Woman in the Making: Panti's Memoir by Rory O'Neill

way that a letter doesn’t, but it’s still better than sitting there daring your parents to be impossibly perfect.
    Once Lorcan had decided that a letter was the best way to do it, he then set about procrastinating even further by writing the perfect coming-out letter. It was going to be a work of art, a masterpiece, the
Ulysses
of coming-out letters, but without the masturbation or theweird punctuation. Shakespeare himself would look at this letter and weep at its beauty. And so Lorcan spent months – no, years! – writing this perfectly pitched letter that struck exactly the right tone. He wrote it (he claims) and rewrote it (he claims) and left it on his chunky mid-nineties laptop on an aeroplane (he claims).
    Meanwhile I was now spending an extended period with my parents for the first time in many years, vaguely avoiding topics of conversation that might stray on to awkward areas and slowly becoming more frustrated and annoyed by it. I felt I was hiding something from them, in a way being deceitful, and, unbeknown to them, it was coming between us. I say ‘vaguely’ avoided certain topics of conversation because through all of this I just assumed that really my parents already knew and were just waiting for me or Lorcan to tell them. I certainly knew that the possibility of Lorcan being gay had been discussed in the family long before we knew for sure, and I assumed that the same conversations had been had about me. After all, my parents knew about my college drag shows, and surely it wasn’t going to surprise anyone that the artistic boy, who hated football and liked Martina Navratilova and drawing dresses, was gay. Surely you didn’t have to be Jessica Fletcher to put that one together.
    So, one bright West of Ireland spring morning my mother was driving me to my hospital appointment in Galway. I was feeling a lot better by then and we weretalking as we travelled along the familiar road (Galway had always been our local town, where we went to do a ‘big shop’, get the sewing machine fixed or broken bones plastered). My mother, in the context of some long-forgotten conversation, said, ‘Well, it’s not like you came home and told us you were gay and have AIDS.’ And in that moment, as my unsuspecting mother drove us along the long, straight Curragh Line across the flat bog, I
thought
what she was really saying to me was, ‘I know you’re gay, son, so let’s just get that out of the way, and while we’re at it will you just reassure me that there’s nothing more to worry about than a bout of hepatitis?’
    And I, with some relief, replied, ‘Well, I don’t have AIDS but I
am
gay,’ and my mother nearly drove off the road.
    It turned out that, bizarrely, my mother had never thought I might be gay. I had so many girlfriends! Apparently Lorcan had drawn all the gay suspicion. Lorcan was probably the gay one and sure there wouldn’t be two gays in the one family so I was off the gay hook – until I climbed up onto that gay hook and came crashing through her windscreen on it just outside Galway.
    After my mother had managed not to kill us both by keeping us on the road, we spoke about it for
a minute
. I don’t remember what was said except that it was awkward and weird, and
absolutely everything
that Lorcan’s letter was
not
going to be. In fact, it was worse than that because even in Lorcan’s worst nightmares he had never imagined that leaving the coming out to memight almost kill our mother in a car accident. And then my mother said she didn’t want to talk about it any more. Or, at least, not yet. She needed time to let it percolate.
    For three whole days we awkwardly didn’t talk about it while all the while it loomed over the house like the world’s most pregnant pause. My mother acted as if absolutely nothing had happened. I avoided being in the same room as her, and my father pottered about entirely oblivious.
    Of course I knew that my mother was a devout Catholic, a woman who took her