The recent report, “Straight Talk”, commissioned by the Department of Education, on gay and lesbian issues in secondary schools, reminds us of the price we have paid (and continue to pay) for letting the Church take over the responsibility of educating children in Ireland.
When it comes to relationships and sexuality, the Catholic Church’s homophobic teachings are still “very influential”, and evidence of homophobic bullying has been found in four out of five secondary schools. Because there are no policy guidelines on the matter from the Department, teachers are reluctant to go it alone and talk to children about homosexuality, for fear of disapproval or censure from parents and other staff members, and indeed for fear of suspicion that they might themselves be gay. Many gay teachers are still closeted, for fear of running foul of the disgraceful employment law that protects the Catholic “ethos” of schools (similar to Britain’s notorious Clause 28). In rural areas, fear of what the Board of Management of the school would say was cited as a contributing factor in this conspiracy of silence, due in large part, of course, to the presence of local clergy on the board.
In properly educating teenage lads about sex, discussions have to happen that are fearless and truthful. And the facilitator of those discussions has to feel supported by their school and board of management and union and peers in order to be brave enough to break down the macho posturing and get students to open up. For a man to do it, and to bring up the topic of homosexuality in such a setting, he needs all the resources he can muster. For if he goes in to the arena weak, uncertain, and afraid, he’ll be crucified.
The most depressing statistic for me was that 57% of teachers believe that moves to improve secondary education on lesbian and gay matters will be “hindered”. However, in an interesting response to the report, the Equality Authority firmly nailed its colours to the mast, laying the ground for a battle that is bound to be fought at some stage. They declared that schools are legally liable for the harassment of homosexual students, unless they take reasonable practicable steps to prevent homophobic bullying. Considering that 90% of schools remain officially silent on the matter, and do not mention homophobia in their anti-bullying policy, there is the possibility that, should a child commit suicide after being bullied at school for being gay or lesbian, or being thought to be so, the family could sue the school for damages. I don’t think it would be easy to prove, as it would be extremely difficult to establish the motives of someone who has committed suicide, unless a damning journal was produced. (I imagine that homophobic bullying is one of the main causes to teenage suicide, but of course it’s impossible to verify.) It’s a test case that would open up a can of worms about modern Irish values. Hopefully it won’t take such a tragic event to galvanize the Department of Education to start asserting humane secular principles in Irish schools, and standing up to the institutionalized perversion in which the Catholic Church is steeped.
Let’s get one statistic out of the way, first. 80% of teachers have heard homophobic words being bandied about in the playground. However, thanks to South Park, the adult programme that every child has seen, the word “gay” now also means “naff” or “uncool” or “lame”, to kids as young as six or seven. When they say someone is “gay”, the accuser is not making an accusation about someone’s sexual orientation, and teacher should not reach for the hate crime pocket book. Necessarily. One can lament the pejoration of the word, in the same way as some people have lamented in the past the ruining of the hitherto “perfectly good” word “gay” to include homosexuals. But that in itself was a deliberate move on the part of the Gay Liberation movement in the seventies to appropriate a positive word as a mark of identity, in place of all the other, less attractive ones around at the time, from the clinical to the abusive. But once new meaning is learned for a word, it cannot be unlearned. I think that’s wicked.
In polite England, where there have been politically-correct policies and equal opportunities training in the workplace for decades, you don’t hear overtly racist language used, except by hard cases. In Ireland the language I hear sometimes on the streets is shocking, we are far more fluent in the language of hate. But then, in polite England, people protesting against the threatened deportation of a popular local Nigerian family don’t get to make headlines. That is, if there are any.
I have no personal attachment to the word “gay”. It can mean lots of different things to lots of different people, and the latest meaning is clever and humorous and post-modern. There is a battle to be fought, but it’s not linguistic. Homophobia, especially the phenomenon of guys expressing violent hatred for those who show signs of effeminacy, or are otherwise outside the perceived norm of masculinity, is far more complex an issue than racism, for it goes to the heart of what a man’s definition of himself is. And this matters, enormously. Indeed, the unhappy plight of many men from Afro-Carribean backgrounds who find other men attractive seems to me to be more about a conflict over gender, what it means to be a man, a proud black man, not necessarily to do with whom you have sex with. You can have the most severe (frequently fatal) penalties in those cultures for adopting an identity that is not “masculine” – i.e. declaring oneself to be “gay” – and yet you can also, if you remain attached to a “masculine” identity, be “on the down low” and have sex with other men. As long as you fuck but don’t get fucked. And that doesn’t make you gay. To say these men are just closeted is to ignore the complexity of gender and how it varies from culture to culture. From person to person. And, lest it be said that I’m highlighting Afro-Carribean homophobia unfairly, I defy any culture that has endured centuries of slavery and domination in its past to survive without some “issues” about power and sexual identity still simmering away. In the same way that Ireland, with its history of famine, has “issues” about hunger. Our martyrs go on hunger strike, they don’t blow themselves up.
Anglo-Saxon rights-based political identities do not fit all cultures comfortably. The Irish gay scene, with its celebration of the transvestite queen, (cf the Alternative Miss Ireland competition) has more of an affinity with those from Catholic cultures, like the Hispanic New York gay scene, or the transsexual demi-mondes of Paris and Rome, rather than the sexualized “masculine” protestant scenes of London, Amsterdam or Berlin. Each culture’s spectrum of gender expression, how polarized things are between male and female, is unique. I have never known, for example, a culture that has so many camp married men, as Ireland does. And yet Ireland also produces some of the least metrosexual or effete men on the planet, the least afflicted by good dress-sense. The least like the poncy Brit.
To talk about what it means to be an Irish man, in school. Is that ever discussed, except in terms of martyrdom/self-sacrifice/butchery in the noble cause of Irish freedom? To talk about what it means to be a sexual being, how to deal with it, what to do when you can’t deal with it. How to negotiate it safely, or at least to know what the risks are. To get past the embarrassment and shame that seems to accompany sex whenever it is talked about in Ireland. To talk realistically about being gay, and to talk honestly about violence and bullying – what that feels like, to be the loser in a fight, to be picked on by a gang. What it feels like to win. To talk about what feelings are around if a lad is attractive. It seems to me that one of the worst features about growing up gay and male is that we find ourselves, as teenagers, at our sexual peak and possessing the most electrifying attractive charge to men. But are not prepared for one second, tactically or emotionally, to know how to respond to it – whereas girls have had this sort of stuff drilled into them ever since they started playing with make-up and reading their teenage magazines.
A campaign of political correctness dictating to Irish people which words are okay and which words are not okay will simply not work. That’s so, well, gay. Insults and slagging are part of our humour, and it can be knockabout and bruising at times. But there are legions of teachers who are now going to have to arm themselves with knowledge and compassion and bear the brunt of all that slagging in order to do what’s right and necessary. They will have to ignore the bigots and reach out to the kids in the class who are burdened with questions and fear about sex and identity and let them know they have a right to self-expression and to information about safe sex and relationships with the opposite and their own sex, and to go through their school days without being bullied and ashamed.