For our character Bridget and many like her, what makes her story so heartbreaking is that her parents’ motivation is not cruelty, but love. As awful as the situation is, they’re doing what they think is best for their daughter. To them, Bridget’s emerging sexuality is a phase. Like a bad habit or falling in with the wrong crowd, it’s something that can be fixed with tough love and professional intervention. Screenwriter Paul Cahill and I were also fascinated by the idea of Bridget’s story taking place at the epicenter of historical flux. Ireland was on the cusp of major change in the late 1970s: countercultural influences were seeping through the old protective walls of religious dogma. Punk, poetry, disco; the cultural fuel of civil rights movements across the water were filtering into Irish consciousness and taking root. What nobody could have predicted was how strong those roots would become. Ireland has since become an international beacon for LGBTQ rights and the degree to which gay culture has been embraced and made accessible here is amazing. As a straight man growing up in rural Ireland in the 80s and 90s, my awareness of gay culture was limited to the John Waters episode of The Simpsons. For young digitally literate people growing up today, LGBTQ lifestyles and culture are ubiquitous and celebrated. This revolution of thought is astonishing not just because of our historical deference to anti-gay teachings, but in how dramatically our culture has uncoupled from it. Same-sex marriage, a gay Taoiseach; it’s as if we’re making up for lost time. It blows my mind to think of both how far we’ve come in the meantime, but also that institutional conversion therapy was happening in my lifetime. In fact, that chronological proximity of dangerous bigotries was one of the reasons we felt ‘A White Horse’ was an important film to make. And though there’s recently been a strong interest in telling these stories on screen (Boy Erased, The Miseducation of Cameron Post), we felt that it hadn’t been told from an Irish perspective.
‘A White Horse’ toured the Irish film festival circuit in late 2019 and early 2020, so we were very lucky to have had cinema screenings before the planet came to a halt with COVID. We picked up a number of awards, one of which qualified us for the Academy Award longlist. Unfortunately we didn’t make the shortlist, but it was an amazing experience and a great achievement for an independent short film. The most gratifying part of the whole experience was when people approached us after the screenings to say how they had related to the film. Either they had gone through something similar in the past, or had known a family member who went away ‘for a spell’ and reappeared back months or years later, often with a marked difference in their personality. What we didn’t expect was that the film would become even more pertinent in the time since it was made. The Republican Party’s 2020 platform all but re-endorsed conversion therapy. An ultra-conservative judge was appointed to the US Supreme Court, which could mean knock-on effects for LGBTQ rights. And Arlene Foster’s abstention to vote in a debate on a motion to ban Conversion Therapy is likely to have contributed to her stepping down as lead of the DUP. It’s astonishing that in such a progressive era the idea of somebody’s sexuality being ‘incorrect’ and in need of ‘fixing’ is taken seriously at all. And though conversion therapy has been thankfully relagated from legitimate medical treatment to fringe practice, for the vulnerable young people who go through it the effects are still as damaging as ever. The sooner it’s consigned to history, the better.
A WHITE HORSE By Shaun O’Connor
In 2019 I directed a short film called ‘A White Horse’.
This practice of sectioning and ‘treating’ people for homosexuality was well documented and happening wholesale in the UK and the US. It was not quite as catalogued in Ireland, but we know from anecdotal evidence that it was happening. Not just that, but anyone deemed generally ‘abnormal’ or ‘burdensome to society’ (i.e., mentally ill) was commonly incarcerated too. Sadly, it was not usual for these people to be left ‘unclaimed’ by their families and abandoned in these institutions for years or decades. To tell Bridget’s story, we drew on various sources, both anecdotal and recorded. We spoke to people who had been in mental institutions around that time. We took inspiration from Lou Reed, who underwent intensive ECT as a young man and whose memory was subsequently affected for years. And we drew from the story of Hanna Greally, an Irishwoman who spent the best part of two decades in a psychiatric institution and recounted her story in the harrowing memoir ‘Bird’s Nest Soup’.
Set in Ireland in the late 1970s, it’s about Bridget, a young girl who escapes a mental hospital, walks into a phone booth and calls home. Through the conversation with her mother, we learn that the reason she’s been placed in the hospital is that parents have found out she’s in a romantic relationship with another girl in her school. Bridget has been sent away to be ‘fixed’, through use of various therapies including ECT (electroconvulsive therapy).
www.corkpride.com
#CorkPride2021
132
133
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker