'I knew I was an outlaw, my life not real'

[xchrom]

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2012/1008/1224325013269.html

?ts=1349704170
Senator David Norris: "I helped to give its name, and argued strongly that we needed to make a bold statement by including the words 'Irish' and 'gay', which at the time was a shocking contradiction as society had decreed that you couldn't be both."Photograph: Frank Miller

***SNIP


I WAS born a criminal. From the moment of my arrival on this planet, my essential nature defined me as such. There was simply nothing I could do about it, since homosexuality is a natural but minority variation of the sexual instinct.

As the American author Wainwright Churchill points out, homosexual behaviour occurs “throughout the mammalian order, occurring in frequency and complexity as one ascends the phylogenetic scale”.

So if such activity is fully natural for a large minority of life on this planet, I sensed that there had to be some reason for the antagonism leading to historic human taboos. The source for this scapegoating of 10 per cent of the population, I discovered, was politico-religious, as it remains.

... In Ireland it was an austere era, and I was an outsider in every way. I was Anglican in a deeply Roman Catholic society; I was half English in a narrow and negatively republican state defined more by hatred of England than love of Ireland; and I was homosexual when you could be jailed for being so.

[William769]

1. Highly recommended.

"Áine asked in what way Ireland had failed to cherish me. I replied: “I was brought up in ignorance of the facts of my true nature. The word ‘homosexual’ was barely known in Ireland, and not breathed in polite society, and I was allowed to grow up through my adolescence believing that I was possibly the only homosexual in Ireland, not knowing there were possibly thousands of other similarly isolated people here. I thought there might have been one or two in England because I had heard about the curious goings-on over there, but I did not realise that I was part of a very large but isolated community in this country.”"

Reminds me of a lot of people here in the U.S., keep us quiet & isolated.

[xchrom]

2. That's our lives - we didn't live in communities until

Very recently.

And most of us still don't.

We had to figure out on our own - what, how & who we were.

[HillWilliam]

4. Anyone who grew up in the rural south here

can totally relate.

Recommended.

[mitchtv]

3. that malady was tranferred to Irish American neighborhoods

all over America