This is what Brian Finnegan wrote in his editorial for Gay Community News for the March 2008 issue.
The Sunday Independent was a virtual smorgasbord of gay features on Sunday February 10, the majority of them written by Donal Lynch. “Drugs, Drink Divorce, Gay Sex – all is changed utterly,” the front page blared in relation to a Millward Brown IMS National Opinion Poll the paper commissioned, which I’ll come to later. The feature I want to talk about beforehand appeared in the Life magazine supplement to the paper, flagged in the contents page with the sentence: “Irish gays tell their stories of lots of sex, but very little love”. The feature itself, titled What’s Love Got To Do With It?’ tells us in the heading, “Gay love, he discovered, was all about internet sex encounters, leather and studs.”
The feature is illustrated by a confetti-strewn, flamboyant gay male couple dancing down the steps of a church, miniature dog in hand, as if making a mockery of the sanctity of religious marriage, complete with the pullquote: “I laugh when I read those arch-conservative commentators saying gays would cheapen marriage. It’s pretty cheap already, but I’m sure we’ll do our best.”
In the feature Donal Lynch interviews a succession of gay men with first names only, who pronounce that love and commitment are not part of the gay psychological make-up for one embedded reason or another, that older gay men are all lonely, that gays aspire to romance and marriage, but the our very nature makes these things utterly unreachable.
In his feature on the National Opinion Poll in the main section of the newspaper, Lynch focuses on the fact that 37 per cent of parents would be concerned if they had a child who was gay and 35 per cent of siblings would feel the same (despite the 53 per cent and 56 per cent not being concerned at all). Lynch posits that ‘concern’ equals the worry that parents feel for their children. “Anything they think is going to get in the way of their progeny’s success, love, happiness or their ability to fit in, is going to make them fret a bit,”he says.
So, imagine the ‘concern’ those parents might feel reading propaganda like his feature in Life magazine? They might imagine that their gay children will never find the happiness
that committed love can provide and are doomed to a lifetime roaming a netherworld where the only thing on anyone’s mind is sex. And leather and studs, of course.
The message writ large in this article is a lie. Hundreds and thousands of gay people settle down and have monogamous lifetime relationships. Sure, there is a large element of promiscuity to gay life, but maybe we see it more because it’s far more overt than the promiscuity that goes on in straight life. We are a people defined by our sexuality after all. Straight people have one-night stands, go to fetish clubs, have affairs etc. They’re human after all, just like those who don’t enjoy throwing it around.
This is not an attack on Donal Lynch’s writing – I think he’s a great writer. But he is in a unique position as a gay journalist in a newspaper read in the main by middle Ireland and he should be using that position wisely, instead of feeding into a myth that seeks to disenfranchise him, his friends, and the entire gay community by dubbing us all as sexually and emotionally sub-human. In agreeing to write this story, he is bolstering the myth that gay people are not as valuable as straight people.
For the record, I love my partner and I hope to be with him for the rest of my life. I am one of thousands in Ireland in the same position, many of whom would like to get married, which I believe is a human right. Articles like this place a major obstacle in the way of those human rights. They feed into bigotry and misconception and they damage individuals – individuals like Donal Lynch.
I republished this here because it’s no longer visible on the GCN website, and I wrote a response to Finnegan’s editorial here.
