Trying to get by on a wig and a prayer

RADIO REVIEW:TRACING THE steps of a man who no longer walks the streets of Ennis, Co Clare selling newspapers provided Brian O'Connell with a challenge in Documentary On One: I Could Have Danced All Night(RTÉ Radio One, Saturday).

Michael Tierney was a flamboyant gay man who wore women’s hats, perfume, make-up and a different wig for every day of the week. He was born in 1917 and died in 1998. He lived at a time when homosexuality was neither seen nor heard. Today, there is a Facebook campaign to erect a statue to him.

O’Connell’s documentary was more than a search for one man. It was a slice of social history from rural Ireland. It gave some insight into how a culture that did not accept homosexuality could embrace a local man who wore his heart – if not his sexuality – on his sleeve. It’s important to remember that there were – are – Michael Tierneys in towns all over Ireland.

His father died in the first World War before he was born and, even after his mother died, Tierney would call out, "I'm home, mother". He was also a reliable source of news. "He didn't need the Clare Champion," said local woman Pamela Ferry, "Michael was the Clare Champion." His cousin Cyril Quinn recalled: "He'd be a ray of sunshine . . . He didn't want no sadness around him." Quinn said his cousin was defined by his personality, not his sexuality.

Writer Mark O’Halloran, who saw him around town in the 1980s, recalled: “He was incredibly effeminate and incredibly flamboyant, but also strong with it. He wasn’t a typical sissy, he was a big strong man-woman.”

Of course, this public innocence was a double-edged sword: one would have longed for him to be who he was and also feel free to comfortably have a relationship too. Ferry added, “I hope he found love somewhere.”

O'Connell found a recording of Tierney, thanks to Denis Canty, a retired school teacher, who interviewed him on a soggy Christmas Eve. Perhaps theatrically, he left this to the end of the programme. "I wish all my friends a very happy Christmas," Tierney said. His voice was high and musical and giddy and high-spirited. His wish for 1986: "I hope everything goes well for everyone." He then sang I Could Have Danced All Night. He sang it wildly and with gusto, and took liberties with the lyrics, which is exactly what one would have expected him to do.

American writer Anne Rice, famous for writing Interview With The Vampire, spoke to Michele Norris of National Public Radio's All Things Considered(RTÉ Radio Choice, weekdays) about converting to Catholicism in 1998 – the same year Tierney died – and her recent defection from the Roman Catholic Church, which she has described as "quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious and deservedly infamous". Rice described herself as committed to Christ, but not a Christian.

Rice said she hadn’t foreseen that the Church would “donate money to defeat civil rights of homosexuals in a secular society. I certainly knew that the Catholic Church was not going to marry gay people or accept gay clergy, or sanctify same-sex marriages, but to go into the secular culture to defeat same-sex marriage in Maine or in California, that is something that I simply had not foreseen.” Rice, whose son Christopher is a gay writer, added, “All that is needed for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing.” But Rice said she won’t be returning to the metaphors of her earlier fiction: “Certainly I will never go back to being that atheist and that pessimist that I was . . . In God we have the hope of all answers and all explanations.”

Her past atheism was hardly associated with a lack of imagination, but nor should it mean pessimism or darkness either. Rather than take comfort in the notion of an afterlife, for some, immortality lies in those relationships we form during our lifetime and in the small acts of kindness while we are here.

Crime writer PD James, who recently turned 90, told John Humphrys on Tuesday's Today(BBC Radio 4, weekdays) she is writing another novel, but not an Adam Dalgliesh which would take too long ("I like to leave things finished or not leave them at all").

Of her mortality, James said, “We cannot foresee the moment of our going, except it can’t be very far ahead, and therefore one lives for the day, and just to rejoice in being alive, which I do.”

Tierney, Rice and James provided three very different stories about social freedom, spiritual and religious freedom and what we wish to leave behind after we’re gone. Their highest aspiration was to be true to who they were, widely and rightly regarded as the highest form of morality.