We talk to Rita Wild, co-ordinator of L.Inc, about the role of the centre and the issues faced by lesbians and bisexual women in Cork.

That’s a really interesting question, and again I can only answer it anecdotally, because there aren’t the statistics to back it up. The experience of lesbians generally would be that at some point in their lives they would suffer from depression. That wouldn’t be the experience of the mainstream community in general. Now, it’s also not a bit of wonder they suffer depression, you know, you’d want to be super-human to be a lesbian in the world, and not have enormous battles on your hands, and have enormous stresses in your life which cause depression, similiarly to gay men. And I’d say gay men and lesbians would probably have similiar levels of depression. They wouldn’t have the same level of suicide as gay men, but again in the mainstream population, more men commit suicide than women anyway, so I think we just reflect society generally.

Homophobia generally in society affects women a wee bit more strongly than men. Lesbians are less visible than gay men, for example, and the reason for that is because it’s much more difficult for a woman in our society to be an independant actor in the world. Men are supposed to be independent actors in the world. It’s more difficult for a man to get the emotional support he might need because he’s pushed the other way, you know. So, for a woman, the whole process of being out can be excruciating. It means that she’s not a mother, necessarily, that she doesn’t adhere to the standards of femininity that have been socialized into her, that maybe she looks different. It’s harder, really, to be a lesbian living in this world than it is to be a gay man. Now it’s hard to be a gay man too, but it’s just that harder for lesbians because of society’s structure.

Depression would certainly be something we would see as a major problem, because it’s very often unreported because a lesbian isn’t going to go to a doctor and say “I’m depressed because the world thinks I’m a pervert”. She may go to be treated for depression, but the reason for it will never be explicit, and if it was explicit, it wouldn’t necessarily be recognized by the doctor as a legitimate cause of depression. I’d love to see more research done, so we could speak about it from a more educated point or view, but certainly anecdotally, yes, it’s a problem, and it’s not being tackled.

I think isolation would be a major conflict, and that could be isolation within your own family, or isolation geographically from the lesbian community. I would say that family would be the major cause of depression for lesbians. Particularly for a women, it can be extremely hurtful to be rejected from your family network, your birth family, because we’re socialized as girls and women to be very much involved in that family structure. Young men are socialized to kind of go out from that more; women are socialized to replicate that. So to be cut off from that, or to be rejected by that can be particularly difficult for a woman.

However, the lesbian community kind of balances that a wee bit, because it provides women with the opportunity to have a family of choice, as opposed to a family of birth, that’s extremely supportive. A feature of lesbians would be that they’re very supportive of each other. Of course, there’s always begrudgers, but generally speaking they’d be extraordinarily supportive of each other’s endeavours. That’s a great medicine for depression.

Oh, that’s a really interesting question. Career-wise, most women wouldn’t be out at work, so they live very compartmentalized lives—this is also a cause of depression—and that would be the case pretty much across the board. So Cork wouldn’t be somewhere where it’s OK to be out at work, generally, it’d be easier in an area like Dublin. However, that’s changing.

In terms of being a lesbian about town, socially, Cork’s probably one of the easiest places to be a lesbian in Ireland. Cork is a city of blow-ins, it’s used to having a lot of people who aren’t from Cork, and that’s because it’s a port. There’s been a Jewish community in Cork for hundreds of years. It has a history of having a cosmopolitan flavour to it. You know yourself, walking around Cork, you see all sorts of people, and that’s normal. Whereas I was in Waterford recently, and everybody was going around with the best clothes on. I was wearing jeans and a big wooly jumper, and I stuck out like a sore thumb. So that’s another thing, people who look different are commonplace in Cork, regardless of your sexual orientation, so that makes it easier for lesbians, who generally look different to straight women—not all of the time, but generally.

Socially, probably the best place in the country to be a lesbian is Cork, there’s an awful lot of social activity. There’s Loafers, which has always had a space for women. That’s unusual, most gay bars cater for the big spenders, who are gay men, and they don’t cater for the lesbians. It looks more like a lesbian pub depending on which night you go in there, you know if you go in there on a Thursday night, flipping hell, if you’re a gay man it must be dreadful, you know?! And, we’re the only lesbian community resource centre in the country. Because of all these things, you’re less likely to encounter discrimination in Cork than elsewhere in the country.

Yes, poverty is a problem for lesbians, and again it reflects mainstream society. Poverty is a problem for women generally. And if you’re a lesbian parent, you’re one of the poorest members of society. Children are expensive wee buggers, so the vast bulk of your income goes into looking after your child. Any single parent will suffer from poverty. Lesbian single parents suffer a wee bit more because they are often isolated from their extended families, and from extended social networks, so they’re more marginalized. And if they don’t have an organization that can support them, they’re extremely marginalized.

The other factors for poverty amongst lesbians would be low educational attainment. That would be because many lesbians, including me, were or are aware of their sexual orientation at a young age, and feel isolated in the school environment. So school wasn’t a happy experience for me, because I felt different, and so I left early. I then returned to education as a mature student, but that was because I was fortunate enough to have a supportive family, who I was out to. But if you don’t have that, then the chances of you returning to education are slim. So, subsequently the kind of jobs you can get are limited, because a lot of jobs would want a minimum Leaving Cert, whereas a lot of lesbians would have left school prior to that.

The other factor would be the kind of jobs you can now do. Because if you’re out, there are certain places you just can’t go into, such as schools. Y’know, church schools arguing that homosexuality is contrary to their ethos. Childcare is another area, because there’s a potential for somebody saying you’re a pervert. So women can limit the fields they will enter, and that leads to poverty. Also, isolation from the extended family can result in poverty.

Lesbians with children can suffer marginalization, because again, without an organization like ours, their only social outlet would be pub/club culture, which often doesn’t suit them, with the issues of childcare and so on. So, lesbian parents can feel quite isolated, without resources like L.Inc.

Bisexual women—there’d still be a lot of biphobia in the community, so what we find is that bisexual women won’t come out as bisexual. They participate fully in the community, but they kinda keep quiet about being bisexual, because they don’t feel safe. They expect to be marginalized, and they expect to be discriminated against. The same way as a lesbian in a straight women’s organization might well be fully involved, but not out as a lesbian, for fear of discrimination. So we’re hoping to do something about that at L.Inc, we’re going to run a programme for bisexual women, to look at their needs.

Absolutely. There’d be a couple of reasons why. It can be very difficult to not fit in, and lesbian culture is distinct from heterosexual women’s culture. We look different, we sound different, we do different things, and quite often, all a woman wants is to fit in. She’s not interested in politics, she’s not interested in equality, she just wants to live her life. So she could find the lesbian community quite alienating, because there’s a perception that you have to be a certain way.

Now that of course is a pile of bollocks, you don’t have to be any way at all, and the diversity that exists at L.Inc, like everyone’s here, there’s just such a diversity, from the one end your very femme lipstick lesbian to your very butch lesbian, and they’re all having a good time, so it’s more perception. But fundamentally, it comes down to homophobia, and it’s internalized homophobia, so some women don’t wish to identify with the lesbian community because they’ve bought all the crap about lesbians: they’ve no sense of humour, they’re all vegetarians [laughs]. And essentially they’ve bought into that, they’re suffering from internalized homophobia, god love them.

World domination! The ultimate plan is world domination, we’re going to take over the world, and run it on an equal basis! Actually, the plan would be to consolidate the resource that’s here. We need to secure funding, and we need a bigger centre. We also want to really work harder on the links with the gay men’s community in Cork. And to meet the emerging needs, society has changed so much that we can’t anticipate what the needs of lesbians will be in the future. So we need to build an organization that will respond to the future needs of lesbians as opposed to what we anticipate those needs will be.

The overall vision would be to improve the quality of life for lesbians and their families.

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