Dublin is set to come alive tonight, as Culture Night 2022 kicks off. With a host of spectacular events taking place across the city, it's the perfect opportunity to learn something new about Dublin and discover something unexpected.
With that in mind, Jen Zamparelli spoke to the 'Godfather of Gay', activist Tonie Walsh about the Lavender Walk LGBTQ+ tour taking place tonight.
Walsh started the Lavender Walk around Dublin Pride 2008, when he enlisted "political friends" like Senator David Norris to lead a stroll around Dublin, "not realising we'd have 200 people on the walk". From there, the event became "embedded in Dublin Pride", he says.
To bring the event to Culture Night, however, Walsh decided to look at queer social spaces around the city, "both the fabulous and slightly notorious". Many of these spaces no longer exist, he adds, which made it even more essential for them to be remembered.
It's this work that has garnered Walsh his nickname as the 'Godfather of Gay'. Despite saying it's a "burden to live up to", Walsh says it stems from THISISPOPBABY's production of his one-man show four years ago.
"I have a rule, I don't care what people say about me or call me once they don't tell lies, but ... you can't control how people think or what they say about you." Aside from that, Walsh wryly says he's old enough to have once been known as a "disco boy" in the 1970s.
"In some ways, that's also informing how I'm approaching a lot of these venues", he says, "because either I've been an habitué in some of these bars ... and I remember them, I remember the personalities. Some of them are dead, some retired, maybe they don't live in the country anymore."
Some younger generations might not know the full breadth of the gay experience and history in Ireland, Walsh says, which is why he's undertaking this work. "It's hard to imagine a time when simply going to a semi-public space, a dance club or a café, was an inherently subversive and political act. And it was an act of defiance. It was somebody saying, 'I'm proud to be a lesbian or gay man at a time when you were criminalised, at a time when you were socially outcast.'"
He recalls that in the 70s and 80s there was only the beginnings of a commercial scene for queer people. "There was a huge need to cultivate friendships", he says. This helped to build a collective voice and work towards a better future for the community.
"People forget that up until 1993 it was a criminal act for men to be intimate in public and private", Walsh says. "Holding hands could get you two years in prison. The very fact that that was a criminal act meant that it gave people license in a lot of mainstream society to discriminate against you."
He mentions that one of the stops on his walking tour is on Dame St, at a strip bar. "I remember in 1981 when I was 20 with my first boyfriend, from Coolock, we went down to this small little speakeasy", he says.
"And we're holding hands. Nothing else, just holding hands, being quite nonchalant in this little bar. The manager came over at one point and said, 'Out. I don't want your sort of people in here.'" The couple left, furious.
"It was shocking, absolutely shocking. It was in that context that people then sought out more LGBT-friendly and aware property owners and landlords", he adds. "We literally had to build our own dancefloors and social spaces in the 70s and 80s."
Walsh himself came out in 1979, two years before the AIDS epidemic hit the world, which he says informed all of his 20s and growing up. "The 1980s was grim. Don't let any millennial tell you that the early noughties was really difficult. The 80s were possibly one of the worst decades in 20th century Ireland – massive emigration, the city centre looked like a bomb site.
"Notwithstanding how grim it was, the poverty, the homophobia, people found a way to have fun. You had to, having fun was part of our coping mechanism, and finding ways to actually have conversations."
Walsh says this is why LGBTQ+ spaces are so fascinating to him: "If you're part of a community that's bound by exclusion and oppression, and then you manage to locate a space, a physical space that allows you to liberate yourself, to make yourself feel comfortable, I always feel that magic happens in these places because you can start the process of removing all of that oppression."
To listen back to the full interview, click above.
