OMAGH PRIDE

ORGANISER CAT BROGAN MADE the following speech. LGBT people have always been here - at the clock in the early nineties, in the Grange Park, Lover’s Retreat, on Gumtree, Grinder or Tinder. Today we aren’t hiding.

As of this month our blood can be donated to our fellow human beings. We have the choice to marry, adopt, to seek fertility treatment. I was Omagh Oxfam, with my mum, after the Pride announcement and the shop worker, probably declared, I have three gay children.

We still have so far to go. I’ve just spent 5 years in Malaysia where being LGBT is illegal. There are 69 countries where queer people are beaten, fined, imprisoned, in 13 of those countries LGBT people can even be put to death. Homosexuality was only decriminalised in this country in 1982. Marriage equality was forced through by English MPs in 2020! So called conversion therapy is still legal.

Tolerance and acceptance is not enough - we need to embrace all types of sexual and gender expression. Today, Omagh showed that lgbtq people can simply be without apology or explanation. That when someone asks my mother if I have a man she can proudly correct their assumption and declare my daughter is a lesbian.

My mum said ‘when you came out I was so angry. Not at you but because I thought it would make your life difficult’ but 13 years later, she can see the change in me. I’m more at peace. Less likely to fly off the handle. Queer people often live separate identities, making constant calculations about whether it is safe or not to reveal themselves. By taking over the streets we show that we are no longer on the outside. We are part of this town, we show the surrounding villages and farms that you don’t have to abandon our home place and take our talents, passions, and spirits off to far away lands.

I only began to be honest about my sexuality in my mid twenties when I moved to London. What a difference it would have made to my life if there was a pride parade in Omagh when I was a teenager. In the 1999, the backlash against Ellen’s first on-screen lesbian kiss kept me in the closet. Tattoo’s music video with two rain soaked women kissing, told me my desires were for the pleasure of men. My sister’s friends were hauled into the principal’s office for holding hands. It seemed too hard.

Even though my partner’s country criminalises our love, mine doesn’t. We can legally be together here. At our wedding, all my uncle’s were there. The Gortin community center was delighted to have their first wedding. In 2021, I am so grateful that my wife is with me when my mum needs us. That as a family we can walk down Omagh High Street surrounded by rainbows, samba bands, placards and glitter, shimmering and shimmying and boogieing.

We don’t have to run away to be ourselves, we can make our world, in the Sperrins and the bogs, by the lakes and burns, in the glens and the windy roads. We live fully when we step out of the shadows - stop being who we think the world wants us to be and return to who we are - today in Omagh, we celebrate Rural Queers.