[0.00.00] CB: Okay I’m here it’s Charlie I’m here with Ronan de Burca to record his story on behalf of Outstories Bristol and M Shed today is 23rd of November yes and we’re actually at Canon’s House in Harbourside Bristol do you want to introduce yourself Ronan

RD: My name is Ronan de Burca um I’m Irish been living in Bristol for 8 years just over 8 years now

CB: And your date of birth

RD: 6th of the 3rd ’65

[0.00.34] CB: You’ve lived in Bristol for 8 years and I’d like to talk about your experience of Bristol but can we just step back it’s always easiest to start at the beginning you were born and brought up in Dublin and went to school there

RD: Yep went to school in Dublin yeah so was born in Dublin I’m a twin actually so yeah we were born in Dublin went to school there and started my career there as well but then in my twenties I moved to Brussels for a little while lived in Brussels for about 4 years moved back to Dublin for a while about 10 years I think when I was back in Dublin and then moved to Bristol then in 2004

CB: Okay these moves were for work obviously

RD: Yeah primarily yeah

[0.01.23] CB: The job you went from school university to your first job did you in Dublin

RD: Yeah I didn’t go to university actually yeah I went from school to my first job

CB: Yeah what was the school tell me about the school

RD: School was the primary school was St. Patrick’s school which was in um Dublin just north of the city in Dublin um it was a good school it was um it was actually uh located right beside the teacher training college primary school training in Ireland is a little bit different from it is here you basically go to a particular course and there’s a primary school training college or training colleges just for that so you don’t do a degree and then convert it or whatever you just go to teacher training um so our school was actually linked to that teacher training college so we kind of they told us we were getting the cream of the teachers the best of the teachers coming out yeah but I’m not sure that was necessarily true haha

CB: Knee deep in student teachers

RD: Knee deep in student teachers yeah and interestingly at the time um as we found out part of the teachers’ course at the time was how to um how to hit children they were actually instructed on the best way to do that as part of their training course which is obviously all very changed now but yeah memories of not necessarily of being beaten badly at school but I do remember certain teachers if somebody was misbehaving in the class the whole class would be you know hit with a cane or there were leathers particular leather was manufactured especially for teachers which seems completely bizarre now

CB: Ah yes a strap

RD: Yes a kind of strap always looked like a big cow’s tongue and you’d see them in the butchers a big long leather strap

CB: And that was allowed a teacher was allowed to hit you

RD: That was legally allowed yeah and the leathers those hitting devices were actually supplied by the school yeah

CB: And let’s say this is early 70’s then you were in primary school

RD: Early 70’s yeah that would have been yeah started school in ’69 yeah

[0.03.17] CB: The school in North Dublin I don’t know Dublin can you say a little bit about the north of Dublin is is um a leafy suburb

RD: Um there are some leafy suburbs in the north um if you’re from Dublin people will claim that the south of Dublin is better there’s a north south divide a friendly rivalry that goes on there still goes on to this day but um yeah

CB: And you lived with both parents at home and your brother

RD: Yeah twin brother yeah and two younger brothers as well came along later yeah so my parents are 50 years married next year which is quite an achievement these days

CB: Would you describe your childhood as happy and easy-going

RD: Yeah it was yeah it was pretty happy yeah I have no particularly bad memories from childhood they all seem fairly good

[0.04.09] CB: And I know you’re heavily involved in music now were you then

RD: Yeah I was I think from an early age whenever we went anywhere if there was a piano that’s where I would be you know if someone wasn’t sure where Ronan was find the piano and that’s where I’d be I started learning taking music lessons formally when I was about 7 piano lessons I continued all the way until gosh I did it right through my teens um into my early 20s got all these grade exams and so on you can do grade 1 grade 2 and so on so I did all the way up through the grades and then a diploma then at the end of that all I was working by the time I got the diploma but that was done outside of work bit of an interest that I had on the side

CB: Did you stand out in your family for this or was this everybody

RD: I stood out for various reasons (laughs) but yeah from a musical point yeah I would have been the most musical my my twin is quite musical as well but um he gave up piano after a year or two himself and the teacher just didn’t get on at all his love of the instrument wasn’t strong enough to see him through that it wasn’t the right instrument for him he later started playing the guitar he is actually a really good guitarist

CB: Okay and he’s still in Dublin is he

RD: No he lives in Sydney actually in Australia we’re kind of dispersed I’ve got one brother in Dublin um I’m here in Bristol my twin is in Sydney and my youngest brother is in Boston

[0.05.37] CB: Oh right good handy for holidays I have to ask the name de Burca is not typically Irish

RD: It is actually it is funnily enough people get a bit confused about that it’s actually a Gaelic name it’s a Gaelic form of Burke so people would be a bit more familiar with the name Burke which is B U R K E or B O U R K E so my father’s family’s name is actually Burke but when he got married he changed his name or decided to take the Irish form in Ireland you can use the English or Irish form of your name without having to change it by deed poll so he decided to take the Irish name at that stage and quite often changing an English name to an Irish name depending on the names you’ll add de in front of it and it’s the same as a French name or a Spanish name de means of or from

CB: Oh right I was guessing that it was had a Portuguese connection

RD: It actually has um Norman connections originally so from Normans and so on de Burgo was one of the original names I think it means well it would translate as being from the town or from the borough so it kind of it was a posh name I like to think (laughs)

[0.05.50] CB: You finished primary school you’re heavily into music you went to some secondary school

RD: Yeah I went to secondary school which was the normal secondary school was the feeder school from my primary school um facilities weren’t great it was an okay school but they didn’t really have there wasn’t a music department so I had to do music outside all the way through so continued doing that outside school towards the end of my time at secondary school they did bring in a music teacher but um that was great but I was I was the only pupil for a little while she started working with the younger years but by that stage I was in my final year so no I did some stuff with her but basically I was kind of just working by myself

CB: So it’s a bit of luck your parents obviously had to pay for this outside tuition and you had to be very keen

RD: Yes yeah and obviously there were times during my teens where I wanted to give it up because nobody else was doing it and it wasn’t cool to be going off to piano lessons when everybody else is just hanging out on street corners and making friends and so on but luckily whenever I did voice that my mum always said no you know you’d be really sorry if you give it up so I’m going to make sure you keep it going so she kind of hung on in there but yeah I do I have to admire my parents for that because they didn’t have much money but they always scraped it together somehow to make sure that music lessons continued

[0.08.11] CB: Right and you mentioned friends it wasn’t cool to be playing piano what was friendship like at secondary school

RD: Um it was it was fine um I guess because being a twin I always had a friend there because we were quite close growing up and we always sat beside each other in school all the way through so we always shared a desk right up um looking back I didn’t really develop that many other friendships in school necessarily not because there was any problems but it just didn’t happen you know I had one very good best friend who joined my 6th class which is the last year of primary school in Ireland um this guy Amond was his name he moved from another class into ours and we just hit it off from then and we went to he came to secondary school as well he wasn’t in my class at secondary school we stayed in touch and we’re still really good friends now I don’t even want to think how many years that’s been

CB: What was it that you hit it off was he musical

RD: He’s not musical but he’s gay

CB: So did you know that that was your common factor then or

RD: I’m not sure I was necessarily aware of it because I met him when I was 11 so I was quite young and yeah growing up (short pause) looking back now I can see the signs that I was probably you know that I was always gay as far back as I can remember but at the time it didn’t really seem to be significant or I didn’t necessarily know what it was I didn’t have any role models there was nobody it was never discussed the idea that somebody could be different in that way so I was quite unaware from one side but aware from another side that there was something slightly different I felt a little bit different to everybody else and then when I met this guy Amond we we just hit it off and I think I knew more that he was probably gay rather than I was I didn’t really think it personally but bizarrely in conversations that we’ve had later he thought exactly the same but the other way round so he as soon as he met me knew that I was probably gay but he didn’t recognise that he understood that because he was as well

[0.10.25] CB: So you’d met a kindred spirit really and you said that was in primary school so he joined the school late and you went together to the same secondary school and that friendship continued (short pause) and what were your shared interests then what did you

RD: Um (short pause) that’s a good question because he wasn’t necessarily musical we didn’t have I think we just um I suppose maybe we felt like you said the kindred spirits thing we felt very different to the rest of the people in school he was very funny um and he is he is very chatty and quite a personality so I think I was attracted to that you know just found him good company and it was just easy to be with him because we could chat about similar things as well and although we weren’t necessarily talking about things that would have been you know ‘out’ or gay related we just hit it off you know we’ve a few funny stories where you know neither of us liked sports and everybody was forced to play sports given the school didn’t have great facilities sports consisted of playing football or running round the field if you didn’t want to play football and that was it so we were we were encouraged to play football but um (short pause) I do have memories of being sent off for talking too much because we’d just stand there and chat (laughs)

CB: With this chap your main friend

RD: Yeah and he scored an own goal once cause he was standing chatting to me and the ball hit him on the back of the head and went into the net he wasn’t exactly the most popular person after that (laughs)

[0.12.08] CB: When how did you as a pair associate with the other children did you fit into another friendship group or loosely on the edge of things

RD: Um kind of the edge of things I think yeah I think I probably felt a little bit on the edge anyway because being we were the only twins myself and my brother so we were kind of regarded as being a bit of a novelty so but in a good way you know it wasn’t as if we were marked out as being odd or freaky or whatever but we were just kind of seen as a little kind of a unit on our own so um we were just kind of we were just there you know there are the twins or something and then when I made friends with Amond it was kind of he’s Owen’s twin he’s Amond’s friend that’s just how it was um and I guess because I was quite good again going back to the music thing I must have been quite busy with music because I went to piano lessons twice a week immediately after school so from school you were heading off to somewhere else or cycling home to do homework and piano practice and so on so there wasn’t an awful lot of time for socialising necessarily and then I did get involved in in my mid-teens my first music group you know which was linked to the church which was a youth group choir folk group and so I got into that when I was about 15 16 and that then provided the social life and friends and so on from there as opposed to from school

CB: Okay and the (short pause) it was a mixed school so there were girls and

RD: No it wasn’t it was a boys’ school (short pause) run by priests so it was a Catholic school as well (long pause)

[0.14.00] CB: And I’m trying to grasp the notion you said you and this chap became friends and there was a kindred spirit there you both later came out as gay and how that (short pause) was managed at school what was the atmosphere at school we’re talking about the 70’s mid late 70’s

RD: This would have been the late 70’s yeah in secondary school um I don’t particularly I don’t remember the atmosphere being particularly tense or or anything being other than just being school um I certainly never felt (short pause) that I was being singled out in any way um that you would kind of expect might happen it was a relatively small school it wasn’t a tiny school but it wasn’t a very big school either um and I think this other guy my friend probably felt a little bit more picked on necessarily or a little bit kind of marked out as being different in his way and I didn’t (short pause) I think he was probably a little bit more obvious than I was at the time (short pause) but it’s difficult to know looking back whether that’s actually true or not or whether that was my perception of it

CB: But you’re not you’re not being torn to describe rampant homophobic bullying at school it was more of a gentle place okay

RD: Yeah I mean I don’t ever remember homophobia or homosexuality being ever discussed at all at any level either just between the boys or from an education point of view

[0.15.40] CB: And what what was the context now in Ireland because in the UK at that point (short pause) homosexual age of consent had been made legal for age 21 and above not brought down to 18 until ‘94 I think what was the do you remember what the situation was

RD: I actually have no idea no idea because at the time I was completely ‘in’ if you’d like um so it wasn’t even on my radar to check out what the legality was

CB: Right so there was no big event

RD: No nothing no um so right through my teens and twenties and so on until I came out when I was late 30s you know I’d never um never experimented or really looked around necessarily to see what I was uh entitled to (laughs)

[0.16.34] CB: (laughs) Okay so um you came to the end of school and found work that was at 16 or 18

RD: That was at well yeah 18 um I finished school at 17 and bizarrely haven’t talked about teacher training college and primary school teaching that’s all I had planned to do from the time I was a kid I wanted to be a teacher there were a lot of teachers in my family and my grandmother was a primary school teacher and a headmistress and I I was very close to her as I grew up so whether that had any bearing on my my career choice or not I’m not really sure but um I applied to get into this teacher training college and didn’t get in the first year which was a bit of a I was quite surprised I didn’t get in because you know I’d done quite well in my exams but to get into this training college you had to do um a certain amount of points from your final exam we call it leaving certificate which is probably quite like the A Levels you had to get a certain number of points which I got and then you had to do an English interview an Irish interview so actually in the Gaelic language um and a music interview um my music was very strong I knew that

CB: Because that’s what you were planning to teach

RD: Well I would have been teaching everything you know as primary school teacher you teach

CB: Ah I see yes primary school

RD: Primary school teachers do everything (short pause) yeah so I knew my music skills were pretty high at that stage and would sail through the music exam my Irish spoken Irish at the time was fairly fluent as well so it was either the English interview I fell down on or it was just a numbers game they had too many people that year applying some people ahead of me blah blah so I didn’t get in that first year and I was a bit thrown as to what else to do so I went back to school and repeated my exams so I went back to repeat the final year to try again and didn’t get in the second year either so that was my plan B (laughs) to go back and repeat

CB: And was this because you had to have so many points and there were just people got more points than you

RD: No I don’t think it was necessarily the points either because I I upped my points I scored better on exam results the second time around and my exam results were fairly good so I’m not sure if people would have been ahead of that but whatever their selection criteria was maybe they had too many men applying that year as opposed to women or they wanted people from outside of Dublin or something stronger I’ll never know the reason why I didn’t get in that year either (short pause) but um I’m quite glad now I didn’t get in because you know my career’s been pretty varied um and I’ve lived in different places around the world whereas if I’d’ve become a primary school teacher at the age of 21 22 I would have been doing that for the best part of 30 years now unless I’d’ve changed to a different career so yeah a lot of people I know who went into it at that time did subsequently leave after 10 or 15 years of teaching to do something different but you know it obviously wasn’t meant to be for some reason it didn’t work out so when I didn’t get in the second year then it was a bit of a case of okay what am I going to do now um and I had I did get some places at university but they weren’t courses I had picked out to do well I’m not really sure if I want to do them so I got a job instead and continued working then ever since

[0.19.51] CB: And what was that that was the job with British

RD: No no god I’ve had so many different jobs my very first job was at the travel agency yeah just doing the office work in a travel agency and then from there went to work for the Irish gas company in a clerical job and left there to go to where did I go to next the (Eastern) Health Board which is a bit like the NHS so that kind of again clerical work and and while I was there after working for 2 years in an office where we didn’t have computers which just seems completely bizarre (laughs) at this stage to work in an office and not have computers and I was maintaining accounts and doing lots of um time sheets and salaries for um ambulance men and everything was based on paper so I had this massive ledger book that I had to complete by hand everything had to go in it was a triple entry book and after about 2 years of doing that my my brain was just stagnating and thinking I’m really not cut out for office work and I saw a job being advertised within the health port for a computer operator no idea what a computer operator was but it just sounded a bit more interesting and I applied for that and I got it and I ended up working in IT ever since

[0.21.05] CB: I see and that’s what’s brought you to Bristol eventually

RD: Eventually

CB: Via

RD: Via well when I got into the computer stuff in the health board doing as a computer operator at first and then as a computer programmer and then as a like PC support we were just introducing PCs and this was like revolutionary that you could have a PC on your desk and only special people got them (laughs) um and then yeah I left the health board to go into um a small company that was funded actually by the European Commission it was like a research and development company that was set up to establish communications between other research and development organisations around the world as part of the European Development Fund so um that small company was based in the University complex University College of Dublin a campus company and I worked for them for a while and they had an office in Brussels within the European Commission so after a while and the reason one of the reasons I joined them was because I’d been trying to learn French for a long time and reckoned the only way to really crack it would be to live in a French speaking country and I was a bit too nervous to ditch in my job and go to France or go to Belgium or whatever and try to get a job so I tried to get one that would take me there instead so got a job with this company and they did send me to Brussels for 6 months originally but that turned into sort of 4 years

[0.22.35] CB: Oh I see and you had this friend at school was he still your friend then what had happened to him

RD: Yeah he left school the same the first year that I had left school that I went back to repeat he had finished that year as well and um he got a job in an insurance company and stayed with them for a long time he left about I think he was working with them for about 25 26 years something like that and bizarrely my twin got a job with the same insurance company on the same day so they were both taken I think they did a bit of a campaign to recruit school leavers and came to our school so they ended up working together they weren’t particularly well they weren’t close friends they weren’t enemies or whatever they didn’t get on as well as I got on with him yeah but it was kind of ironic how they became colleagues

CB: Yeah he was working with his best friend’s brother that’s how it was (short pause) um I’m curious then you said he was gay that was the kindred spirit when did he come out to you then

RD: Um about 10 years ago yeah so not that that long ago um I think all through our teens as as I became a bit more aware of what (short pause) what made me different even though I’d never voiced it to anybody or spoken to anybody ever and as far as I know he had never spoken about it to anybody either it’s quite bizarre how you can be very close friends to somebody and never talk about something as fundamental as that um but he got married and I went to his wedding and then I subsequently got married and he came to my wedding you know we all knew each other we didn’t necessarily hang around together all the time I knew his wife very well and his wife knew my wife quite well and we all got on um it was quite nice and um then as time went on I think he was married for about a bit longer than me at one stage I just sensed that things were going a bit rocky between them so well without going into too many details because ultimately that’s that’s his story I knew I vaguely guessed that they had separated and as soon as I knew that I guessed why um and my marriage was on the rocks at the time as well um we weren’t seeing as much as each other at this stage as we had before just because life took over

CB: And he is in Dublin and you were in Brussels

RD: No I was in I was in Dublin at this stage as well yeah I had moved back up to Dublin before I got married um I got married while I was living in Dublin but as coincidences happen I got married in Bristol because my ex-wife’s family were in Bristol so we came over here to get married and then moved back to Dublin immediately afterwards um and it was when he broke up from his his marriage that we went out to dinner one night and I I knew that he was going to tell me that night I just knew for sure kind of thing I gave him lots of opportunities during the conversation to actually say it and he never did until the very end of the evening as we were just about to go and he said I’ve got something to tell you and I said I thought you were never going to and he just said what what do you think I’m going to say and well I’m not going to guess but you tell me and he told me he came out then you know he said are you shocked and I said well no obviously you not because I am too (laughs) so he accused me then of stealing his thunder and uh ruining his big moment (laughs) but uh you know it obviously changed the friendship quite a lot after that you know from having been very close beforehand to you know completely close because there were no secrets between us you know there was no wondering what was happening nothing ever happened between us it was always just a friendship and I don’t think either one of us wanted more than that and it would be bizarre (short pause) to imagine something might have happened just because I suppose we were just too close friends you know but um yeah our relationship moved on quite a lot then we became a lot closer (short pause)

[0.22.55] CB: I’m curious as to why he found it so difficult to tell you what was his fear

RD: Um I don’t think he had any fear of telling me um he wasn’t really worried about my reaction but I think his image of himself was quite different to what other people saw so he had no idea that people might have guessed that he could possibly be gay and even me I don’t think he ever thought that I would have ever expected that

CB: When he did tell you and you stole his thunder you’d obviously already decided that in your head

RD: Yeah I’d been going through a kind of a difficult time emotionally for a little while before that and not being married for a little while we’d had a child and I think as as you get older um you start to examine your life a little bit more you think am I doing what I should be doing am I who I should be um and I think I was getting more and more curious this sort of need or um desire towards men that I’d had before and I’d always managed to repress or control and I’d just seen it as a tiny almost unimportant part of me that I could just push to the back of my mind was just becoming a bit more prominent as I got older and then I think also having my daughter made a big different because um (short pause) I was one of one of the things I wanted for any child I would have would be that they are be happy in themselves confident have good self-esteem um and I wouldn’t care whether she was massively successful as whatever career wise people might consider to be a success as long as she was relatively happy and kind of grounded and sound as a person and I think I found it quite difficult to do that honestly for her when I couldn’t really look at myself well I’m not being honest with myself um so I went through yeah quite a difficult few years trying to figure that out in my own head whilst still being married to somebody that I was very happily in love with um who’s you know she she’s an amazing person we’re still in touch and I would I would always be quite protective and quite respectful of her and I think that also was what spurred things on because I couldn’t really be respectful of her and honest with her by lying and living a lie and dragging her a long with that as well so eventually it got to the stage where I you know something had to be done you know so I went to several different therapists over the years to try and figure things out always hoping that they would tell me that everything would be fine (laughs) and that it’ll be okay um but eventually (short pause) I think to use sort of a clichéd word the journey I was on was only ever going to go one way once you eventually accept that um (short pause) it makes it difficult for a while but better eventually

[0.30.06] CB: And this was before your best friend had come out to you you were on the same kind of on a parallel journey can you try and put this in context what year was this

RD: This would have been about (short pause) 2000 round about 2000 2002

CB: And you were living

RD: Yeah I was still living in Dublin this was before I moved to Bristol yeah um so I struggled to stay in as much as I could and to stay in the marriage but eventually you know had to come out so I came out to my wife which was very difficult at the time but we we tried to stay together even after that um you know I didn’t (short pause) coming out for me was sort of more an acceptance rather than doing anything about it so we did stay together and we stayed together for another 2 years we’d had our daughter at this stage she was quite little so we tried to stay together but things had obviously shifted quite a lot um in the relationship and it got it got trickier and trickier to keep things going um and I think the move to Bristol was kind of a last ditch attempt it was either going to go one way or the other we would move here and it would make things stronger between us or we would move here and it would be the end of the relationship but um

[0.31.28] CB: And it was work that caused you to move here or this was where her family

RD: No it was work well it was a choice you know we could have stayed in Dublin but um I don’t think she had really ever settled that well in Dublin we moved you know she enjoyed living there but she didn’t ever feel it was really home for her um and I think I felt like I needed a complete change in lots of different ways um and because I was flying to the UK pretty much every Monday and flying back to Dublin on the Friday so I was working in the UK all the time expect weekends and we just sort of thought maybe try somewhere in the UK um and looked in various different places London being one but we kind of discounted that as not it wasn’t what we wanted you know living wise or individually and looked in a few different places and haven’t really considered Bristol we thought somewhere close to Bristol but hadn’t really considered it as an option and I had come over a few times looking for houses and eventually on one of our places we drove back in places of Bristol that I hadn’t seen before and it looked quite nicely attractive you know enticing looking place so we looked seriously about the idea of coming to Bristol and we’d drawn up a bit of a list of what we’d like to have in a city we lived in and Bristol just ticked all the boxes for that particular list so that sort of choice made so so we moved over um and like I say it was voluntary work weren’t transferring me um it wasn’t their idea it was my idea to relocate but because the job I was doing wasn’t location dependent I could have done it from anywhere in the world basically uh I just got an agreement from them that I could just change my address really from one country to another

CB: And this was about 2006?

RD: This would have been no 2004

CB: 2004 would have been when you moved to Bristol okay so then you were living together your daughter getting older and bigger

RD: Yeah we didn’t live together for very long yeah about 6 months after we got here that I moved out

CB: So it was your decision that you need to separate it wasn’t that another man had turned up in your life

RD: No but I think once I had kind of come out to myself and to her um it was kind of letting the cat out of the bag to a certain extent and the more and more that I accepted my homosexuality my gayness the more I wanted to do something about it you know and I need to go and explore this and I won’t I can’t repress it any more I can’t hold it back um and it’s going to destroy me and it’s going to destroy her if we try and keep this going because it’s just not what she deserves or what I deserve either so um you know I took the decision at that stage that I needed to go I needed to leave to find out what was out there what was going on

[0.34.38] CB: And what did you find cause you’re now in Bristol

RD: Uh yeah yes in Bristol um yeah the first year or two was interesting (laughs) that was probably the hardest part of the whole thing for me really because my job at the time was home based so I didn’t have an office in Bristol um so the location independent bit once I had a computer and a home line I could work from wherever so I moved into a flat by myself um which I worked from in my flat um so I was basically in the flat for 7 days a week (laughs) with no real social interaction no how do you start what do you do you know to try and make friends and I’d never been anywhere on the gay scene anywhere before you know Dublin no matter hadn’t been on the internet hadn’t discovered how how do you go finding other kindred spirits at that stage other than you know through friends or a network or through work or social events and so on and I didn’t really have that outlook at that stage so it was a difficult time trying to branch out a little bit but eventually you know you do make contacts somehow (short pause) and interestingly the first time the way that I broke into it was I saw a speed dating night being advertised and um I’d never been to any kind of speed dating night before it was a gay speed dating and I thought well it’s got to be better than going down to a bar by yourself or a club by yourself which is kind of quite a (short pause) yeah soul destroying way

CB: This was speed dating in Bristol

RD: Yeah it was a company I think they’d been doing some straight speed dating nights and they wanted to do a gay one um for a while and they had organised one or two nights which had fallen through because not enough people had signed up but when I eventually went along there must have been about how many people there (short pause) maybe 16 or 17 guys or something turned up and it was it was really good actually it was a lot more fun than I expected it to be you know everyone was shaking with nerves when we went in because everyone was as nervous as everyone else but that was nice to feel that everybody else felt the same way

CB: And this was held in Bristol where was it

RD: Yeah it was down in a restaurant called Byzantium down near St Mary’s Redcliffe so basically you turned up and you’re all given a number and somebody had to sit down at a table and they’d blow a whistle or something and you could sit and talk to that person for 3 minutes and then you had took off and talked to someone else but it was such a great way of breaking the ice because you absolutely had to talk to someone so there was no kind of hedging round and thinking am I too shy or are they too shy or who’s going to talk first you had to sit down and talk to them and I think the idea was that afterwards they’d give you you know you had to mark whoever you were talking to out of a score of 10 and the people who organised it would collate that and tell you if you had a match for a date or wanted to be your friend or if somebody didn’t like you or whatever um and but they hadn’t really thought it out themselves because I think when it comes to straight speed dating typically what happens is all the ladies sit down and all the men move around where with this one there were no ladies just men so everybody had to talk to everybody and they hadn’t really done the logistics of it so it got to one stage of the night where they said oh just forget the whistle and the numbers just make sure you talk to everybody so you still had a questionnaire to work through but then they couldn’t really collate the results properly afterwards because they hadn’t really thought that through either but what it did result in was about 10 of those people said yeah they’d like to stay in contact with me in some way or the other and through them and just through email addresses really

CB: That was quite a high hit rate 10 out of 15

RD: Well yeah you know I’m a nice guy (laughs) yeah no (short pause) I think I think it was really helpful doing it in that way because people that you you may not necessarily talk to those people if you saw them in a bar setting or some other social event but have them sit down and you find some kind of link or some kind of connection and you know I do get on with you and they might have been new in the city as well they didn’t know anyone else just somebody to go to coffee with or lunch with so through that you know I didn’t stay in contact with all 10 guys I did contact them afterwards you know and try and arrange things with all of them at least a coffee or lunch or something but I’m still in contact with 2 of them quite seriously yeah we’ve become quite good friends and through them met some of their friends you know so that was my first kind of little outing and that was enough then to establish a kind of social network and so on

[0.39.16] CB: It’s quite an unusual entry to the gay world I suspect

RD: Yeah and it’s funny the kind of reactions you get from that because quite often when I tell people they say oh my god I could never go speed dating but I’ve had such a positive experience with it that I’d encourage anyone to go but um Bristol is kind of a funny place in some ways I love living in Bristol but the speed dating it took the people 3 or 4 goes of organising it just to have enough people turn up and they tried to keep going after that but it just never took off yeah it just wasn’t people didn’t sign up it wasn’t

CB: Gay wise Bristol is no bigger than a village so some of these men might have known each other already you’d never get a room full of strangers

RD: Possibly yeah (short pause) but having said that Bristol is bigger than you think it is we’ve seen that through the choir we’ve got so many people to join the choir over the last 4 or 5 years and people that I’ve never seen anywhere else I wouldn’t say I’m active or whatever on the gay scene but um you know I’ve been involved in other gay social groups and so on and have quite a network of friends through other people and so on and still people turn up to choir um we had almost 13 new people joined over the last month and I don’t know any of them from anywhere before

CB: Yeah so it’s just become a big social network

RD: A huge social network yeah

[0.40.43] CB: How did you tell me about the choir how you got involved in the first place

RD: Um I was um I was having done all the music as a child and working up to diploma on piano and then being involved in the youth group and so on in Dublin once my once my job took over once my career took over and particularly once I moved to Brussels I sort of ditched all the music I didn’t really do anything at that stage you know cause the work was very busy and I did a lot of travelling so it was quite difficult to have any kind of a base or any kind of routine to it as well and even then when I moved back to Dublin we did have a piano in the house and I did play a little bit not as much not anywhere near as much as I had done beforehand and then when we got to Bristol and particularly when I moved out on my own and tried to make friends I suddenly really missed music and wanted to go back to doing something again so I bought a piano and that was great you know it’s kind of like a therapy in itself um and looked around to see whether I knew the musicians or some way of getting a group of people together just on a social basis to do something and couldn’t really find anything at the time

CB: What year would this have been

RD: That would have been (short pause) 2005 certainly anywhere I was looking I couldn’t find you know and I hadn’t really thought about choirs because even though I’d been involved in the youth group I’m not I’m not a singer necessarily I couldn’t not sing in tune but I wouldn’t claim to have any great voice at all um but then just through one of the listings magazines I saw an article which was written by someone who was trying to start a gay choir in Bristol it was a guy called Raymond I don’t know what Raymond’s second name was actually I think he’d move down from Birmingham or another city and had been in a choir and had thought well there isn’t one in Bristol I think there had been one years before

CB: There had been yeah

RD: But that had been disbanded or had ended um I don’ t actually know the history of that group other than people said oh yes there was a choir here beforehand but anyway Raymond had tried to start a gay choir and so I joined that just went along to one of the rehearsals one night and (short pause) I think it was just probably starting to take off but it was difficult because you might get 6 or 7 people turn up to rehearsal and you’d go along next week and it was 6 or 7 different people so it was quite difficult to keep momentum going and then Raymond moved away again so it kind of fell through that particular version of the choir but there were about 4 or 5 of us maybe even 6 of us who were in that group um had kind of become friends through it even though this was only over the period of about a month because I think I’d only been to 4 rehearsals when it stopped and then this small group thought it’s a real shame to stop let’s try and keep it going ourselves in some kind of form um and we just sent out emails to see if there was anyone else interested and organised it from that point of view so the founder members who are all still involved in the choir

CB: Because you’ve not been involved in organising a group like this before

RD: No no

CB: So there were other people involved who did the organising

RD: Yeah there were other people I suppose we all took a bit of an equal role at the beginning because we didn’t have any great vision we didn’t have this idea of let’s set up a gay choir let’s grow to x size and let’s do this and let’s do that it was just organising to meet in someone’s living room to do some music and as the first time we got together there might have been 8 or 10 people and then the next week they brought a friend so it kind of grew to about 16 20 people over a few weeks um and at that stage somebody said we could really do with someone who plays piano or can read music and I was very shy and didn’t want to have that kind of role but because nobody else was doing it I kind of put my hand up and said well I play a bit of piano so I’m happy to pick up notes and so on um so that’s what I did at the very of beginning and it just got bigger and bigger we had a just borrowed somebody’s tiny little keyboard that they’d bought from Argos for £20 or something (short pause) and yeah we grew to about 30 people I think um and I took on a lot more of a musical role then rather than picking out notes on the piano I would actually accompany the choir or choosing arrangements and teaching I started to teach the different parts as well and bring it together that way

[0.45.07] CB: And somebody had to do when an organisation’s emerging there’s bureaucracy to invent someone else was organising that and you could concentrate on the

RD: Yeah well I would have been involved in that side of things because it was sort of run as a democracy really at the moment and because it was quite small everybody could be involved but um Andy (Fole) was quite heavily involved at that stage of the group and was quite instrumental in helping us establish a strategy and vision and direction and so on and somebody else is Nick Stevenson who’s heavily involved Lesly um what’s Lesley’s surname

CB: Lesley Welsh

RD: Lesley Welsh exactly yeah um and some other people Hannah Hannah (Lakelan) you know Hannah

CB: I know of her

RD: So we would have been sort of the core group to try to move things on from there

CB: And it’s particularly interesting how small organisations like that emerge but why for you why did you choose to get involved in the creation of a gay choir rather than

RD: Another choir

CB: There’s dozens of other choirs in Bristol which you could have got involved in readymade what was the

RD: The um I hadn’t I hadn’t thought of joining a choir at all because as I say my background was never singing it was music so I was looking round for a musical group and had seen this listing of Raymond trying to organise a gay choir you know and that was I’d never thought of it before and I thought well that could be really good because that kills 2 birds with 1 stone because it’s musical but also it gives me a chance to expand my social circle and it has been incredible from that point of view yeah just the sense of community within the choir the sense of belonging and a readymade social life

CB: Yes and it’s now established as the biggest um social network of its kind in the city LGBT network in the city

RD: It’s been quite remarkable we’re constantly surprised by how much its grows and continues to grow

CB: And you stand up there and conduct the choir um people shouldn’t assume but they pretty much guess that you’re gay doing that

RD: Yeah

CB: That’s made you quite out in places I imagine and people might recognise you

RD: Yeah I was a little bit wary about that at the beginning but now I’ve thought well you know it’s a really positive thing to do um I was I think I was probably more nervous about it from not from my point of view but from my ex-wife’s point of view and my daughter’s point of view because that exposes them as well

CB: Yes and they’re both in Bristol

RD: They’re both in Bristol yeah so I was a bit sensitive about that from their side more than anything else but um they’re they’re both very supportive of it and once we get over the initial um conversations or you know communications and so on about that yeah they’re very supportive they both come to concerts

[0.48.15] CB: Okay um so what next for the choir that’s um

RD: To take over the world (laughs) yeah um we’ve got a few things it’s been really interesting to see the evolution of the choir as it’s moved from being an amateur group having fun and then it became a bigger amateur group of having fun to become quite um (short pause) very established but also a lot more professional in terms of what we try to put on you know because at the beginning we didn’t plan to be a performance choir but people expect you to perform as a choir there’s only so long you can carry on with just singing in somebody’s front room when people invite you to sing at something um and then I think we realised some of the people who joined us had been in other gay choirs and they were saying this choir does this and this choir does that and so on so there were all ideas of things we could do um and there’s a festivals that’s on about every 4 or 5 years an international festival called Various Voices which was held in London um this particular time and we’d only been established for about a year and we thought well we should go to that festival and we went up and we were just blown away there were something like 60 or 70 choirs from all over the world gay choirs that came together for this long weekend of workshops festivals and concerts and so on and some of them had been around for like (13 14/30 40) years and had 200 members and we had arrived up from Bristol I think there were about 25 26 of us who you know knew about 6 songs but we had a slot we performed with them but we came back buzzing with ideas about what we could do and how we could move the choir on and I think that really was very instrumental giving us some direction and some um ambition you know so everybody stepped up their game big time after that so you know the committee got a lot more focused the committee got a lot bigger um I got a lot more involved from a musical direction point of view so rather than just teaching and accompanying and doing some music over the top we needed somebody with musical direction skills so that was a whole new challenge for me to try to get to grips with that um so we having done that we changed our focus and decided yes we are a music performance choir and if we’re going to be a performance choir we’re going to be a damn good performance choir you know let’s put on good performances um so from just deciding oh that’s a nice piece of music let’s do that that’s a nice piece of music or somebody loves this song and we would just do it on that basis we then started to think about if we were performing this how would it fit into a concert theme and how does it fit into production and what do we ned to do with it to make it more interesting and work the whole production side not just picking nice pieces of music um and from that point of view the performances have got bigger and the venues we have to perform in have got bigger our audience has got bigger uh the actual stuff we take on has got bigger we do a lot more complicated arrangements a lot more complicated movements to them introducing different aspects in and one of the things we’re working towards is the next Various Voices which will be in 2013 so the invitations they’ve just announced a little while ago the dates and so on for that so we’re really keen to get to Various Voices next time round just to see how much we’ve moved on in the 4 years since last time

[0.52.00] CB: Yeah where will that be held

RD: Interesting story while we were in London the plans were that the next one to be held would either be in Vancouver in Canada which would be great or Barcelona which again would be great and I’ve never been to either and I thought well great that’s a great opportunity but they announced that the winner it’s a bit like the Olympics they announced that the winner of the Various Voices festival in 2013 is Dublin (laughs) so I’m going home

CB: Ah that will be interesting standing on a stage in Dublin

RD: Yeah it will be really good actually um it’s quite it’s just ironic that it turned out to be Dublin and it turned out to be 10 minutes from where I grew up so it’s a part that I know really really well the university campus

CB: And you’re already out to your family members so this is not going to be a surprise

RD: Yes no no no when I came out well more like when our marriage broke up I came out to everybody at that stage you know because they would wonder why we split up there would have to be a good reason for it so it would be like we are splitting up and this is the reason why so everybody knew at that stage um and the support from everybody for both of us was incredible really it was really good but yeah I’m looking forward to going back for singing in Dublin it’ll be a chance for a lot of people over there for people who have never seen me conduct a choir for a start but have also not seen the choir um and I’m desperately proud of the choir so it’ll be nice to go back and say look what I do (laughs)

CB: Is there a LGBT choir in Dublin that’s the reason they’re the hosts of this event

RD: There is yes yeah and they’ve got the very enviable name of Gloria which you know just works so well as a choir name on 2 levels (laughs)

[0.53.56] CB: I was going to ask I think we’re nearing the end but I want to ask how you found Bristol as a city to be gay in a gay person slightly confused by you being a big part of providing the scene in Bristol what do um I’m picking up that mostly now you’re social life revolves around the choir you’re not someone who goes to bars and clubs

RD: Well I do but it would tend to be with friends or with a group of people going out as opposed to I don’t go to bars or clubs to try and make friends or improve my social life it’s just part of it and you know I do like going to some of the gay venues in Bristol from time to time

CB: Okay is there anything you want to say that we haven’t touched on or anything you want to ask

RD: Um I don’t think so no I think we’ve covered pretty much everything you know it’s nice to come on and talk about the choir a bit you know sorry you asked a little bit about my impressions of the gay life and so on in Bristol it’s been pretty much positive all the way through um I’ve never noticed any issues um through homophobia or anything like that and it seems to be I think it’s moved on a lot I think when I moved here first you did sort of look over your shoulder a little bit before you ducked in to a gay club whereas now I don’t get any of that sense at all maybe I’ve just been incredibly lucky that I’ve never suffered any homophobia and kind of problems people might have with that um I did find it a little bit difficult at the beginning to establish a kind of a gay social life as I’ve said but once that took off it became pretty good pretty very quick the choir’s been massive in that but also through Members Bristol the networking organisation I was heavily involved in setting that up as well and I think a lot of other cities had networks like that now but Bristol didn’t seem to have one and it was just another way for people to meet that wasn’t just in bars and clubs but there didn’t seem to be a lot more of a you know I think there were things but I just didn’t come across them you know there were cinema groups there were walking groups there were cycling groups but I didn’t know them at the time so I was instrumental in setting Members up another bright way a positive way to meet new people a similar stage of life as me and I’ve made some incredible friends through that as well so through that and through the choir (short pause) um yeah that’s been very positive and you know very happy

CB: Okay and we thank you for doing it for making it now I’ll switch off the recorder