A Son Called Gabriel
Page 34
“I’m very proud of you, son,” she said. “Work hard, and don’t take any drugs. There’s a lot of that going on in England and people will tempt you.”
“I won’t, Mammy.”
Her eyes ran over my short hair and moustache. She didn’t like it, but I’d refused to shave it off.
“Say your prayers and go to mass on Sundays. Don’t miss any.”
I nodded, the irony that she considered me devout despite my having had sex with a man foremost in my mind. The ferry’s thunderous horn blared. After a final embrace, I picked up my suitcases and walked up the gangplank.
It seemed to take forever for the ship to travel along Belfast Lough and finally enter the choppy Irish Sea. The crossing to Liverpool and train to London took the guts of a day. I felt grimy and tired when I finally entered the Euston station concourse at noon the next day. The place was enormous, built of massive naked girders and ribs of steel, with rows of plate glass forming the high roof overhead. I felt as important as an ant. People bustled about the concourse with a knowledgeable air. These people were part of London, knew the city intimately and their roles in it. Would I ever feel like them?
I made my way to the information kiosk, my arms aching as the suitcases were so heavy. Richie wasn’t there. I scanned the milling crowd. After ten minutes, I panicked. We’d planned that I’d spend the weekend at his apartment in Chiswick before I moved into the University Hall of Residence. Horrible thoughts crowded my head. What if he’d changed his mind? What if he’d gotten cold feet? What if it had all been my imagination and he really didn’t care for me as much as I thought he did?
“Gabriel!”
He came to me with his arms outstretched, his amazing blue eyes flashing in the shafts of sunlight spilling down on the concourse. He wore a red plaid shirt, faded jeans, and a pair of Doc Martens he’d told me about. We hugged. I expected it to be brief, but he made no attempt to end it.
“The moustache suits you,” he said. “All you need now is some faded jeans and a plaid shirt and you’re a clone, too.”
I laughed. Richie had told me about the clone fashion among gays.
He picked up the largest of my suitcases and we headed up the steps and out the exit. When we reached the street, he summoned a black taxi and we bundled inside. Our driver wore a purple turban and took off at high speed after Richie told him where to take us. Richie sat much closer to me in the cab than I expected. London really was going to be different.
“Welcome to your new life.” He squeezed my thigh and kissed me quickly on the cheek. “I’ve so much to show you.”
In the rearview mirror, the driver’s almond-shaped, dark eyes locked briefly on mine. A woman’s rapid voice rattled over the walkie-talkie, telling other cab drivers in a cockney accent I recognized from TV to pick up fares. I was in a new world. My new life had begun.
Afterword
As A Son Called Gabriel is republished by Pegasus Books, some readers may wonder why I decided to change parts of the novel as originally published.
While Gabriel’s story is not mine, his family is not my family, and the novel explores universal themes like love and sectarianism, there is some truth in the parts of the narrative depicting his growing up gay in a religiously conservative neighborhood and in the personal and external torments he endured. In the 1960s and 70s, Northern Ireland’s Protestant and Roman Catholic communities were very homophobic and the Reverend Ian Paisley, a Free Presbyterian, spearheaded an assault on the latent LGBT community with his “Save Ulster from Sodomy” campaign after the parliament in London decriminalized homosexuality. His efforts were ultimately unsuccessful, but Northern Ireland still remains quite homophobic. The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), the majority political party forming the government in Northern Ireland and founded by the late Dr. Paisley, refuses to allow same-sex marriage, despite it now being legal throughout the rest of the United Kingdom.
As I wrote A Son Called Gabriel, there were several nights when, after I read a scene I’d written, I’d break down because it brought back bewildering and painful memories of my own experiences as a sixteen-, seventeen-, and eighteen-year-old. A few years after the book’s first publication, I began to feel I had not been as true to Gabriel as I should have been. I wondered if I’d interwoven too many of my personal feelings with Gabriel’s and, as a consequence, had shortchanged this budding young man. Had I constrained his growth, denying him both happy as well as painful opportunities and experiences? Had I left him in a sort of limbo, neither fish nor fowl, heading into his future still somewhat troubled?
As more time passed and I became increasingly perturbed about the injustice sustained by the LGBT community, my community, the wise words of the late Harvey Milk in his “That’s What America Is” speech sounded louder inside my head:
Gay brothers and sisters, . . . You must come out. Come out . . . to your parents . . . I know that it is hard and will hurt them but think about how they will hurt you in the voting booth! Come out to your relatives . . . come out to your friends . . . if indeed they are your friends. Come out to your neighbors . . . to your fellow workers . . . to the people who work where you eat and shop . . . come out only to the people you know, and who know you. Not to anyone else. But once and for all, break down the myths, destroy the lies and distortions . . .
As the community asserted itself increasingly, the world indeed moved haltingly forward regarding LGBT issues, as Milk had predicted. People began to understand that men and women who identified as gay, bisexual, or transgender were indeed not the threat to society that religious zealots and bigots portrayed them as, that they could form relationships as loving, committed, and important as their own, that they were indeed their brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, cousins, uncles, and aunts, friends and co-workers, and, admittedly rather shockingly to many, even their wives and husbands. My own long-term relationship, which has brought joy, burdens, and responsibilities equal to any heterosexual union and that demands the same recognition and respect, is further proof of Milk’s hypothesis now crystallized into undisputable fact.
With the advent of legal same-sex marriage in the US, I knew I had to rewrite a fundamental part of the novel. While no marriage other than heterosexual marriage crosses Gabriel’s mind throughout the narrative, I felt compelled to acknowledge the silent gay men and women who grew up in the same era as he did, who were as reconciled and happy with the newly minted adults they’d become as most LGBT people are today, but who also understood they had to escape the homophobia and sectarianism of rural Northern Ireland and live their dignified truth in England’s cities and beyond. For Gabriel, though the rigid political and religious milieu conspired to deny him equality (because he was both a member of the population’s religious minority and a young gay man), I needed to depict scenes of hope and happiness, even if his happy relationship had to remain secret due to the omnipresent threat of exposure and the dire consequences that would surely follow.
I feel unburdened now that I’ve done Gabriel justice and sincerely hope those readers who’ve enjoyed the earlier version of the novel will agree.
—Damian McNicholl
Pennsylvania, 2017
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my editor, Katie McGuire, Claiborne Hancock, Iris Blasi, cover designer Derek Thornton, interior designer Maria Fernandez, the sales people, and everyone else at Pegasus Books who worked on the novel. And to Margaret O’Connor, my agent and friend.
A SON CALLED GABRIEL
Pegasus Books Ltd.
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New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2004 by Damian McNicholl
Afterword copyright © 2017 by Damian McNicholl
First Pegasus Books edition September 2017
Interior design by Maria Fernandez
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ISBN: 978-1-68177-504-3
ISBN: 978-1-68177-573-9 (e-book)
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