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

And I cried because I loved her back.
    We spoke about Lorcan, and after she’d talked to him on the phone and stoically taken on the full gay picture, we sat longer on her bed. Then she looked at me and said, ‘You and Lorcan always seemed like two exotic birds that just landed down on top of us.’ I knew exactly what she meant.
    Still sitting on the bed, we heard my father’s car pull up outside. My mother stood up, straightened her skirt and said, ‘I’ll go out and tell your father.’ I sat nervously in the living room while my mother sat in the passenger seat of my father’s car and told him about his two exotic birds.
    Some minutes later he walked in the door, looked at me and said, ‘Don’t you be worrying about what I think,’ then sat down for his lunch as if just being told by his wife that two of his three sons were gay was the least interesting thing that had happened all day.
    In fact, he was
so
casual about it that, for a long time, I didn’t fully believe it. My father had always been a calm, laid-back kind of guy but it hardly seemed credible that a sixty-year-old Irish Catholic man born in the 1930s could have been so entirely unfazed to hear that a third of his six children were queer, even if he’d had his own suspicions. For a long time I assumed that my father, seeing that his wife was upset, had decided to
act
completely unbothered for her sake. His utterly calm acceptance of the situation was, I decided, fake, achivalrous façade designed to make it easier on his wife. However, in the years since I have asked him about it a few times and he has always insisted that he wasn’t faking it. He simply didn’t think it was anything to get upset over.
    Of course now, in retrospect, I feel guilty for ever doubting him or worrying how he might react, but it’s impossible not to. He’s my father.
    From that day my pre-war Irish Catholic father has never once betrayed any discomfort over his gay sons. Whether he’s meeting boyfriends or sitting through a drag show that’s much too loud, he does it all with the same vaguely bemused expression he has when the TV weather lady is wearing something he considers ‘silly’. (In general, my father doesn’t like anyone who appears on the telly but the poor posture and inappropriate fashion choices of lady weather presenters is his specialist subject: ‘Oh, there’s Slouchy again with her arms!’)
    My mother, like most parents, took longer to be totally comfortable. It had taken me a couple of years to come to terms fully with who I was and be at ease in my own gay skin, and my mother needed the same time. She never said or did anything that made her discomfort explicit, but I was aware of it. It wasn’t easy for her to be totally at peace with having two gay sons. It was a difficult and painful journey for her, and for that I largely blame religion.
    Religious people (including my mother) will always say how much comfort their faith brings them. Theyremember how their faith comforted them in sadness, how their quiet conversations with God helped them through difficult times, and how the rituals of religion strengthened them in bereavement. But they never describe the times their faith caused them unnecessary hurt. They never remember that, even though their love for their gay sons was never in doubt for even a second, and accepting their gayness should have been entirely simple and uncomplicated, it wasn’t. It was not having gay sons that caused my mother pain, but having religion – and I have never forgiven religion for that.

10. Boom-town Gay
    A S THE LETHARGY OF ILLNESS started to lift, I needed to make some decisions. What was I going to do now? Japan definitely felt like a finished chapter, but Dublin – the only place in Ireland I could have imagined living – didn’t particularly appeal. After all, it was only a few years before that I had happily left behind its crumbling plaster and weird Lost World quality, where long-haired types