Pádraig Ó Tuama - Don't Patronise Me

 

I didn’t get into the university course that I wanted when I finished high school. I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with my life. I looked at my options and I decided that I would join a missionary organization, because I thought, why not? There’s the possibility of travel and maybe even the possibility of learning a new language. And so, I got the application to join this missionary organization. It was the kind of application you’d expect from a Christian mission’s agency. Is religion important to you? What does your priest or your minister say? Tell us a little bit about your faith, etc. Are you used to intercultural experiences? All of those things were really fine for me to fill out in the application form.

 

And then, it had this question that said, “Have you ever been involved with the following?” There were four tick boxes. [audience chuckle] One said alcoholism, one said the occult, [audience laughter] one said drug addiction and the last one said homosexuality. I had never come out to anybody at that stage, but I’d known that I was gay since before I knew what gay meant. I looked at this application form and the world fell apart and I thought, I won’t apply, but I had no other options, really. I didn’t know what to do. I went and I got a youth group leader from a church youth group and I said to him, “I need to talk to you about something.” And he said, “Okay.” And I said, “Come over into the corner.” 

 

I opened my mouth to talk, but I couldn’t. I had no language. I just started to weep instead. And not a kind of a nice relief kind of weeping. This was the kind of weeping that hurts and gets worse and where you feel like your tears are from acid. And then, I said to him, “I have to show you something.” And he was like, “Okay.” I went and I got the application form, and I opened to the page, and I pointed to that box and I said, “I have to tick the homosexuality box.” And I saw his shock. He was a young man too. He was 24. I was 17. He didn’t know what to do. 

 

And then, he started to tell me a story. He told me about a time that he had been at a big prayer gathering, and there was somebody there saying, “We want to pray for people here who are in pain. We want to pray for people here who are in pain.” He was feeling really awkward, because he was in pain but he was too embarrassed to go up. Because the reason he was in pain was that his left testicle was quite sore. [audience chuckle] But he didn’t want to go up to the nun at the front of the church to say to her, “My left testicle is in pain.” [audience chuckle] He was telling me this after I’d just come out to him. [audience laughter] 

 

So I was thinking about his balls [audience laughter] and wondering, “Why are you talking?” [audience laughter] I realized he was trying to say something embarrassing, and he thought, well, you’ve just come out, so I’ll talk about my left ball. [audience laughter] It didn’t quite comfort me, really. [audience laughter] Anyway, I did apply to join this religious organization. I did tick that fourth box. I felt like an abomination. The Irish word for abomination is adhfhuafaireacht, and that comes from an old word meaning monster. I felt monstrous. I used to practice saying I hate myself in all the languages I knew. So, is fuath liom é in Irish, or je me déteste in French or this in sign, I hated myself so much. 

 

So, I joined this missionary organization. Because I ticked that box, that monster box, shortly after I joined, they’d arranged an exorcism for me. [audience chuckle] But it didn’t work. [audience laughter] So, there was another one and another one, and they got worse. People screaming holy words in your ear that felt anything but holy, using language that is meant to be elevated, but actually was terrible. When three exorcisms hadn’t worked, it was decided that maybe I should go to what was called reparative therapy. 

 

Now, reparative therapy is neither reparative nor therapeutic. The idea is that somehow you can be turned straight by somebody with no qualifications or accountability asking you invasive questions. One of the reparative therapists-- I went for about two years. There were two different ones. One of them used to start off each session with a little tick sheet. He used to ask the questions in the tick sheet in the medical plural, “Have we been thinking about men this week?” I’m 19. “Of course, I’ve been thinking about men.” “Have we been fantasizing about men this week? Have we been flirting with anyone this week?”

 

Unfortunately, I was a nun magnet. So, the only people that were flirting with me were a bunch of frisky nuns who had a really, really creative understanding about what celibacy meant. [audience laughter] And then, one time, I was just saying no to these questions. One time, he said to me, “Okay, look, have we been walking down the street seeing a guy we like, indicating to him going up a dark alleyway and having sex in the dark alleyway?” [audience chuckle] And I was like, “No.” [audience laughter] One time, he really got annoyed at me and he went, “Okay, have we, for instance, been imagining ourselves sitting on the floor by the sofa with our head in a lover’s lap while our lover strokes our hair?” [audience laughter] I wanted to say, “Well, I haven’t.” [audience laughter] The reparative therapy all ended at one point.

 

The therapist had become really fixated on getting me to talk about which parts of a woman’s body I found most attractive. I felt like I was being schooled in misogyny and predatory masculinity. And I said to him, “I don’t want to have the kind of sex you want me to want to have.” And he said, “You know what your problem is, Pádraig? Your problem is language.” Unbeknownst to me, we’re accidentally on my territory. And he said, “You’re selfish. You shouldn’t want to have sex with a woman. You should want to give sex to a woman.” And I realized, this is bullshit. [audience laughter] 

 

And it all fell apart, and the exorcism happened, and the monster box broke open and I walked home, never went back. And now, the world was suddenly wide and wild and wonderful and frightening for me, because I didn’t know what to do. Now, for the next number of years, I studied language. I studied theology, I studied communication, I studied conflict, because I was determined to find a way to rescue me through language and perhaps be involved in the work of rescuing other people through language from these kinds of abominable experiences of being cured from being LGBT. I became convinced that if we learn how to exercise the muscle of our tongue, we might be able to use language in a way that can save us, not shame us.

 

And so, for 20 years now, I’ve worked with thousands of people who would come from a conservative or negative point of view regarding LGBT people about what does it mean for us to have meaningful, difficult conversations with each other. And in one room, it was about 15 of us, 3 or 4 LGBT people, the rest clergy who came from very conservative backgrounds who had been brave enough to come to this engagement, sometimes at some risk from their own congregations. We were talking over a two-day residential experience. And those experiences can be awkward. You’re always experimenting with language with each other. When I’d said something once, one of the people in the room had said, “I had never realized that homosexuals were capable of love.” It’s great to realize that.

 

Part of me was glad and then part of me was like, “What?” [audience chuckle] Somebody else in the room was really nervous and said, “I will never officiate at a gay wedding. I will never officiate at a gay wedding.” And I thought, I’m going to take an experiment with language and I said, “Do you know any gay people who’d want you at their wedding?” [audience laughter] I tried to be gentle, but you can never shame somebody into thinking something better about you. I wasn’t trying to shame her, but I think she was shamed. So, that was never going to work. 

 

It got to the end of this two-day experience. And just about a minute before we’re about to finish, the person in the room upon whom I had hung all of my anxiety, I always do that in the room. I choose one person and my unconscious projects everything onto them. [audience chuckle] And so, this guy, just a minute before we’re finished, said, “I have a question for the homosexuals in the room.” I thought, oh, God, I failed. This has not been a success. I thought maybe I should say, email me, or you could have said it earlier on. I could have all these kinds of things. 

 

But the night before, he and I had an unexpected encounter. Because over making a cup of tea, he had said to me, “I hope you appreciate the sacrifice I’ve made in coming to this event.” And I said, “Oh, sure, you know, I do.” And he said, “I’m missing my favorite television program.” I'm like, “Oh, gosh, that’s not that much of a sacrifice.” And I said, “What’s your favorite television program?” And he told me it was a political TV show from back home, current affairs news program. And I said, “Oh, my partner Paul is the producer.” And he was like, “What?” He knew Paul’s full name, because he’s that kind of a geek that knew the name of everybody involved in the show. 

 

He seemed to be caught between this moment of wanting to ask me all the insider information about this TV show. But to do so, he’d have to acknowledge love between two men. And his curiosity won out. So, he did ask me all these questions. So, this had happened just the night before. So, there we were a minute before we’re finished. I was exhausted. I just wanted to go home. And I said, “Okay, what’s your question?” And he said, “My question for the homosexuals in the room is, how many times since we got together two days ago have my words bruised you?” Suddenly, I wasn’t tired anymore. Curiosity unfolded between us. Wonder sprung up in the interactions between us all. 

 

Somebody in the room, one of the other LGBT people said, “You’re fine. You’re nice. Don’t worry.” And he went, “No, no, don’t patronize me. How many times?” [audience chuckle] One guy said, “I’ve given up counting after the first night.” And he said, “Are you telling me that every time you come into the room and meet someone like me that you have to protect yourself?” And one of the women in the room said, “It’s not just come into this room. It’s turn on the radio. It’s hear ourselves being discussed.” And he said, “I have some work to do.” I watched him save himself with language, and I watched him save the room with language and I watched him save me from putting him into a monster box that I had spent so long trying to get out of. Thank you.