26 Mar 2009
The Gays in Recession
There's nothing like a recession to get
people reminiscing about the bad old days. The subtle conversations about
guaranteed returns are once again limited to the places where they have
persisted for centuries - where the real elites live. For those gilded
demiurges, the property speculation bubble was a passing fad, a chance to
dabble with someone else's money, but now that it's bust, they continue their
progress into the future they have already mapped.
For the rest of us of course, the bust
is having real effects, not least in the range of acceptable topics in the pub.
Anyone who was an adult in the 1980s can now bore any young wans they manage to
corner with 'it was much worse in the '80s' or less often, 'it's just like the
'80s all over again'.
Now maybe it's because I was just a
self-indulgent teen for most of the decade of giant hair, with no major
decisions to make, but I think both of those phrases are true.
The 1980s were far worse than 2009 in
Ireland. Apart from the statistics - unemployment, poverty and interest rates
in the '80s were multiples of what we have so far had this time - the
experience of life in the 1980s was a different world. That world was the damp
and gloomy desert that characterised the Republic of Ireland pretty much since
its foundation. Despite a short burst of optimistic sunshine in the 1960s, the
first time the country tried globalisation, when it lowered the barriers that
had defended DeValera's fantasy of a re-illuminated Celtic Twilight since 1922,
Ireland in the 1980s was an inward-looking shithole, hidebound by its class
system and by a fundamentalist state religion.
No surprise then, that being a gay in
the 1980s was hardly a bundle of laughs. Aside from the democratically
paradoxical condition of being an illegal identity (albeit one that the Gardaí
rarely prosecuted anyone for), crimes against gays were acceptable. Gay men
could be beaten to death in parks or in their homes and the Republic and the
judicial system that interpreted its laws looked the other way. 'Queerbashing'
was a word used by UK or US publications, while Irish gay men expected being
beaten up, robbed and physically intimidated as part of their daily experience,
it wasn't regarded as a separate set of crimes, akin to racially or
gender-motivated violence. Indeed, the arrival of Aids and HIV in the late
1980s gave homophobes another horribly effective weapon, the accusation of
being typhoid Marys. The only openly gays I can remember from the 1980s were
Boy George and Mr Humphreys in Are You Being Served? and even John Inman,
hilariously, was still in the closet.
The gay experience now is very
different. Being gay is not illegal and there is protection against
discrimination. Queerbashing still happens, but most people find it as
acceptable as attacking people for being black or female. Gay-specific HIV and
Aids services are effective, supportive and free. And the media often seems
like they are coming down with gays, even if a lot of them are Perez Hilton.
Whether 'it's just like the '80s all
over again' probably remains to be seen. One of the positive aspects of the
'80s for gays was an effect of all that unemployment. Large numbers of
energetic and increasingly educated young people, if they didn't go off to
contribute to the US or UK economies, went on Fás or community employment
schemes. The holes in the social fabric that currently make Irish society
impoverished even before the recession's economic effects kick in, were for a
time filled by those schemes, to provide services for disadvantaged areas and
groups of people, including gays. Organisations like Outhouse, //GCN//, the
HIV/Aids groups, all spent their early years relying on these people who the
Irish economy was otherwise failing.
When the good times began, these people
were drawn away by salaries and the chance to finally start the lives that the
'80s stagnation had put on hold. Community organisations may have got higher
funding from the property-swollen coffers, but they had to spend a lot of this
money on big salaries to retain staff. They still do, even as the public purse
rapidly becomes threadbare.
Will the Celtic Tiger babies rediscover community, now that a lot of
them are likely to have some time on their hands? Will the neglected areas of
fairness, social integration and the creation of welfare (in the original sense
of the word) benefit from the energy and experience of the globalised,
technophile unemployed who Ireland Inc. is currently failing?