Nov. 19, 2014

Read the essay (originally in the Irish Echo.)

Excerpt:

…I landed in Belfast in 1994. I’d dropped out of college and needed to go somewhere. My family had roots in the North. By then I had come out myself. ACT UP, ILGO, and theLesbian Avengers – all home to queer Irish émigrés who had worked in republican and pro-choice and feminist movements at home in the 1980s – had been churning out the queer Zeitgeist. Although I missed it in New York, I had finally caught it in college.Knowing nothing about the Irish queer political currents that carried me, I arrived in Belfast a queer activist.

Queer organizing in Belfast was small, constrained by everything from the Troubles toreligion to the permanent absence of privacy. There was no queer group at Queen’sUniversity, where I was enrolled; there had been one, it seemed, but no one would lendtheir name as a contact and it fell apart….

[Image: Gothamist]