Everyone welcome to Cavan’s first queer book club

Killinkere native Leanne McMahon had just returned to Cavan after finishing her masters in Library and Information Studies in UCD when she began to long for the capital again.

Moving from a diverse city back to her county homeland, the 26 year old described how she missed her university city and the friends she had made there.

“I had a lot of friends, a lot of queer friends when I was in college, and came back here and then there was like nobody,” she said, describing how “it felt kind of, a bit lonely”.

She described how the main sources of community in rural Ireland are football, church and “different things like that” and she really felt the loss of leaving the queer community in Dublin. Ellie Flood from Ballyjamesduff also remembered feeling the same sense of loss upon moving home from Maynooth.

“You’re friends are all leaving and I was like, God there is nothing going on in Cavan.

“I was looking at other queer events that were going on but they were all happening in Dublin,” remembered a disappointed Leanne.

“Can somebody do something for Cavan?” she asked herself.

Both Leanne and Ellie work for Cavan County Library Service, and having met through work, they decided to start a book club for the queer community in Cavan. They recalled bouncing name ideas off each other when Leanne came up with a suggestion.

“Then I was like, oh queer culchie,” she recalls.

“It’s two terms that were previously derogatory I suppose but have kind of been reclaimed.”

The literature enthusiast shared that people have asked her if this is an offensive term to use.

Ellie gave her take on this: “It’s my preferred word because it’s an umbrella and, if you’re still figuring stuff out, it is a great word to use because we’re not saying you need to know exactly how you identify right away.

“You can use this term, which is neutral and we have reclaimed it,” the 27 year old said, adding that “some people don’t like it so you wouldn’t use it for them”.

“I always take the approach of when you’re still figuring stuff out it is a great word to use because you’re not pressuring someone to immediately identify with say, bisexual, or gay or lesbian or whatever, it’s just a nice little umbrella term of I’m figuring out who I am.”

Leanne added to this, explaining that calling someone “a queer” is “offensive” as opposed to statements such as “I’m queer” or “are you queer?”

“People in the LGBTQ community know that that’s not offensive because we use that word kind of regularly now.”

Best practice?

“You can ask someone and I actually think a lot of people who are LGBTQ would be like ‘thank you for asking’,” Leanne advised.

“Starting these conversations can inspire other people to start thinking about these things [identity],” Ellie added.

“I do think something that we really try and embrace in the queer community is, even if you don’t personally understand someone’s experience, you can still respect that.

“We can completely respect the way you want to identify now without having shared that exact experience.”

It is with this in mind that Leanne believed a book club would be a good idea for people “to come together under the queer umbrella”.

“That doesn’t mean we’re all the same,” she said, adding that anyone can attend the book club.

“If you want to come and support us, we’re going to be reading queer books,” she said.

“You’re totally welcome to come, it’s a learning opportunity as well.

“When we’re there, we’re not sitting around telling coming out stories or anything like that, we’re just chatting and normally connecting over interests.”

Speaking of the queer community in Cavan, Leanne said “it needs more.”

“There is a cry out for services.

“There are people here - they just don’t have anywhere to come together and that’s what we want to do with the book club.

“It’s an opportunity for people to come together and just be around people they can be comfortable with.

“Hopefully there’ll be friendships and we’ll get to learn from each other, that’s the goal.”

The next book club meeting will take place on September 29 at 12pm in Insomnia, Cavan. The current book the group is reading is ‘Bored Gay Werewolf’ by Tony Santorella and an additional optional ‘Reeling in the Queers: Tales of Ireland’s LGBTQ Past’.

“If you haven’t read the book that’s okay, come for the chats,” Leanne encouraged.