We talk to Dave Roche, community development manager with the Cork Gay Project.

This is something that bugs the living shit out of me. I spent the last two days racing at Mallow, being very affluent, and being up in the box, and looking down with my binoculars and having lunch, it was all very civilized, and I got into a conversation with some people, and they were saying “But sure all gay men are comfortable, all gay men have homes and cars and jobs, beautiful interior decoration, and you’re always so neat”, and y’know, all this thing.

And there’s this perception in mainstream society that because gay men don’t have spouses or children that their disposable income is higher, that they’re much more affluent, etc, and that’s true for the minority who do reach the pinnacle of their professions, of course. There are professional gay men out there who do have a lot of money, and do have second homes, and drive beautiful cars, and have beautiful apartments.

But the vast majority of gay men are not the ones you see at racecourses or at the dinners or at the auctions in the gallery or up in Jury’s Ball. They’ll be the ones who are taking low-paid jobs, usually the black market. They’ll be in hairdressing jobs where they’ll have to train at abusive wages for 4 or 5 years. They’ll have to take jobs where their sexuality won’t be an issue at all, where it won’t even come up, so that usually means like, way out of third-level education, often out of even second-level education—they leave early because there’s a perceived threat of homophobia in school, so they fall into low-paid jobs.

The tip of the iceberg that we see, the politicos, the social gay men that we see are, of course, very comfortable, but there’s a huge poverty, and that’s only financial poverty, because poverty goes deeper than finances.

There’s cultural poverty—the lack of connection to any deep sense of culture. This total isolation that a lot of men feel. Traditional ways of measuring culture in this country are the indices—do you have a fridge, do you have one car, two cars, etc. They’re very systematic, the government use them, but that’s not really what poverty is all about. Poverty is about quality of life, it’s not always about money or finances, and that cultural poverty, that sense of not belonging, and of falling into low-paid jobs because you left school early, you left home early, you can’t go into certain professions because you perceive there will be blockages.

So there is a huge level of poverty within the gay community, but we often don’t see it. The people who can afford to go into The George and pay, what, €6 for a bottle of Bud, that’s only one section of the gay community, there’s so much more happening below, and for a lot of gay men, I know from listening to them on the phone with the helpline, the cost of spending one night on the scene in Cork is beyond their means. It’s horrendously expensive if you’re not from Cork, you’ve got to come up, pay for accommodation, pay the prices in the pubs and the clubs, it all becomes quite expensive.

There’s no doubt about that. There is evidence to suggest that suicide figures, for instance, would be largely influenced by gay men’s deaths. Even the suicide figures in this country are false, they’re tweaked. There’s that denial in Ireland, again it’s a leftover, a kickback to the Church, of suicide. So often suicides don’t even get reported as suicides, so the figures are completely unrealistic, I think. The real figures need to be reported.

Internalized homophobia. You can understand how people could be negative, or pick up negative vibes. If you’re watching television any night, from 5 o’clock until 11 o’clock at night, you’re constantly being fed straight, straight, straight. Open your newspaper, straight, look at every advertisement, straight. Everything around you, all the subtle hints, is straight, and you’re taking all this in, constantly.

So it’s impossible not to develop some kind of a self-hatred, now that’s the extreme end of it, but some kind of negative feelings about your sexuality. And unless you’re constantly aware of that, and you development is at such a stage where you can take it in, deal with it and dismiss it, it could become a very serious mental issue.

Often, if you look at the inappropriate lifestyles of a lot of young gay men, a lot of that can be linked back to low self-esteem. If you need to exist for two nights at the weekend out of your head, and if that is your life, and if that is what you perceive what being gay is about, then you obviously would have self-image issues, I would consider. I would actually say, quite clearly, there are self-esteem issues there. And I only know because I did it, it’s not as if I didn’t. I was the recreational drug user, we all go through that phase, that’s fine, but you need to stop at some stage and say “Why am i doing this?”

I suppose one thing that is needed above anything else, is an awareness within the community of what health is all about, and what being gay is all about, and not focusing on illness. We need to stop focusing on health as being about illness, and concentrate on health being about wellness. We need to take a much more holistic approach. It’s not just about your physicality, it’s about your spirituality, how you feel. It’s largely about how you feel about yourself, because once that’s right, everything else just falls into place, your behaviour changes, your whole thing changes. But it’s not an easy place to get to, I’m making it sound very easy, to get to like yourself is quite a difficult fucking journey. I’ve met people who are older than me, more experienced than me, who think they have it all sorted, but they haven’t.

When you think you have it all sorted, you really need to go back to the start again, because you’ve missed something. That awareness needs to come from the community itself, and I don’t mean professionally, and I don’t know how you’d facilitate this in any way, except maybe through peer groups, they need to start questioning “Why am I doing this? Why is my life two weekend nights that I can’t remember?” When I was 16 or 17, it was Slicks, and I did exactly that. Slicks was one of the gay bars.

It’s almost like the people that are out there in Taboo and Loafers and the club are halfways there already, they don’t really need much, it’ll come to them anyway naturally. It’s Johnny and Mary who are fucking living in Turrelton, he‘s playing GAA, he’s drinking too much at the weekend, he’s unhappy, he doesn’t know why, he doesn’t even know he’s gay but he is, they are the people I really want to get at. It’s the people that are out there in marriages, living halfway up mountains, playing GAA, drinking too much, being miserably unhappy, not knowing why they’re unhappy, they are the people I really think need to be targeted, and that’s this Rural Gay Men’s Network, I hope, is going to be a success.

No, there’s not enough. Again, you need to take a definition. By health, I’m saying everything, emotional, spiritual, I’m taking a real holistic approach to health, I’m not defining it down to antibiotics and drugs. Basically, before I begin to scratch the surface of health care and health prevention. A lot of the health prevention stuff that we take as given, like the Cork Gay Project, HIV Strategies in Dublin, the Gay Men’s Health Project in Dublin, they’re all crisis-driven. They arose directly out of the AIDS crisis of the ’80s. So they’re illness-orientated.

What health strategies have been doing up to now has been focusing in on behaviour problems, in other words, put on a condom, don’t drink too much, cut down on your Es. They’ve all been totally behaviour-focused. But the argument is that your behaviour comes directly out of your image of self, and that this is where we should be focusing. That’s where we’re starting to focus, but up to now, most health prevention, because it was crisis-driven, didn’t have time to say “OK, let’s tackle that. But if you do that, you effectively cut off an entire generation, and they’re lost, I’m not putting any effort into them, we need to tackle the next generation coming up. And that’s largely what we do in the project, I try to get into education, change school policies, that’s largely my job, it’s political, it’s not scene at all. So that’s where my job pays off.

Well, when we go into schools we’re only ever let go near the staff, we’re never let go near the pupils. We try to get them to challenge their homophobia. Progressive schools will invite you in, or youth workers or social workers will invite you in. I got a phone call the end of last year to know would I go out and talk to the Southside Education Network, a network made up of principals, vice-principals, chaplains, career-guidance counsellors, youth workers and social workers for the southside of the city. They meet on a regular basis to discuss issues that might be affecting education in their schools.

And I did this talk to the South Net, and they were looking at me as if I had two heads. First of all, how dare this gay man come in and lecture us professionals—forget the fact that I’m a professional myself, and I had as much academic qualifications, if not more, than most of them in the room, but I was a gay man, so I shouldn’t be lecturing them, there was a really bad resistance, and particularly from some of the older women, I found. So I was getting nowhere, and I was wasting my time with them for the whole afternoon, and I said “Ah, this is a total fucking waste of time”. And they just weren’t buying into the fact that homophobia was a big thing in their school. Again, there’s this huge denial thing, they don’t want to deal with it, they’re afraid to deal with it.

Well, at South Net I was losing them, we’d got up and had coffee, we were having a break, and of course it was a school, so we got scones and cakes, and I turned around and at the top of my voice, I shouted “NIGGER!” across the whole room. And outrage, how dare I, I couln’t use that word. So as soon as I got their attention, I said “Now, what’s the difference between that and ‘faggot’ or ‘queer’? How come you’ll react so violently if I shouted that across your schoolroom, or your schoolyard, but you’ll allow me say faggot or queer?” And then I had half of them in my pocket, the other half still didn’t get there.

But once we started talking about it, they did admit to me that it is used constantly in the schoolyard, that they’re afraid to challenge it, they can’t talk about it because the parents would come into them. One teacher told me that when she suggested having somebody from a gay project come in and describe what they do to sixth-years—these are young adults who are probably sexually active anyway—one parent said if you did that, he would pull his son out of school, he didn’t want his son to be taught to be a fucking queer. If you’re dealing with that level of negativity all the time, and I am when I go out to these places, the teachers are afraid to deal with it. The teachers that have tried to be progressive are labelled as being gay or lesbian themselves.

Schools have to take it on board, the Gay Project is at an inter-agency, you have the City Council, FÁS, Rapid, the VEC, Department of Health, and a few others, and we’re doing what’s called ‘equality-proofing’. We’re going into these agencies and the City Council is asking them “This is the law, this is the equality legislation, now what are you doing?” And if they don’t come up with adequate answers, they’re going to have to re-address their policies, and they’re going to have to come back, and we’ll be brought in at that stage then to help them with policy-forming.

There’s also the City Development Plan [2001–2011; a plan which puts in place measures to facilitate queers to participate fully in the life of their city], and it’s the first time it will happen in Ireland, in England, or anywhere like that. It’s quite a phenomenal piece of work, if we can keep going with it, with the resources we have. But the City are taking it on board now, at least. We will be in the schools. We’ve done Ashton, obviously, already, Midleton, more progressive schools. But I can’t see myself being up in Pres or Christians for quite a while.

Homophobic bullying is THE most prevalent form of bullying in schools, this is something that often shocks people, but it’s true. There’s a group called the Concerned Parents Against Bullying, set up by a group of parents, one of them lost a son who wasn’t gay, but he was perceived to be gay because he was a very gentle, soft, quiet lad, and he killed himself at 15. So this group set up, and 20% of their callers would experience racial abuse, 10% would experience size abuse, but 100% of the boys that called the line had been called ‘fag’ or ‘queer’ or ‘big girl’s blouse’. Not 99%, one hundred per cent. Now, it’s inconceivable that 100% of the lads ringing the line were gay, probably 10 or 12% of them were.

But getting back to the bullying, even if you take that half of them were gay, the figure is still shocking, that it’s the most commonly-used bullying tactic in schools. If you ask the small kids, 8 or 9, who are using “Shut up, ya queer“, ”Shut up, ya fag”, if you ask them what it is, they don‘t actually know, but they know that they’re dirty words. And I think that that’s really scary, so there‘s a negativity attached just to the word, before they ever realize what they’re talking about. We all do it, I often say still, if I’m not watching myself, “Shut up, ya girl”, and if you don’t challenge it at certain levels, it’s going to be problematic.

Third-level is notoriously homophobic. I did social science, and you’d expect there they’d be quite liberal. I was the only gay man in a class of 140. And I was there largely because I was a gay man, it was tokenistic, there was one lesbian there as well, it was very funny [laughs].

I did a thing at UCC for the LGB Society recently, a stand in the Boole Basement, it was part of their Pride thing, and I was a bit disturbed by their concept of LGB Pride. It was like, meetings half-eight, west wing, top-floor, it was very hidden, it wasn’t Pride at all to me. When I walked around the campus, there was no sign anywhere saying it was Gay Pride week, there was no flag, there was nothing to indicate it was Gay Pride week. There was a huge thing about Mícheál Martin and the smoking debate, that seemed to be huge, or there was some boat race for the rugby team that night in the Western Star, but nothing about Pride.

So, I did the stand anyway, and I took the Boole Basement, and I set it up there with a big, huge sign reading ‘Cork Gay Project’, like an almost-neon sign saying ‘Queer’. So I sat there for the day, and as you know, every 50 minutes the basement fills, they all sort of regurgitate out of the lecture rooms, and then they’re all gone again two minutes later. And nobody approached the stand, except two or three who thought I was part of the anti-war thing, so they wanted to sign a petition and two straight guys because I was giving out free condoms, and they were quite clear “We’re only here for the condoms”, and I told them “you’re quite welcome, take them”.

Not one person from the LGB Society came up to me. So I went for lunch in the main restaurant, and I met the entire LGB Society around one table, so I joined them obviously, and I said “Lads, a bit of support wouldn’t have gone astray, while I was on a coffee break, someone to mind the stand while I was gone to the loo”. And they almost unanimously told me that they couldn’t be out within college. And I found that very disturbing. They’re out in Loafers, they’re out in Taboo, but that’s not necessarily what being out is about. I didn’t blame any of them, because there would be negative consequences, I‘m sure, there are always negative consequences when you decide to do something which people perceive as other, or different. And you need to be prepared for that.

In my opinion, it’s probably one of the best places to be gay. As well as having a reasonably active commercial scene, there’s an awful lot more subculture structures going on than there is in Dublin. For instance, there’s a much stronger sense of community in Cork than there is in Dublin. You often have more options outside of a commercial scene in Cork than you would in Dublin even. L.Inc is extraordinary in its concept. We’re the only two really in the country [gay community development centres], there’s a place in Dundalk called Outcomers, but they’re at the stage where we were 20 years ago, where they meet once a month in someone’s sitting room.

In an ideal world, and this is totally aspirational, I’d like to see that I’d be out of a job in 5 years. Nobody ever needs to do this work again. Social workers should be working toward their own death, it’s not something you’re doing for a job. You need to be quite clear that it is your job, and not take it home, or else you’d fucking just lose it. So that’s an aspiration, that’s not going to happen of course, grand.

But what I would like to see in the next five years—I’d consider that long-term—I want partnership rights sorted out, and I want to be involved in that. But I’m quite clear that it’s not a gay issue. It’s a single person’s issue, it’s not just about gay people. Partnership rights are one of the battles we need to fight, in conjunction with the others. And with partnership rights automatically comes the adoption thing, but I’m not going to go into that, because that is so emotive, as soon as you start going into that, you get negativity into your face all the time. And that’s another thing about our job, you often have to be quite strategic. So that’s the long-term.

In the medium-term, in the next two years, is my dream of a fully-resourced community centre. My dream come true before I leave this job—and it will come true—would be to have a dedicated building, which would just be a community centre. It’ll be an accessible, properly resourced community centre, which would be very public and city centre, and it’ll be self-financing and viable. And there will be a cinema space, theatre space, art space, meeting space, coffee shop. It’ll have everything a community centre has, well probably more, because gay men can obviously do it slightly better!

I think we also need to build up a much larger sense of culture. By culture I mean gay art, gay drama, gay cinema, gay lifestyles, gay sexuality, everything. Gay men need to realize that there is a gay art out there, and it’s not all Tom of Finland, y’know? Now, Tom of Finland is great, I’m a great admirer of his, but it’s not all Tom of Finland, there‘s other aspects of gay art. There’s gay theatre, gay cinema, etc, etc. The planned new centre is a large part of that.

In the short-term, I think the biggest problem is the lack of connection that the project has with the out community. We’re of huge importance and influence on the non-out, most marginalized community, because they’re the people that use the project. Young gay men who are out don’t see the reason for the project. You could walk into Taboo tonight and ask them “Was it easy to come out?” They’ll all say yeah, or they’ll all have reasonably positive things to say, they don’t see what the project has to offer them.

Because they’ve been so marginalized for so long, there’s a sense of powerlessness, “Sure why would I get involved in politics, we can do nothing.” And that’s not the case. There are people who have been working in the political arena for quite some time, and getting stuff done. Ireland went from being really bad on law to being one of the most progressive, on paper, in Europe. That sense of apathy, that needs to be gotten over, and people need to interact more with the project, and direct the project more. Come in and say “Look, I really think there’s a need for a left-legged, black, transvestite group.” Well, great, I can do that, but they need to come in and demand it.

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