"BECAUSE Mary Robinson is someone who's done a lot of work for homosexual rights, people outside Ireland perceive her election as president to be some sort of affirmation of change," says Desmond Hogan. "But it's not. It's just not true."
Anyone who knows Desmond Hogan or his work will quickly realise that this kind of thing is not his usual ballpark. Hogan has never set himself up as a social commentator. His writing, whether his fiction or his occasional journalism as recently collected in the Lilliput book "The Edge Of The City", has always had a laconic quality. He is an imagery curator. He simply presides over a tour around a gallery of striking and finely-wrought pictures and leaves everything else up to the viewer.
Invariably, however, this modus operandi is more revealing than any didactic tract could ever be. There is, for example, a piece towards the end of "The Edge Of The City" in which Hogan describes life in St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) on January 2nd, 1992, the day on which all price controls were abolished and Russia's free market economy was unmuzzled. In a few terse pages, he comprehensively conveys the sense of sheer bleak numbness which currently grips the people of that benighted country.
"I'm not trying to impose any philosophy on the reader," avers Hogan. "I like to build up a relationship. That's why I write in collages and mosaics, I like that form of creating. The images are like hieroglyphics. You make your own sense of them."
"The Edge Of The City" is "a scrapbook" of non-fiction sketches, the earliest dating back to 1977 and many of which first appeared in such diverse publications as Hot Press, Books and Bookmen and The Sunday Times.
"When I moved to London first in the late Seventies, I lived in a squat in Battersea," he recalls. "There were bombs going off at the time and I remember it as a very bleak place. But the great thing about London is that it's the cheapest place in the world to travel from. You can go anywhere from there.
"I'll always remember the joy of buying cheap flight tickets in those days and knowing that I was about to leave London. It became like a sort of bad habit. I'd write when I was travelling just to keep a record, then I started asking newspapers and magazines to publish my pieces. They were usually very reluctant but I learned to force myself on them."
Aside from the travel writing, "The Edge Of The City" also features several essays on some of Hogan's favourite writers and a couple of interviews. One of these is an encounter with Van Morrison, a man who usually treats journalists the way Hannibal Lecter treats his victims' livers, with or without the falfa beans and the nice Chianti. Hogan, however, found Morrison in a slightly more expansive mood than one would normally expect.
"He was really insolent to me," says Hogan. "He kept saying 'what's your name, what's your angle' and I had no angle. I hadn't even interviewed anyone before. But eventually we started to talk. And the thing is I've met him a couple of times since and the last time I bumped into him in London he just handed me his phone number.
"It was a kind gesture really 'cause he probably knew I wouldn't ring him. There's something very lonely about the man. I felt a lot of loneliness and intensity there, and that he was misunderstood. He's trying to express something very painful about Ireland and he's really frightened that it will be misunderstood."
Though never one to camouflage his homosexuality, Hogan has likewise had little desire to flaunt it in crusading neon. Growing up gay in a place like Ballinasloe, Co. Galway in the Sixties was obviously difficult and the suffocating intolerance of small town Ireland was clearly part of what prompted him to move away, first to Dublin and then to London where he has been based since 1977.
Nevertheless, Hogan also insists that he feels scant affinity with the London gay community and, indeed, often feels alienated from the homosexual culture in general. His attitude toward the traditional depiction of this country as intrinsically hostile to homosexuals is similarly complex.
"My problem with Ireland is not Ireland, not Irish society at large," he explains. "It's the background, the family I come from. I never really got on with them. And if you live here and don't get on with your family it's very difficult. I remember in the mid-Sixties, I was always coming up to Dublin and going to any kind of Russian or East European films.
"Dublin was like Leningrad then, like Leningrad is now. And Dublin was great for a while but then I had to get out and go further, to London like so many West of Ireland people do. London is the capital of Galway not Dublin. But, again, it was my own personal circumstances that made it difficult for me to live here, not Irish society itself.
"You see," he continues, "I'm still actually trying to work out what people think in Ireland. You never know. It's like Russia, there's all these signals but you don't actually know what people really think. That's why collages are such a good medium because I don't understand Ireland. With something like homosexuality, some days people will come out with things that are just so awful, other days they'll be wonderful, the same people. But the one very good thing about Ireland in regard to sexuality is that there's still that sense of spirituality about it.
"You go to other countries where homosexuality is accepted but people's relationships are utterly dead in another ways because they're so categorised and boxed in. You go to places and everybody's defined by whether they're gay or straight or whatever. There's actually no sense of love, no spirit. Despite everything, that's horrible. The one thing that Ireland has, inside the conservatism, is a sense of the transcendental and the spiritual.
"There are really good things in Ireland and really bad things, it's those kind of extremes. For me, the good things will always be the intensity and the spirituality. Especially among the older people."
Younger people, however, can be one of the bad things. Hogan has been struck in recent times by an emerging generation of Irish people who seem to have abandoned whatever baseline decency their parents had and have added only virulence to their bigotry. Youth Defence,. anyone?
"Older Irish people came from a tradition, a spiritual tradition," he says. "They had a pain and a history and a great struggle. They came from something that was very hard. But there's a new kind of conservatism that's very deceptive and these younger people are worse than the older ones ever were. It's a conservatism that's all dressed up in lovely, youthful clothes but it's very, very bleak. It's frightening. These are people who are supposed to have different attitudes but when you listen to what they come out with it's horrible. These are the ones I'd run a million miles from.
"I'll tell you a story. I was having a bad time in '88. I didn't think I'd write again or anything. And I met a girl in a pub in East London and she said 'what you need to do is go to North Yemen, here's a ticket'. Anyway, there was an Irish contingent going so I went with them and I got very friendly with these three Irish tourist girls. We were driving through North Yemen one day, just talking, and our Moslem guide started saying that homosexuals should be thrown off rooftops. And the girls said 'we agree'. Can you believe that? I thought they were joking but they weren't.
"These were three lovely Irish girls from North Dublin. They wore lovely bright clothes and low-cut dresses and they talked about going to nightclubs and everything, but the stuff they were coming out with was incredible. It was really frightening."
As a seasoned traveller with a forensic eye for detail and
nuance however, Hogan knows that sexual prejudice and bigotry are far from unique to Ireland. "The more places you go to the more you see the same thing," he says. "I had a flat in Berlin for about six months two years ago and I've been back since for sojourns. And the interesting thing about Berlin is that you meet loads of people from Brazil there who are running away from their families.
"The exact same thing," he ruminates. "They come from Sao Paulo and very Catholic families and they're homosexual or whatever so they leave and go to either Canada or Berlin, just like we go to London. Again, is it Brazil or is it the constraints of the individual families?
"And it's not just Brazil or Ireland. In Berlin, there was also this Norwegian guy who came from a very political family and he was living with this other guy from Sao Paulo. His mother came all the way over from Oslo just to spy on him and then tried to bring him back home. Just like an Irish mother, you know.
"In the end, you've got to laugh. It's just people trying to make identities for themselves away from families, whether they're in Oslo, Sao Paulo or Ballinasloe."