On the Border
Words by Kelsie Fitzgerald.
There are many facets that make up an individual’s identity. From the big life defining things like sexuality and gender to the smaller aspects such as hot beverage preference or which era of Kanye West you think is the best. (For the record, I don’t have an opinion. I think he’s a bit of a gobshite).
When I was thinking about ‘identity’ I couldn’t figure out how to summarise it, when I looked at the Merriam-Webster definition they had two definitions to explain ‘identity’
A) The distinguishing character or personality of an individual.
B) The relation established by psychological identification.
From what I gathered from this, there are two sides of the identity coin. On one side, identity is all about being an individual and separating yourself from everyone, a sense of being unique and not like anyone else. On the other side of the coin, finding your identity can be a gateway to finding your people. Finding people with similar views and interests can make you feel a sense of community and belonging to something bigger than yourself.
Our identity shapes us from a young age, it shows through our opinions and views, thoughts, and feelings. I’ve found the older I’ve gotten the more topics surrounding identity become a main conversation point, especially having moved away from home, to meet so many different people it really does open the eyes to different lives and topics.
I am ashamed to say that it took moving to Beijing for me to have a proper conversation with someone who grew up in the north of Ireland. Fortunately, my friend Paul opened my eyes to many things I’d never even thought of. What began as a 4am drunk conversation, a DMC if you will, led to multiple conversations delving into the question of national identity and identity as a queer person.
Irish pride is a strange thing, while living in Ireland I couldn’t wait to get away. Now, living so far away, I love the opportunity to hype up Irish cheese and tell funny anecdotes of the absurdity of our small island. I realise now that I’ve often taken my Irish identity for granted, having spoken to Paul I learned that in his life, he has fought both external forces as well as his own internal struggle with his Irish identity.
The way Paul viewed things was that he was both claimed and rejected by two countries at the same time. When he told me this I could understand being claimed and rejected by Britain but was taken aback that this accounted for the south as well. All around me people shouted about a United Ireland and taking back the six counties from the Brits, in fact over the last few years I’d seen a rise in Irish nationalism, especially online. In fairness to Paul, he set me dead straight, it’s very easy for me to have these thoughts as I grew up in Cork, quite a distance from where all these things were happening and I’ve never had my Irish identity questioned.
Political murals in Belfast.
Growing up Paul lived in a Catholic area. From his family, friends, and neighbourhood he was told that he was Irish, end of story. However, outside influences like the government and media would refer to him as British. Understandably from a young age this caused what he described as an identity crisis. I always thought someone from the north coming down south would be no problem, that it would be embraced. Paul thought it would be the same as he felt coming to the ‘free state’ was like coming home, however he often felt it was like travelling to a foreign land. While he felt like this was where he belonged, many people would hear the northern accent and tell him to fuck off back to Britain. There was the big rejection, in their eyes he wasn’t one of them at all, no matter what they claimed about a United Ireland.
In a contradiction to this, while studying in England, Paul was in fact considered Irish, he wasn’t one of them either, he was a foreigner. Well where the fuck does that leave people from the North? Claimed by everyone but rejected by these very same people? It makes no sense. Being ‘Northern Irish’ is meant to be some compromise but to Paul that doesn’t feel real, it’s just a meaningless phrase. Aside from Paul’s persistent question of national identity, being a queer person is probably the most pertinent aspect of his identity. Like myself and many of my friends, Paul also spent his teen years hanging out with the more ‘alternative’ kids, all the punks, metalheads and skaters etc.
Part of identity is finding similar people, those who understand you and for Paul that made it easier to recognise and realise his own sexual identity. For him, having his people meant he was comfortable enough to come out to his family that he was ‘gay’.
If you’ve moved up through the Catholic schooling system, they aren’t exactly dishing out information and advice regarding sexual fluidity and the complexity of sexual identities. Between social attitudes and school teachings, even the forward thinking, quasi-socially liberated alternative kids of early 2000s Belfast, were ignorant about anything outside of the straight-bi-gay matrix. After coming out to friends and family; there was a year of bliss for Paul, who approached his sexual identity as simply and easily as singing ‘I am who I am’ every so often and not needing to give it another thought.
Go tobann, this year of bliss would come to a halt when faced with a big ol’ identity crisis.
At 16 years of age, full of enthusiasm and excitement to find ‘his tribe’ Paul entered a gay bar expecting everything to be finally complete. However far from being complete, he left more lost than ever as in his words “The place was so unfamiliar and just didn’t feel right. I didn’t look like anyone in there and none of them looked like the tribe I’d identified with to this point”.
Belfast city hall lit up for Pride.
Suddenly Paul was faced with being called a ‘bad gay’ and much like his national identity, his queer identity also seemed to be rejected by those meant to accept him. Following on from this, Paul spent a few years trying to make sense of his sexual identity, he was excited by kissing boys but just didn’t feel comfortable in the bars, hated the music, and couldn’t abide by the fashion. At this stage of life, there was a ‘gay culture’ which Paul just simply didn’t care for and because of this, he felt like he lost his gay card. There was a club with strict requirements that he just couldn’t fulfill.
While our teenage years are vital to building a foundation of who we are, I feel our twenties are even more significant. Just speaking of myself I’ve began to feel a whole lot more comfortable with myself in this decade than I ever did in my teen years, and I’ve been very lucky in that respect. I am a straight, cis woman, a societal default. In my life I’ve never really had to question my national or sexual identity, it was just accepted. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple for everyone and Paul said that he’s jealous of that to some extent.
While I travelled through university and my twenties having craic I never really had to as Paul puts it “find your tribe in order to understand what your sexuality means for the rest of your life”. During this time the thought of my sexual identity never became something more than a passing thought, but for Paul it was a time of feeling rejected by a very specific crowd and scene amongst gay culture. In response to this, Paul spent a few years simply refusing to sexually identify himself, believing that nothing could quite summarise how he felt. As we continued speaking and spoke about our late twenties and adulthood there was one thing we both could relate with there’s a maturity that comes with our relationship with ourselves and our identities.
From all our conversations I know that identity is a big deal for both of us, our experiences have shaped us as people even though we’ve both travelled very different roads to get here in this place and time. To have these chats is to grow and understand each other more, to learn about different people and what identity means to them.
For Paul, two of the most pivotal aspects of his identity have been his national and sexual identity. Throughout his life his identity has been questioned and ridiculed by the very people who are meant to support him. Now though, he feels comfortable to identify as a queer Irish person. With regards to his identity as an Irish person, he is comfortable with his self-identification and that the people of the north and south of Ireland should have acceptance of their Irishness. However, both sides need to recognise that there’s been a century of these identities evolving in different environments. It’s only when we accept these differences and acknowledge it that we can see progress.
In relation to sexual identity that is also something Paul has found that being exposed to more mainstream discussions that fluidity in sexual and gender identification has made it much easier now. “Being queer now, doesn’t mean I wasn’t gay then, and also doesn’t mean that I’m not gay now, too”. There is complexity to these terms and it means different things to different people, and for himself personally it goes from being “just a word to an identity when I take on the term myself, not when I’m given it, and when I recognise the common experiences that I share with others who use the term to identify themselves”.
For a while, identity was a very individual experience for Paul but now it’s become a much more of a community of warriors, a tribe if you will. “I used to feel like my sexual identity was a way of explaining my sexual proclivities to strangers. A handy wee word to answer an awkward and unwarranted question. But now it’s a link to a huge community of comrades and allies and beautifully vast and varied culture. When I need it to be, it’s a suit of armour.”
Aerial night view of Ganzhou, located in east China's Jiangxi Province.
For Paul, his perception of his identity continued to develop as he made the decision to uproot his life and move to China. Unlike most who move here, Paul didn’t begin his Chinese life in a modern metropolis like Beijing or Shanghai; Paul first lived in the “small city” of Ganzhou, in the Jiangxi province. Now, small city here is small by Chinese standards, Ganzhou still has a population of 8 million people, quite a bit bigger than our wee island.
If there is one thing you must know about Paul, it’s that he’s unapologetically himself and having come out in his teens, he promised himself he would never hide his sexual identity from those who asked. For him it’s important, “especially for those of us who are able and comfortable to do it, because it brings visibility”.
However, for the five months in Ganzhou, Paul was surrounded by a more ‘macho’ crowd in which he “consciously omitted truths and allowed for the default assumption that I was just a regular straight man”. Upon moving to Beijing and reflecting on this time and breaking his promise, he felt a sense of shame. However he realised his promise needed the addendum “as long as it’s safe”.
Now is this solely a China thing? Absolutely not, and Paul is very adamant to state this doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with China, but more to do with the oppressive nature of hetero-normative behaviour and toxic masculinity, which can be found as easily in Ireland as anywhere else in the world. When speaking about queer identity in China, it must be acknowledged however that we can only speak of it from a foreigner’s perspective. Because we are foreigners there is a freedom from the social norms here that’s only granted to expats, perhaps because we are only spectators and not active players in the societal or national game.
When we spoke about reactions to his sexual identity outside his close friend group, Paul spoke mostly about people being unaffected by this information. For the most part it is considered more of a ‘foreign’ thing, the worst reactions being a general confusion of how this affects a normal pattern of life (marriage, kids, etc.) On the other hand though, he was reminded of friends from back home, whose families were fine with him being queer but couldn’t fathom their own child being so. “It’s as though queerness is interesting to look at, if kept at arm’s length, but once it’s too close to home, one has to actually deal with the reality of it too much.”
Every time I have the joy of speaking to Paul, I leave the conversation knowing it was valuable and over these few occasions it’s been no different. I want to end with something Paul said that has stuck with me, and I think it can be applied to anyone who’s looking at their identity or trying to figure themselves out.
“It’s about the shared experiences I have with a whole community of people and how recognising that, recognising each other and having an identity we can use to celebrate that, gives us the shared strength that we need in order to live in a world like this one. We can use our shared identity as a weapon against oppression and discrimination”.
