My life as a queer kid in Northern Ireland was filled with dread thanks to the DUP. Finally the tide has turned

Vocal politicians single-handedly provided justification for every homophobic comment I ever received

This week marks what will be a monumental piece of history in Northern Ireland  –  the liberation of equal marriage and reproductive rights. What has felt like the longest journey has seemingly come to an end.

I’ve been openly queer for 15 years now. From a small town in County Down called Bangor, I knew from a young age I was different, and growing up I felt the full force of marginalising and oppressive legislation upheld by our devolved government.

This week we saw the DUP vow to fight on against this progress towards our civil liberties, and so it would be dishonest of me to claim my soul feels at rest. Every single one of us is only one law away from our freedoms being taken away. However, I will ignore the trepidation and embrace the joy doing pirouettes in my heart. For perhaps the first time in my existence, as a queer person from Northern Ireland, I feel seen.

Forgive me for being dewy-eyed about the whole thing. The truth is it doesn’t feel real in many ways: my home is a complex part of the world that no one really knows how to fix. Northern Ireland has a difficult past, and still lives in the undertow of our political and social history. Women and queer people across the country have lacked representation and for decades our voices have been ignored in favour of those who believe their religious beliefs grant them a monopoly on morality.

I was 12 years old when I realised I was attracted to the same-sex. I attempted to ignore it as I believed it to be wrong. My father raised me Presbyterian and being gay was a topic that was, and still is, left unspoken.

I was overwhelmed by my inner dialogue and decided to confide in a friend. By the following day, the entire school knew, and a safe space for learning became a hostile environment that I had to endure daily.

Any queer person who has had to come out early in life can tell you about the cruelty of teenagers – I learned a lot of expletives and hackneyed insults in my early teens. To be frank, by the time I hit 15 I was exhausted and I’m not sure my mental health has ever fully recovered.

A couple of years later, after a homophobic assault on a gay man, Iris Robinson, a former DUP member and wife of former First Minister Peter Robinson, went on BBC radio to condemn the attack in her constituency, but also to highlight how gay people made her feel “sick”, “nauseous” and that we were an “abomination”.

I asked myself at the time, if an adult in a position of power could so heavily condemn my mere existence, how could I be surprised my peers would do the same? The DUP single-handedly provided justification for every homophobic comment I’d ever received.

As I grew older, to deal with the “othering”, I made myself smaller in order to be palatable for the people around me. I would get changed alone in a toilet cubicle for PE so the other boys wouldn’t feel uncomfortable, or reduce myself to a walking punchline before others could do it for me. In many ways my sexuality, or rather how I thought others saw it, was at the forefront of every decision I made. All I wanted to be was myself, but even in the 21st century, living your truth as an openly queer person can so enervating that it barely seems worth the effort.

My saving grace has been my mother. I would not have made it through the hardships of my adolescence without the strength she provided. Luckily I never had to “come out”, my mother made it clear in her own way that I never needed to. At 27, she is my go-to for relationship advice. We’re incredibly close and I don’t take that for granted – having a supportive family is expected for most people, yet it remains a bonus or a commodity for LGBT+.

Higher education provided me a way out of the country, and in 2015 I moved to London to study. It was an awakening. For so long I’d normalised queer culture to be something strictly “underground’, that only placed itself in the spotlight during Belfast Pride, to remind those who wanted us to live in the shadows that we existed – and we weren’t going anywhere. I rarely met another queer person in my day-to-day life, and when I did, the acknowledgement was usually no more than a quiet nod of understanding.

In London, I had the privilege of meeting so many people who were unapologetically themselves – it was inspiring to see people live their truth with such effervescence. There were so many more spaces for people like me, I felt part of something special.

However, it also taught me that there are bigger issues within the community that I’d never considered while living in Northern Ireland; inclusivity for queer people of colour, and for the trans and non-binary community. As much as London provided me with a space to be authentic, it also taught me that there are layers and nuance to internal discussions within our own ranks. I owe a lot to this city and to the lessons it has taught me.

As an adult I’ve met so many queer people who have left Northern Ireland – and, in most cases, while sifting through our collective trauma, we’d all come to comprehend a shared experience. While Northern Ireland had come so far in mutual recognition of individuality amongst Catholics and Protestants, LGBT+ folk had been robbed of our distinctiveness.

In 2017 we discussed the Conservative-DUP deal and our disbelief at how little the rest of the UK knew about the DUP. Women and queer people in Northern Ireland watched the reality of living under the jurisdiction of DUP policy get whittled down into a listicle by the media in mainland UK.

People simply didn’t know that equal marriage and abortion laws had never been extended to Northern Ireland, that women did not have the same access to safe reproductive healthcare as their counterparts in the UK, that campaigners have been fighting for our rights for decades to no avail. It was quite possibly the most bizarre thing I’ve experienced in the past five years, and it reaffirmed that we continued to be marginalised in the UK.

I didn’t blame the public for this, I blamed the politicians in Westminster who knew our circumstances and did nothing. I blamed the education system for sidelining the existence of NI and how it came to be part of the UK in British schools.

Whilst Scotland, England and Wales have enjoyed the freedoms that Northern Irish people have campaigned so hard for, this week still feels like the beginning of a new era. A moment when young people know they can marry whomever they wish, when young girls will know they have autonomy over their own bodies. It may be purely thanks its own historical intransigence, but right now, in a world that feels unstable and volatile, Northern Ireland is the surprising place bringing a little more love and hope into our lives.