Dublin’s 2019 Pride celebrations were marked by the visible and vocal splits that emerged in our community due to differing opinions on the presence of multinational corporations in the parade and the increasing commercialisation of the festival. With that in mind, sociologist and LGBT+ activist, Evgeny Shtorn, talked to John Malcolm Anderson, leader of Prism - the LGBT+ employee resource group in Verizon Media Dublin. Here John details his own growth as an activist and how he makes space for activism within a multinational corporation.

Portrait by Babs Daly, Evgeny Shtorn

John was raised the youngest of seven children in a Jehovah Witness family in Ballina, County Mayo. “It is a sort of fundamentalist Christian sect, non-Trinitarian, quite sectarian,” John explains. From early childhood, he remembers attending meetings and doing bible study almost every day. He would go out on field service with his parents and siblings, knocking door-to-door, preaching their beliefs.

Until John was 16 he still believed in the Jehovah Witness doctrine. Then he began having doubts, in part related to his sexuality, but also to the doctrine itself.

When he was 17, John came out to his parents as gay. The reaction wasn’t one of acceptance. “It was generally very bad, my dad took it a lot softer while my mom just went mad. It’s obviously a big thing to not be straight and there’s no sex before marriage… Homosexuality was considered a big sin and presented almost like a disease”.