Out Spotlight CVXXVIII

Today's Out Spotlight is on Irish writer but not who you first expect. It is not Oscar Wilde , but a contemporary Irish writer, who's been mentioned as "the national successor to James Joyce, Flann O'Brien and Samuel Beckett."

Jamie O'Neill was born in Dún Laoghaire Ireland in 1962 and was educated at Presentation College, Glasthule, County Dublin,, and (in his words) "the city streets of London, the beaches of Greece." He was raised in a home without books, and first discovered that reading "could be fun" when he read Ivanhoe. Unhappy at home and having a very difficult relationship with his father he left home at 17, moving to England, where he lived and worked for the next two decades.

While living in England and on holiday to London in 1982, O'Neill met BBC Host/television presenter Russell Harty. O'Neill was 20, Harty 48. They became a couple and soon shared a home in London and at Rose Cottage, Harty's home in Giggleswick, Yorkshire.

Together for six years, Harty encouraged O'Neill to write, not only reading his manuscripts; but secretly mailing them to publishers, securing a book deal was with Weidenfeld Publishers, for O'Neill. Soon after, Harty passed away of AIDS related Hepatitis B.

Following Harty's death British tabloid press pursued the story of their relationship, splashing a nude photograph of O'Neill, that he done modeling, when he first came to London earn some money, across the front of the Sunday Mirror. O'Neill was also offered £50,000 for interviews about their private. He turned them all down.

It was the news coverage of Harty's death how O'Neill's parents in Ireland found out that their son was gay. O'Neill saying later that his mother did not have a picture of him up in their home after that, for fear people would ask, if or when her son would marry and have to tell them he was gay. Tough enough being outed to your family through the tabloid, things would get worse when members of the Harty family threw him out of the cottage shared with his partner, burned all his clothes and left him homeless. “I had nothing. They burnt my clothes. They stole my car. They even wanted my dog.” They did, however relent and allowed him to take his and Harty's and pet dog, Paddy with him.

A year after Harty's passing, his belief in O'Neill's writing came to fruition with when O'Neill's first novel, Disturbance, was published; his second Kilbrack followed in 1990. Both novels had been mostly finished while Harty was atill alive. When asked about those two early novels during the press for his book, "At Swim, Two Boys", O'Neill said “I don’t consider them to be mine. They’re from what I would consider a previous incarnation.”

Grieving for Harty and alone in London, he struggled with depression and his writing. He went into therapy and ended up leaving both his agent and publisher. He decide to take on a job as a night receptionist at the Cassell Hospital, a psychiatric institution in Surrey. He worked there for 10 years.

Two years after Harty's death, their dog Paddy accidentally introduced O'Neill to his future partner. While in a London pub when he noticed Paddy was missing. He was found by a ballet dancer named Julien Joly. The two began a relationship and Joly helped O'Neill put his life back together.

"At Swim, Two Boys" reportedly received the largest advance in history for a debut Irish novel. Once overseas rights and film rights were sold, the tabloids announced, O’Neill stood to make close to $1.5 million. He hoped the link to his tabloid past would never come up. He worried people would think he wanted to capitalize on his celebrity connection.

He spent 10 years crafting “At Swim, Two Boys”, a 200,000-word epic about Ireland’s 1916 Easter rebellion, while working at the hospital, writing the novel on a laptop during his 13-hour night shifts. The title is a pun to Flann O'Brien's novel At Swim-Two-Birds.

While everyone was reporting on his remarkable success, no one seemed to care that the heart of “At Swim’s" story was the growing love between two teenage boys.

The story is about the friendship of uptight, well-schooled Jim Mack and the randier Doyler Doyle, a smart but poor kid with a useless dad. Jim goes to school on scholarship,he is quiet, studious, thoughtful, and naïve. In contrast, Doyler is outspoken, rebellious, brave, and affectionate. Doyler might once have received a scholarship, but left school to find work and support his impoverished family, leading them to grow apart. The boys have an additional connection through their fathers, who served in the army together during the Boer War, and were once best friends. Doyle fools around with older men to make a little cash and fuel his campaigns against the hated British.

The boys meet at "the Forty Foot, “a sort of gentleman’s bathing place” in Sandycove, just outside Dublin. They train and plan to swim out to the Muglins off Dalkey Island come Easter Sunday 1916. Set against the Irish uprising, the fight for independence, 'the boys find their own nationality through their love affair in much the same way that Ireland struggled to find its independence.' They are befriended by MacMurrough, an intellectual who has spent time in gaol for soliciting. 'It explores the value of friendship. Whether friendships last and if they have a status', says O’Neill."(Gay Times)

O’Neill says he’s determined that the role of gays be reflected in the stories of Irish history even if he’s less than confident that his fellow Irishmen will get the point he's trying to make. “There’s so much that could be learned from the gay experience, but they won’t,” he comments. “Among gays there’s no division between Catholics and Protestants. They all get along and go to the same pubs and clubs. You would think someone like Sinn Fein, instead of saying, ‘Yeah, we’ll tolerate (homosexuality),’ would say, ‘We’ve got to learn from this’.”

At Swim, has received both the Ferro-Grumley Award for Fiction and the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Men's Fiction

At Swim, Two Boys had it's theatrical debut, preformed in water, by the Earthfall Company in 2005.

It's success hasn't just changed O'Neill but one other person in particular. His mother.

His partner Julien had tried to mend the situation of his picture not up at his mother's home after their first visit. “When we got home, he sent a picture of me,” “The next time we went there, still no picture of me. Then when all this (the fanfare over the book) happened, my mother started showing the newspaper clippings to the neighbors.”

Laughing, he said “They all said, ‘God, she’s got Alzheimer’s. She’s inventing this new son,’ because they had never heard of me before.”

Today, O'Neill lives in Gortachalla, in County Galway, Ireland with Julien who now is a Shiatsu therapist.