In the last days before the marriage equality referendum, we need to take the opportunity to let the people in our communities get to know us as real human beings. When it comes to voting, there’s no better way to get a Yes, says Rory Carrick.

I was at a friend’s wedding recently and happened to be sitting at a table with a group of people I had never met before. I got chatting with an older lady, sitting beside me (let’s call her Margaret), and inevitably she asked if I was married myself. I replied in the negative and told Margaret I dated men and was currently single. Her reaction was to let her wrist go limp and declare: “You’re like that, a queer”.

Maybe I should have been offended, and I’m sure others in my position would have been, but I wasn’t. I’m very comfortable in my own skin and have encountered these kinds of conversations before. They don’t bother me; I’m well able to handle them.

I’ve never been bullied for being gay. I quietly opened the door of my own personal closest and stepped out at the age of 30, to very little fanfare or raising of eyebrows. It was all very ‘non-event’, with only positive reactions from my friends and family. But it might have left me a little oblivious to the very difficult struggles that others face. I read about bullying online, I see the stories on TV and I sometimes think these are gay people so far removed from my reality of gay that it’s hard to identify with them. I guess that makes me the lucky one; it’s something I don’t take for granted.

But back to Margaret with the limp wrist. As it happened, I wasn’t the only gay at that particular wedding, and a friend came over to my table to say hi, with his boyfriend. I introduced them to Margaret and made it clear they were couple. Out came the limp wrist again along with the exclamation: ‘There’s more of you!’ We all laughed. None of us took it to heart. None of us felt the need to challenge her on her choice of words or actions; it just didn’t seem necessary.

She was quite a sweet lady and I’m certain she meant no actual offence – it came across more like a scene from a Carry On movie.

Stereotypes and Naivety

As the evening progressed I spent quite some time chatting with Margaret, enjoying her company. She told me intimate details of her life – the ups and the downs. I find this kind of instant familiarity is a strange side-effect of telling someone you are gay. People take you deep into their confidence and divulges all sorts of personal details. Margaret even declared that she thought some woman in the town might have a son who was “like me”.

There was a naivety about her knowledge of gay men. It was stereotyped, uninformed and misguided. She had just never (to her knowledge) spent any time with a real live gay man. Her experience stretched as far as Graham Norton on TV. Margaret, like many others in this world, unfortunately had a notion that every gay man was as camp as a pink handbag and in danger of dying from Aids. How could she not? The stereotyping of gay men has been been a very successful endeavor for eons, and Margaret had got this far in her life without her limited understanding ever being challenged.

Margaret was married for over 40 years, and her husband was deceased. She had never actually contemplated the idea of two men getting married. I told her that I was single about a year and before that I was with my partner (a man) for seven years. Her eyebrows raised and her jaw dropped a little when I told her before him I was with my girlfriend for six years. “Did you love them both?” she asked. ‘”Very much,” was my reply.

One of my major relationships may have been with a woman, and one with a man, but all the elements of the relationships were the same. I pictured a life with each of them. We lived together. We talked about the future, the past and the present. We went on holidays together, and we were invited as a couple to birthdays, christenings and weddings. We were there for each other in tough times and in good times. We went grocery shopping together, watched movies on the couch with wine, fought over the remote, took turns making dinner, got drunk together and whinged about our hangovers together the morning after. And like every other relationship, each of mine had its ups and downs.

Food For Thought

That night Margaret wished me happiness for the future and even threw in a hug. She had learned quite a few new things over dinner, the main one being that the ‘gay’ at her table was just the same as everyone else. She just hadn’t had the opportunity to sit down and get to know a gay person before.

I too was given some serious food for thought. There are thousands of people across Ireland just like Margaret, in towns and villages and cities and living next door to us. We probably see them in our local supermarket and have most likely sat beside them on buses and trains. We don’t know them and they don’t know us, but they are going to vote in the marriage equality referendum on May 22. If we want our Margaret’s to have a reason to vote ‘Yes’, then we need to let them get to know us. If we don’t put an everyday face to the ‘gay’ label, then we are in danger of remaining anonymous and it’s far easier to say ‘No’ to someone you don’t know.

I’ve had two major relationships in my life. The first was with a woman who made me very happy at the time, and had we wanted to, we could have got married without anyone batting an eyelid. There was no permission needed. The second, the longer of the two, was with a man who also made me very happy. Had we of wanted to get married, however, we couldn’t. The marriage referendum is hopefully set to correct the imbalance between my two relationships, but it will only pass if we put a face on gay, and talk to those people living in our towns, villages, streets, who we don’t know, but who have a say on our lives.

In the days leading up to the referendum, I urge you all to take a moment out and let someone like Margaret get to know you. It may very well turn a No vote to a Yes one, or just as important, turn a non-vote into one that could count.