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s someone who was born in the early 80s, I occasionally take offence to being classified by marketers as a ‘geriatric millennial’. But then I hear myself telling younger friends what gay life was like in the last century and I realise that I’m a dinosaur, so the fossilising term makes sense. Still, the past is always a good place to start when trying to make sense of the people we are today, so I’ll kick things off with a short history lesson which explains a little about how travel saved — and made — me.
I was raised in Galway in the west of Ireland. Nowadays (‘nowadays’ is a very geriatric thing to say), when I tell people where I’m from, the response from anyone who’s visited is invariably effusive, and rightly so: the coastal city is Ireland’s cultural capital, packed with pubs and alive with music and art from Monday to Sunday. Summer is one long string of festivals. You’re an easy drive from some of the most beautiful and poetic landscapes in the country too, from Connemara’s heathered mountains and marshlands quilted with drifts of bog cotton to the Burren’s ancient tombs and the Aran Islands’ foreboding, elemental landscapes. Plus, it’s really gay-friendly, as you’d assume of a prosperous Western European nation that was the first country to approve gay marriage as the result of a public referendum and which has long had an openly gay prime minister. You should go!
But that isn’t the Galway or Ireland I grew up in. Despite our present-day secularism, our culture is rooted in staunch Catholicism.
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