LONDON CALLING The London Irish LGBT Network
We have also had talks on Roger Casement and the Black Diaries (which I delivered) and Sonja Tiernan spoke about the radical Irish lesbian Eva Gore Booth, who is buried in London and was mentioned also by President Higgins during his trip to London. We rediscovered the plays of the Irish gay dramatist, Colm Clifford nee O’Clubhan, who was on the verge of fame when he died of AIDS in London in the 80s and organised a performance and a staged reading of his play about Irish gay emigration “Rio Rita” in the Lewisham Irish Centre in 2019. We have also organised the first ever conference about Irish LGBTQ emigration to Britain in 2018, together with Irish in Britain (the umbrella organisation for Irish groups in Britain) where one of the themes was marriage equality in Northern Ireland with MPs from the Labour Party and Sinn Fein as well as the Irish TUC. More recently with Covid we have organised online events and have had a number of Irish LGBTQ filmmakers and musicians come to speak, including Riyadh Khalaf, who won Celebrity Masterchef. We held a really interesting presentation about special LGBTQ housing projects in London and Manchester as well as a talk with trans activists in both Ireland and the UK. On the social side we hold a regular Christmas party and often attend the London Irish Film Festival where
there is usually something of interest for an LGBTQ audience. We have just been involved in the launch of the exhibition at the Epic Irish Emigration Museum in Dublin on the history of the Irish LGBTQ Diaspora and many of us hope to return to Ireland to see the exhibition which runs until December this year. Many of us have, of course, been unable to visit our families in Ireland this year and are hoping to be able to make it over soon. Recent developments in Ireland around marriage equality and the repeal of the 8th have made us feel very proud and even more a part of the modern Ireland just across the Irish Sea.
During the course of that talk with Dr Leeworthy, we mentioned the many Irish people who came to be nursed and many to die, in London during the AIDS crisis. This is a story that needs proper telling and has been brought to life again by the recent Channel 4 series, It’s a Sin. I was one of those who was diagnosed in 1990 and got great support from organisations such as Positively Irish, which was visited by Mary Robinson at the time and funded by the Irish government. Our two big events are the London St Patrick’s Festival and London Pride. At St Patrick’s we march with our banners to Trafalgar Square and have a stall there with many other organisations – we frequently meet Irish people over for a trip but also many, especially younger Irish LGBTQ emigrants living in London and introduce them to us. We always get a great reception from the Irish crowds. One of our best St Patrick’s was in 2016, after the marriage referendum, when Colm O’Gorman (from Amnesty Ireland) who we had invited, stood on the main stage and brought us all up to a rousing cheer. We also take part in London Pride and enjoy showing off our Irish LGBT Network t-shirts. We have held some really good events. One highlight was having the veteran lesbian novelist Maureen Duffy read poems, joined by the Irish ambassador at the time who read some of his favourite poems.
The London Irish LGBT Network was set up in 2014 by a group of Irish LGBT people living in London who felt that it was time that we had an organisation where Irish LGBTQ people could meet and share issues around Irish identity and culture as well as sexuality. Our first Chair was Bernard Lynch (the famous AIDS priest) who served for two years and I followed him as Chair with Vanessa Monaghan as our current Chair. I am a proud Dub living in London since 1984 and although there have been other Irish organisations in the past, the last one being in the 90s, there had not been anything for a long time. We were warmly welcomed by the Irish embassy and were the first Irish LGBT organisation outside Ireland to receive a grant from the Emigrant Support Programme via the Dept of Foreign Affairs and the Dept of the Diaspora. We have become regular visitors to events for the Irish community at the embassy and I recently spoke at an event run by the embassy called “Rainbow Crossings” about the history of Irish gay men in London in the 80s, one of whom was Mark Ashton from Antrim, made famous as a result of the film Pride.
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