Una Mullally: We are all coming out now

Another Dublin Pride has passed in a pandemic. The LGBTQ+ community, like everyone, remains fragmented by the curtailments with which no one has really learned to live satisfactorily.

I felt a change in the air a couple of weekends ago, sitting out on Parliament Street in Dublin with friends, across from the great queer bar, Street 66, and down the road from the George in one direction, and Pantibar and Penny Lane in the other, as LGBTQ+ friends and acquaintances got back together. It was cathartic and a relief to realise that we’re still here. Most of us.

But it also raises the question during this Pride Month, as it has come to be known, what an LGBTQ+ community will look like on the other side of a pandemic, and what we can learn from the experiences within that to reshape broader society and politics.

It speaks volumes that the entire global might of Big Pharma was activated to find treatment and vaccines for Covid-19 compared with Aids

As a gay woman, I’m interested in examining the experience of the pandemic through a queer lens, both from what the queer experience can teach us about isolation, disease, marginalisation, stigma, radical personal growth and change, to how cis-straight people are experiencing “coming out” as their new post-lockdown selves, and how discombobulating navigating social situations as a “new” person can be.

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Will you still relate to people in your life? Do you feel you’ve outgrown some? Were you even living your authentic self beforehand? Have you discovered new characteristics and interests but don’t know how they’ll land in this new version of you and your world?

Common experiences

In many ways, the personal development, stress, isolation and feeling of oppression may give some cis-straight people an opportunity to empathise with the queer experience, whether they know it or not.

People’s friend groups condensed, they questioned what they really wanted in life, they looked inward and examined their lives, they found new interests that felt authentic to their desires, and they are emerging, butterfly-like from the lockdown chrysalis with new looks and new ideas about the world and themselves.

These are all common LGBTQ+ experiences, but for cis-straight people, seeing a world that usually bends to their experience upended, queers the pitch.

Of course there are plenty of rigid thinkers still in the closet of the past, willing “normal” to resume, and seemingly either refusing to or incapable of examining their own lives. And if a global pandemic doesn’t change that, I doubt much will.

At the outset of the pandemic, I wrote about the rhymes between Aids and the Covid-19 pandemic, and many of them have played out, from fear and stigma, to travel restrictions.

Traditionally, LGBTQ+ activist politics, like the feminist politics that worked alongside and within it, intentionally rejected the notion of figureheads

That said, it speaks volumes that the entire global might of Big Pharma was activated to find treatment and vaccines for Covid-19 – a virus that is devastating and kills, but from which the vast majority of people don’t get seriously ill, and recover well – compared with Aids, which was originally a death sentence for all, and its treatment was devastatingly hindered by global homophobia, even though the majority of its victims ended up existing outside of the gay male community.

Many social ills have been exposed over the past year and a bit, and civil rights issues have come to the fore. Most recently, the abhorrent homophobic and transphobic policies of Victor Orban in Hungary were met by rankled European Union leaders, and the stupid fumbling of UEFA which saw a rainbow stadium as a political statement, yet did not see banning it as an equally potent political statement.

I’m not particularly interested in rainbow stadiums. Symbolism, although powerful, can often languish at a superficial level. I would imagine most LGBTQ+ people in Europe would prefer if Germany didn’t vote down two self-identification Bills for trans people last month, and prioritise addressing trans rights fully, rather than lighting up a stadium.

Collateral damage

I’m concerned about how few LGBTQ+ Hungarian people have been given a platform to discuss an issue that is about them. I know that “lightening rod” moments around LGBTQ+ rights “debates” can offer the potential for change, but they can also be moments for huge division, opportunities for homophobia and transphobia, give rise to an increase in LGBTQ+ attacks, and create a massive collective stress for the community.

While cis-straight people in western Europe might feel they’re engaged in a virtuous “debate” about rights, there is rarely an acknowledgement of how LGBTQ+ people are collateral damage in these moments. And it’s hard to even articulate that, because some can take it as batting people away from well-intentioned acts of solidarity.

I watched a panel discussion recently following a screening of the documentary, The 8th. During it, Ailbhe Smyth said that what she was most proud of regarding the Repeal referendum was that the movement didn’t split the country. It brought it together. The same can be said for the marriage equality movement. Solidarity and “allyship” can often be passive stances, but coalition is action.

Traditionally, LGBTQ+ activist politics, like the feminist politics that worked alongside and within it, intentionally rejected the notion of figureheads, leadership, or other hierarchical and patriarchal constructs that are about power and ego. So if society is to have its new-look, coming out moment, perhaps we can dig into these modes of being, and shed the rigid structures and ways of doing things that serve individuals, not the collective. That would surely be something to be proud of.