For Irish LGBTQ New Yorkers, it’s been a long road to Staten Island

This year, for the first time, every New York City neighborhood will host a St. Patrick’s Day Parade that welcomes LGBTQ groups, ending a decades-long conflict.

That milestone will be celebrated Sunday with a new parade on Staten Island, part of a deal brokered by Mayor Eric Adams. It is the culmination of decades of work by activists like Brendan Fay, a tireless Irish immigrant who began lobbying for the inclusion of gay protesters 34 years ago.

“There’s been a huge cultural transformation that I’ve witnessed from 1990 to today,” Fay, 65, said this week as he prepared to march in the Staten Island parade.

Still, he said, “we had no idea it would take this long.”

The new parade quickly overshadowed the municipality’s traditional march, held on March 3, which officials said was the only one in the United States to ban gay protesters. Most of New York’s elected officials, who plan to march on Sunday, have boycotted the borough’s original parade for years.

The organizers of the original parade, a private group, could not be reached for comment, but they have previously stated that they did not want the parade to contradict the teachings of the Catholic Church or be used to promote “political or sexual identification agendas.” .

In 2018, Larry Cummings, the parade’s lead organizer, said The Irish voicea diaspora newspaper in New York City: “Our parade is for Irish heritage and culture.”

When Mr. Fay moved to the United States from Ireland in 1984, few if any St. Patrick’s Day parades welcomed LGBTQ organizations. Mr. Fay was a religion teacher at a Catholic school and had thought he would work for the church all his life.

But in 1991, Mr. Fay joined a group of gay demonstrators in Manhattan whose inclusion in the Fifth Avenue parade had been negotiated by then-mayor David Dinkins. Things went very badly: both the mayor and the demonstrators were booed for more than forty blocks and pelted with beer bottles and swear words. Some spectators shouted “AIDS!” as they passed by.

After the parade, Mr. Dinkins compared it to “marching in Birmingham, Alabama,” during the civil rights movement. Gay groups were excluded from the parade the following year because their presence was inappropriate for the celebration of a Catholic saint.

Following coverage of the event, Mr Fay was fired, putting his visa status in jeopardy. But he soon began working at Metropolitan Community Church, a gay church in Midtown, and devoted his life to activism on behalf of AIDS patients, LGBTQ people and immigrants.

“I come from a spirit of Catholic activism for social justice,” he said. “People say, ‘When did you become an activist?’ And it goes back to nuns, priests and devoted laity in Ireland, who protested for the people of El Salvador and against apartheid.”

But the St. Patrick’s Day Parade always loomed large, not just as a street festival, but as a symbol of something more.

“At the heart of the parade issue is a deeper issue of human connection,” Mr Fay said. “The exclusion from the parade reflected the silence we lived with for most of our lives – the question of whether you could safely hold hands on the street in your neighborhood, whether you could be yourself in your workplace or with your family.

While gay activists fought for decades to be included in St. Patrick’s Day celebrations in the United States, their participation in events in Ireland was largely uncontroversial. And as Irish America became more politically conservative, Ireland moved quickly in the opposite direction.

In 2015, the year the New York City parade first admitted gay demonstrators, Ireland became the first country in the world to introduce same-sex marriage by popular vote.

The following year, Mr. Fay received an award for his activism from Michael D. Higgins, the President of Ireland. In 2017 he was invited to Ireland as chief marshal of the parade in Drogheda, “the town I fled from in 1984,” he said. And months later, a 38-year-old biracial gay man, Leo Varadkar, became the Prime Minister of Ireland.

Throughout the 1990s, Mr Fay worked with the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organisation, then founded his own group, the Lavender and Green Alliance, in 1994 to lobby for the inclusion of gays in the city’s main parade on Fifth Avenue and in smaller parades around the city. the other parts of the city.

Mr. Fay and other protesters were arrested so often that when police officers saw him at a parade, “sometimes they would ask me if I would be their guest for another St. Patrick’s Day,” he said.

The turning point came in 1999. Mr. Fay was arrested three times: at the Fifth Avenue parade, at the Bronx parade and at the Brooklyn parade. After years of campaigning, the activists had little to offer other than an arrest report.

And then Mr. Fay had an idea: why not organize their own parade?

He and friends in Queens organized St. Pat’s for All, an event with a homespun atmosphere that started in 2000.

“When we did the parade we asked, ‘What does it mean to be Irish?’” he said.

Their answer to that question was a parade of truth local parish groups and Irish drag queens marched alongside NAACP members carrying banners about Frederick Douglass’ travels to 19th-century Ireland.

But St. Pat’s for All became a sensation before the very first bagpipes sounded, because of a surprise phone call Mr. Fay received from the White House. It was an aide to Hillary Clinton, who was then preparing to run for the United States Senate from New York.

She wanted to participate in this new parade that she had heard was coming to Queens. Could Mr. Fay take that into account?

“They asked me about the stage and the sound system and all that, and we didn’t plan any of that,” Mr. Fay said. “But she came in March 2000, and the media came, and that was that.”

St. Pat’s for All is still held every year in Sunnyside and Woodside, but its spirit has now spread to almost every parade in the New York area.

And as Mr. Fay marches through Staten Island on Sunday, the last borough to welcome everyone, he will think of friends and parade people who did not live to see this day: Father Mychal Judge, who died in the September 11 attacks ; the activist Tarlach MacNiallais, who died of the coronavirus in 2020; and author Malachy McCourt, who died Monday at the age of 92.

“I don’t take anything for granted. LGBT people take nothing for granted when it comes to being welcomed as part of your community,” he said. “Of course, I never thought a parade would become such a big part of my life, but it did.”