for people to lead meaningful lives, meaningful social lives, meaningful cultural lives, in towns/villages of their choices. I think that’s one of the big issues facing the LGBT community as we have an ageing demographic- we have to talk about that.

Georgie Williams, voiceover: There is a brilliant concept within queer theory which articulates much of what Tonie is describing here. In Jack Halberstam’s 2005 book In a Queer Time and Place, Halberstam introduces the term ‘metronormativity’. Metronormativity, for Halberstam, is the normalisation of the urban centre as a space of progression, visibility, and liberation for queer people. For the urban to be progressive and liberal, the rural must be backward and conservative. What then, as scholars of queer rurality- as it’s called- have asked, happens to rural queers? What possible lives might LGBTQ+ individuals live if they do not want to live in urban cities? For some, this potentially erases the validity of rural queerness as a meaningful way of living. 

While the concept of metronormativity is decidedly USA focused in its context, Tonie’s articulation of Irish queerness bears similarity to this concept. What ideas of queerness become normalised as we push for political and cultural shifts, and who else’s queerness do we erase as we do so? It would seem that to be gender and sexuality diverse in Ireland is to navigate a complex geopolitical landscape. Furthermore, an ageing queer population- particularly those in the so-called rural geographies- may indeed be expected to compromise on their beliefs. There is a deficit of caregivers for the elderly across much of Europe- the priority at this time is training said caregivers on the bare essentials to fill that deficit. Undeniably, many professional carers will be ill-equipped to understand the social and emotional needs of queer elders, whose kinship structures and complex life experiences may necessitate different forms of support and empathy. How do we as a community grow old in supportive spaces with our values and practices preserved, if we are queer?

Tonie Walsh, in interview: We have to frame it in the context of the hard battles we’ve fought, the choices we’ve made. Because why in the hell should we give it up or settle for less? Just because we’ve reached 55 or 65, or whatever you know? I want to grow older, I’m 60 but inside I’m still 25. It’s the bloody horrible paradox of getting older, it’s not the dying… but I think inside, somewhere, the choices I made at 25 are still valid. You know? They’re still valid for me in terms of the way I want to socialise, the value system, the value system that I not only fought long and hard for but spent a long time looking for. These are things that I would like to think will envelop me and cocoon me as I head into, slide into my 60’s and 70’s.  You know? And It’s a big question we need to be having. I was amazed that 5 years ago GCN did a significant article on aging called Golden Queers as they put one of my darling friends and actually former tutor Ailbhe Smith on the front cover, and I thought ok bravo we’re finally having these conversations. You know? About aging, really important. Really important. 

I do think one of the things that marks out the LGBT community in Ireland from other communities abroad is a profound sense of community we have, I think there is, the structures are there we built those structures ourselves because we actually didn’t get that much help, certainly in the early days, you look at something that used to belong to the youth group and now they get support from the funding from the department of family and children, they get funding from the department of justice, possibly social protection, whatever – none of that ever happened in the 80’s or even into the early 90’s, so I think it’s really exciting that stuff like that is happening. 

Georgie, in interview: Wow yeah I think those provisions are something that’s been overlooked for the longest time, and going back to what you said about aging queers as well, I think because of the impact of the aids crisis, it’s really a subject that’s only coming to ahead now because of the people that did survive and who kind of paved the way for our communities and now are in a position where never before have we really had to talk about, well, what did it look like? As you get older as a queer person, you know, what accommodations need to be made? I think about how we do still see, beyond a certain age, we still assume cis-heteronormativity of a particular generation, and I sometimes worry about the erasure of that queer community. 

Tonie, in interview: You know as well as I do that one of the unique qualities of our rainbow society, the LGBT community, is that of all of the subcultures that we know of, we’re the only one that does not have heredity, in the sense that we know it. There are still parent/child links that are the convention of all other subcultural groups, so you know that’s also one of the reasons acknowledging that is actually one of the things that drives my, abiding sense of historicity and my abiding sense of wanting to preserve our past and celebrate our history, celebrate and trying to find some of the intergenerational and meta generational links that have been established, it’s really important. 

It’s important in terms of the passing on of stories of struggles past, so it’s important in terms of passing on that sharing the wonder of how we framed our relationships and our friendships, you know? They’re the building blocks of community they’re really important and we should never take them for granted you know, it’s sometimes it’s good. I don’t want to go and beat people over the head about how bloody rude they were back in the 70’s or 80’s or whatever else you know, because actually, I survived and I’m here right now, you know? So it’s now we need to talk about, the future is now, we need to talk about it. But it is really important I think every now and then to have a moment to take stock of the distance we’ve travelled and go ‘wow, what got us here?’ ‘who got us here?’ and I think you know, to me that’s abiding by the example of pride every year, pride is the ideal time for us to have that metaphysical moment, and even to have a conversation about it as well, and to acknowledge the journey. I think in Ireland, I’m aware that I’ve been part of this dynamic, but I just need to say that the LGBT community has been really well-served by its leaders, we’ve been very lucky at the people we’ve inherited, people who have given us certain things, people who not only signposted the journey for us but who have embolden us along the way, there are many many many extraordinary people, and I suppose it’s only now the distance of time that we’re actually taking moment, and also because of the proliferation of queer studies and queer history studies that which of course, you are very much an important part of, but it’s only as a result of this recent development that I think we’ve become a lot more mindful and aware of the roles that various people have played and the decisions that people have made to get us to this place. 

We’re also very lucky in Ireland too, I’m wearing my queer archive hat now, we’re really lucky we have what I call the foundational documents of the Irish, almost all of the foundational documents of the Irish LGBT civil rights movement even the Irish Queer Archive or the Cork archive are else in the burgeoning trans archive that my dear friend Sarah Phillips is developing. So we have all of these foundational documents that are really really important and it means we have access to the thought processes and the choices and the dreams of our founding brothers and sisters, that’s really important. It’s really inspiring as well, actually. So also I think it’s really handy too because it means that we don’t have to make it up as we go along you know we - [Georgie Laughs] It’s not about always about reinventing the wheel, we can look back at how people have done stuff in the past and then decide ‘hmm you know what I’m going to take that but I’m going to do it even better’ I’ve always said this and I’ve gone on-record many times saying that I think part of the legacy of the aids pandemic is the manner in which we found ways to survive the brutality of the period, the coping mechanisms and the survival strategies of the period, were really important to us. 

I mentioned the Irish Queer Archive and I should correct a common misconception that I founded the Irish Queer Archives when actually what I did was simply arrive in Outhouse in Dublin around this time in 1997, and I walked into a room that was just full of black plastic bags and national LGBT federation had moved into new offices, in what would have been the first iteration of Outhouse on South Williams street, over a fabulous Indian restaurant if my memory serves me right, and anyway, there was just all this documentation, and I turned around to Michael McGrain and the editor of GCN at the time and said ‘let me do something with this’ and they took me on as a part-time employee and then I got… I motivated some other people and I ponied up some cash and not long afterwards a couple of years later, put a name on it. So, what I really did was I took earlier collections from groups like the Sexual Liberation movement which was founded in Trinity in ’73, took all of the documents from the Irish Gay Rights movement which was founded in 1974, took the National Gay Federations documents and also enquired the administrative records of groups like Lost Lesbians and organised them together, and a number of many different other publishing groups, and essentially put some form in it and gave it a name as well because I didn’t like the .. it was originally called ‘The National Lesbian and Gay Archive’ and that just didn’t really describe the breadth and width of the collection certainly to describe the richness and variety of the collection. You know earlier on you were talking about general sexuality and you know there are two sides of the same coin we can’t have a conversation about one without embracing the other. 

And its not for nothing you know that historically we feminised gay men and they have been the target of bullying and harassment by uber straight guys. Its because of course the cultural misogyny that has existed since time in memorial and we simply can’t have the idea where a man can allow himself to be feminised and be seen as weak or less, simply just doesn’t ride. 

But anyway I’m digressing, back to the archive, so yeah it was about putting some form in it and then being an advocate for it, essentially doing what I’m best at being which is being mouthy *both laugh* trying to persuade people into actually giving cash and make it fly. I always had a vision for a self-standing independent archive, but not like, say the Lesbian Herstory archive in New York, which I’ve always been a huge admirer of, and I think there’s a lot to be said for us shaping and controlling our own history- LGBT people shaping and controlling our own history. 

Georgie Williams, voiceover:

The Lesbian Herstory Archives, as Tonie mentions, are a foundational collection of lesbian and women’s organisations, activism, and politics in New York created at the beginning of the 1970s. The archives, now located in their permanent home on the Upper West Side in the apartment that once belonged to one of their founders, Joan Nestle, were created by a group of women within the Gay Academic Union, who realised that lesbian history was, and I quote, “disappearing as quickly as it was being made”. The archives, still open today and free to visit and use, are an example of community centred, owned, and managed projects that run throughout political organising. They are a testament to the long and rich history of lesbian politics, and a bastion of standing firm in the face of endangering forces.

The Irish Queer Archives that Tonie helped to found, as he mentions, were very much inspired by the Lesbian Herstory Archives. Such projects demonstrate the tenacity and dexterity of queer activism and politics, and are vital records of our shared, collective and individual histories. They are pivotal to maintaining access to a history that might otherwise be forgotten or erased, and are consequently massively important to contemporary queer organising and community. The foundations of queer Ireland are very much preserved in and by these archives. 

Tonie Walsh, in interview: But do you know what, the actual archive is in a library of Ireland and it’s in a state repository and I think that’s a really brilliant thing. The symbolism is enormous, in terms of what it says about Irish society, and statutory Ireland not only taking ownership of our history but valuing it. And being seen to do something important with it. And acknowledging that this is a repository that is worth sharing with the rest of Ireland. You know, that we can’t, to paraphrase the great Colm Tóibín,  you can’t write the modern history of Ireland without accessing and acknowledging everything that is in the Irish Queer Archive. 

But you know, talking about ownership and everything brings be back to one of the reasons why I set up GCN, partially because I wanted a job as a journalist, and I’ve been working as a staff reporter on Out magazine which is Ireland’s first commercial magazine, and it floundered, a massive number of problems, printers refused to print it. I mean you’re probably familiar with all these stories,I’ll just briefly recap for anyone who doesn’t know this, but it had an upward struggle, it was around for 4 years and it had an upward struggle, as Ireland’s first glossy commercial consumer title. It had an upward struggle trying to get advertising in an economically and social hostile environment, it had some great writers with some great opinions, it was a fabulous platform. 

Now McCafferty was a regular contributor, did some amazing work on documenting unfolding aids pandemic amongst other things, but it was always undercapitalised- and it operated on a shoe string, so all it needed was one small problem to just tip it over and then that happened with it’s penultimate issue where the [inaudible] Times took an exception to a very innocuous safer sex, a fecking safer ad and if you think about it now it’s so ridiculous… and they refused to print it. Of course this is in the context of male homosexuality being illegal, it took exception to a safer sex ad and refused to print it and the thing just collapsed. And I was out of a job and I was really incensed, you know I was 26-27, I was out of a job, and I thought I had a great writing career ahead of me, so selfishly I wanted the platform to be published. But the thing as an activist, the thing that really riles me was that the state was actively censoring our access as a community. Was censoring our access to information, it had twice tried to ban Gay News which was published in the London School of Economics in 1973, it’s now called Gay Times, it morphed into Gay Times in the mid-80’s. But Gay News was and remains Europe’s largest most successful English language newspaper. Fabulous, fabulous, A3 newspaper. The Government twice tried to ban it. Citing the old Victorian legislation, which was basically a cop-out, claiming that it was ‘indecent’ and ‘obscene’ or whatever whatever. But they banned it in the late 70s and they tried to ban it in 1982 but we opposed the ban in 1982 and we were a lot better organised. So you know I mention this because that’s the type of climate that we had. 

So setting up GCN was really important in terms of developing a platform where our voices were heard and our voices mattered because you know what, the mainstream media didn’t give a toss about it. And the mainstream media has been long in coming to a place where it actually freely accommodates our stories. And even today there are LGBT people working in every branch of the print and broadcast media to, in good and bad ways, some people are limited, some people have extraordinary freedoms, our stories get out there and frankly, they get out there now and we see ourselves represented in pop culture and everything else, we have anchor men and women who are LGBT, running magazines, news shows and everything else. It’s so much different to what it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago, definitely 30 years ago, but you know what, I think there’s still a need for us to define our own narrative. There’s a need for us to actually parse stories of our struggle, and to ensure they’re preserved. And we can even see the way this is playing out, the fraught nature of conversations around gender identity, especially in countries close to us like England. 

One of the interesting things in Ireland is that, it seems to me that the Irish feminists had a conversation amongst themselves about, well, they didn’t have a conversation – they knew instinctively what the answer was to the question of how we embrace the concerns and needs of our trans brothers and sisters. Which, the result’s that actually it seems that the women in the Irish Liberation movement in its guises… is onboard with the trans struggle. In a way that is not, it’s utterly fractured, venomous and fraught in countries like the UK, but it seems we’ve had much better accommodation, a much greater sense, there’s compassion and understanding, seems to be more… as qualities, they seem to be more embedded and informed, the conversations that we’ve been having here but I do think there’s always been an abiding need on the part of the LGBT community for us to frame our stories, on our own terms. Really, really, really, really important. 

Because you know what, history has shown us that we can’t, we can’t trust other people to do it for us, you know? And that’s down to, whether it’s the language we use, the type of imagery that we chose, to actually define our cultural choices, all of that is really important. And you know what, I’ll be damned if I’m gonna have arguments with some mainstream sub-editor of a magazine or newspaper about what picture should be allowed, or what words and terms I should use if I’m writing a really important 3000 word essay or whatever else you know? I think it’s really important to know that there’s a choice there for us, that there are other platforms that we have, there are podcasts, there are broadcasts, there are queer channels on YouTube or whatever else. There’s a whole panoply of broadcasting, and I think also that increasing the diverse and noisy landscape of broadcasting is also really important because it’s actually necessary for us to actually create a landscape of inclusivity. We have to remember you know, going back to the comment I made about the LGBT community not being this monolithic construct, there’s a multiplicity of voices, and if we’re going to do ourselves any favours, if we’re going to ensure that we get to the promise land and we can enjoy it and bring as many people with us then we need to develop the structures that will actually allow everybody into the conversation, that’s really important. Because too often, you know, those voices have been locked out. 

Georgie, in interview: I 100% agree. And I think this is where, this is the direction a lot of the conversations are going now, that it’s not about finding a representative of this supposedly monolithic community to speak for all of us. You know it’s so much more about saying, there should be a platform for individual experience. So that we don’t homogenise groups, so we don’t presume what experiences these individuals have had based on them fitting into a demographic. Because, that’s ultimately what the intersexual perspective is about, it’s about saying it’s not just about reducing us down to our gender or our sexuality, it’s about every other aspect of our experience, it’s about all the other protected characteristics and everything that doesn’t fit into a box as well. 

Tonie, in interview: I totally agree with you and it’s really really important you know? And if I was inclined to be a spiritual person the line I would come out with right now is well God made us all in his or her image, you know? Everyone and everything has value, even if it’s something we actually have difficulty actually accommodating. 

Georgie, in interview: and I guess on that note, I’m going to invite you to answer my final question, just one, because you’ve been incredibly comprehensive, and that is I guess from your individual stand point, based on the perspective you have and the experiences you’ve had, what do you feel is still on the agenda, for queer rights in Ireland and what work still needs to be done? It’s a big question!

Tonie, in interview: The first thing I would say, and it comes quite easily to me, is that we need to be ever mindful of creating and enabling new structures for queer and cultural heritage. I think the legislative battles have been fought, now we can actually divert and really emphatically divert our attention to culture. What queer culture means, how it plays out, how we enable it and give it a voice, how we give it many voices… how we value it. How we value it on every level, economically, socially, in every-way, so culture for me is really important, because culture actually helps us find a new way of living and it gives us comfort in the choices that we make. 

And I also think we need to turn our sense of outrage at being othered, our sense of outrage at social injustice at people being forced to live miserable lives, all of that outrage I think we also need to now refine and focus towards the needs of other people, in our society who are suffering. We need to turn our attention to those of us who have an activist bone in our body, we need to turn our attention just to other LGBT people who continue to be othered and marginalised. I’m thinking of LGBT travellers, I’m thinking of LGBT people who are in direct provision who’ve got a distinct set of social, cultural, and indeed political needs that need to be addressed. 

I’m thinking of how we use our voice individually and now, and in Ireland as a community, how we use our voice and to shine a light on atrocities that are happening in the other parts of the world and particularly that are happening in the European Union, we need to be really vocal in not putting down and not accepting some of the stuff that is happening in countries like Poland or Hungary, or Russia, or Turkey, expect some noise from me next year [Tonie laughs] so yeah I do think we have … but those of us who have arrived at the promised land, or whatever that promised land constitutes in our head, I think we have a duty of care, I always say we have a duty of care to others less fortunate than us and we should never forget the struggle, the choices we made in overcoming our own struggle for acceptance and put that to the use of other people. 

Liberation’s like getting to the top of the mountain you know, being liberated, it’s like getting to the top of the mountain and seeing the extraordinary view in front of you- but you know what, wouldn’t it be much better if you had loads of people with you to actually enjoy that view? So we need to do whatever we can, we need to do whatever we can, we need to use every fibre of our humanity to call out, to call out bad behaviour when we see it and to be an example to other people. And a lot of the time that is just simply about, that comes down to nothing more simple than simply going about one’s life with conviction and realness and honesty. Because, there’s a life of activism but that’s not for everyone, so I think you know, activism starts with the individual choices we make and the decisions we make about living our lives with honesty. And that’s a powerful aphrodisiac to other people. It’s enormously liberating, it’s enormously enabling to other people because you can be sure that somebody’s watching you. Right now, somebody’s reading one of your posts, your /Queer posts on Insta[gram], and they’re on the other side of the world and ‘I want to be like that [person]’ or ‘I want to be like that person [they’ve] just interviewed’ or whatever and this is me and they see themselves reflected back. They see themselves reflected back with positivity, because you made certain choices, and you made certain choices to also share your unique queer world view and your humanity with other people. It’s really fundamentally important. 

Georgie, in interview: …I’m quite emotional. Um, thank you so much for.. yeah. I love what you said about liberation being like climbing the mountain, and how much better it feels to be up there with other people. I think that is gorgeous. Well thank you very much for answering all my questions, I have learnt so much, so yeah, thank you. 

Tonie, in interview: I wish we were there so we could actually devolve to the cheese and wine!

Georgie Williams, voiceover: Tonie’s perspective on Queer Ireland is incomparable in value and impact. Tonie’s conceptualisation of queerness is of something individual, personal, and subjective to change as LGBTQ+ politics have evolved in recent Irish history. An effective queer politics and activism, then, understands the import of arguing not for a dilution of rights and liberations for a select few, but for the freedom from social persecution for all to live as one is. Is this not what queer is at heart? Of course, queer entails a broad scope of other ideals and values, but it is perhaps this relentless pursuit of liberation in the face of institutional and social backlash, for the betterment of all people that characterises queer best.

What we must also take from Tonie’s testimony is more than just the individual fight for queerness. What Tonie’s account perhaps exemplifies best is the importance and significance of community and collectivity. It is in unity and coalition that queer politics are strongest and most effective, and it is in the foundations of queer to seek alliance with others. The Irish queer community is, as Tonie demonstrates, an immensely diverse and extraordinarily strong movement that illustrates the power and potential for collective change. In forming coalition between communities and identities, recognising common struggles, and fighting for one another, Irish queer politics is a stronghold of queer community and love defined in its own terms, perpetually in the face of those who might argue otherwise.

Speaking to Tonie and listening to his story has been a transformational experience for us in the /Queer team, and since our talk I have found myself often thinking about the view from the mountain; that peak of freedom and justice that Tonie describes, and the joy that can only truly be achieved in sharing that view with those we have brought up to sit atop the mountain with us. Next episode is our final episode not only in Ireland but in this season of /Queer- and we will spending it talking about one final example from Irish queer history of powerful and compassionate activists shepherding their people to that summit of liberation. I’ll join you next time as we finish Season One of /Queer.

This episode of the /Queer Podcast was edited by Sam Clay, transcribed by Bronya Smith, co-scripted and produced by myself and Matt Thompson and hosted as always by me, Georgie Williams. A very special thanks to Tonie Walsh for his wisdom and insight in both this episode and our previous episode. Thanks also to our wonderful Patreon subscribers- our humble team of volunteers appreciate every penny you donate to fund our work. If you’re not a patron and want to support the podcast, you can find the /Queer Patreon at patreon.com/slashqueer. That’s S-L-A-S-H Queer. The link is also available on our Facebook, Instagram and Twitter pages. We are still selling all our /Queer merchandise on Threadless and are still accepting donations via Ko-fi and you can find the links to both in the description for this episode. Finally, a thank you as usual goes to you, our wonderful listeners. Thank you for always giving this project time and sharing it with the people in your life.

This episode was recorded on location in London, the United Kingdom. Music in this episode was composed by our resident audio king, Sam Clay. If you enjoyed this episode or have any feedback, please get in touch on Instagram or Twitter at @SlashQueer or email us at slashqueer@outlook.com. As always stay kind, stay radical and stay queer.