BEING QUEER AND DISABLED BY RYAN Mc McMULLAN I was born in 1982. Something happened during my birth. My brain was starved of some oxygen and that’s why I’ve cerebral palsy, which is a permanent condition. Cerebral palsy, or ‘CP’, if you’re hip, can affect people in a wide spectrum of ways. For me it affects my speech and my right-hand side. I look and sound pretty disabled. It’s a constant challenge to get others to know me before they jump to conclusions. It can be in people’s nature to be unintentionally patronising and controlling towards disabled people. Therefore, I have a constant inner battle in trying to be understanding of why society is like this and not getting too annoyed. I’m also a gay man, although I like to identify as being queer because I don’t like buying into the toxic cis-male masculinity that’s ever so present in my world. We’ll get to that later. Growing up in Northern Ireland, in a strange Protestant society, there weren’t many gay role models that I was allowed to look up to. I got the impression that we were taught to believe that all gay men were somehow sleazy and full of innuendo. A lot were dying of AIDS and there was real shame about that at the time. I didn’t buy any of this. I knew being gay wasn’t a bad thing. For me it was cool, exciting and edgy. It was a two-fingers up to what I saw, sometimes, as a backwards society. There was no doubt in my mind that one day I was going to be accepted by my peers and society would catch up. Being disabled gave me this perspective. I knew I wasn’t less of a person because I was gay. To be honest I was
probably more hung up about being disabled rather than being gay. I came out in school. The reaction, however, was people thinking I was looking for attention. One particular strong memory I have was being told that I probably enjoyed the rape scene in The Shawshank Reception – which really surprised and hurt me. It still does. That’s where we were at in late ‘90’s in Northern Ireland.
“There was no doubt in my mind that one day I was going to be accepted by my peers and society would catch up.” I came to Edinburgh in the early 2000’s. The scene was great. It took me a while to get engaged in it but it was a great time to be around, with many of the big clubs still happening regularly. It was a far cry from Northern Ireland. I was like any young
