Your voice is your connection with your community

By Jacqueline Daly

I thought about creating a fiction piece for this issue, but after some reflection, I realized it's more important to write about my real-life experiences at this time. I want to offer a sense of sisterhood to other queer women and non-binary folk and show that their voices matter, even if the world around us sometimes feels unwelcoming and difficult to navigate.

As a teenager, I knew I was gay early on. Growing up in rural Ireland, the realisation came with implications for my future and how I would view myself as a young adult. I want readers to understand that when I discovered this about myself, there weren't as many options as there are now. Education on the subject was limited, and I was scared of all the unknowns ahead of me as a result.

Gay marriage was legalized in Ireland on November 16, 2015. While this wasn't the start of my own life, as I am twenty-six at the time of writing this, from that moment onward I can say that my life, for the better, was never the same. When I was a teenager, gay marriage wasn't even on my social media feed, let alone discussed in my secondary school, not positively at least. Other students at school knew or suspected that I was gay, even though I tried my best to hide it.

As I got older and the apparent differences became more obvious, the fact that I couldn't get married in the future, in Ireland, became a target for many hurtful comments from some less understanding classmates. So, I cocooned myself in music, books, and playing Nintendo, trying to ignore the prickling sensation of classmates' eyes staring at me like I was an exotic animal in a zoo everyday. I did my best to navigate my teenage years in silence, though I wasn't always successful, to survive.

There was a mandatory silence on any topic involving the LGBT+ community, both in social settings and in the classroom. I knew about the Lego Movie before I knew there were people fighting to ensure I had the same rights as my classmates, to marry who I chose to be with, in my own country. Looking back, it seems strange and a bit silly knowing which was more common knowledge. Before the election, especially among students who could vote, badges supporting ‘Vote Yes’ started to appear. I listened to the radio every morning on my way to school, but I didn't realize a referendum was coming or fully understand what it meant until I saw those badges. The hallway chatter went from a whisper to a roar, at least in my mind.

These badges were like lighthouses in a never-ending storm I had to navigate in my mind every day. They were proof that, despite all the hateful rhetoric I had faced both online and in person, that there were real people—people my age who knew me, who might even be in the same situation or knew someone who was—who believed and openly stated and were communicating that myself and others deserved equal rights like everyone else.

And while I couldn’t fully express it at the time or vote, it did ignite something positive inside me for the very first time.I started paying more attention to politics when my parents turned on the news. I’d scan newspaper headlines for updates and read articles I saw in shops. Yes, I prayed overnight as the votes were counted, hoping the world would change for the better when I woke up the next day and the referendum results were finalized.

I felt lighter after the referendum was over. While school didn't become perfect overnight, the imagined stigma that had haunted me—that being a lesbian made me an irredeemable or lesser person who didn't deserve happiness—was gone. A fog had lifted.

And now the fact that I enjoy peppermint in my tea, ice-cream, and favourite chocolate is more debated among my friends today than who I love or date. Nowadays, being a lesbian doesn't cause surprise. Whether I'm single or in a relationship, I have the freedom to choose every day and it’s my choice. There's laughter, book clubs, sports clubs, music, art and friends in my life, instead of the cold silence that used to surround every decision I made about how I presented myself or how I felt about who I was on the inside.

If you can take anything from these eight-hundred words, it is that your voice and visibility matters , then and now. And using that voice is what breathes hope into LGBT+ lives, the lives of those we may not see immediately, when they need it most.