IT'S A FAMILY AFFAIR

More and more research confirms what we always knew - we're born gay and genealogy almost certainly plays a part. So why, when Stephen McKenna takes a peek into the family closet, does he find it so very bare?

The first date on my father's familys tombstone in rural Ireland applies to that of my great great great grandfather Nicholas McKenna who departed this world in 1786.

Now, he wasn't gay and, as far as anyone can reasonably know, there never ever was a gay McKenna until I came along some 220 years later and tipped over the whole apple cart. I must have given it a knock when I burst out of the closet I'd been imprisoned in for the previous forty years. Yes, an unbroken 220 year run of traditional masculinity and manly celtic ways had been undone in the shake of a very bent shilelagh .

Even amongst the present metro sexual generation (we've long since moved off the land) which includes my three brothers, my sister and some 22 cousins on that side of the family, I is still the only gay in the village!

Mind, there was a Great Uncle (T.P.McKenna). He never married, emigrated to the Argentine and wrote poetry! He's often had me speculating if he was perhaps a prior pink sheep of the family. Well, writing poetry of itself is hardly a gay indictment and as for his South American getaway - that was for health reasons. He'd contracted TB while hiding out in the Dublin mountains on the run from the Black & Tans during the original Troubles. Not that it proved to be much of a remedy as he was dead by 34, but I just wonder.

And what of the other unknown homosexual figures that must linger in the family's distant shadows? How would they have coped with their repressed and frustrated lives where pulpit thumping clerics tormented their flocks with threats of eternities held in dungeons with walls a thousand miles thick.

Were their frustrations spent on tethered beasts in the farthest field or, worse still, did they end up in the priesthood compelled to do terrible damage. Well, I don't know about the former but it definitely won't have been the latter as there were no Father McKennas. There were a number of Sister McKennas who took up the veil and spinster aunts but I'll thank you not to suggest that any of them may have been lesbians - and anyway everyone knows that if it wasn't for the telly which Ireland did fine without until the 1960s Ireland would be as wholly devoid of any of that kind of thing as it is clear of snakes.

There is as it happens a priest on my mother's side - an Archbishop actually, since you didn't ask, but his position is unassailable. Let's just leave it at that.

Indeed, speaking of my mother's family, that line can't be traced for 220 years, but still it's a similar tale of holy and catholically stable marriages going back as long as your arm. That is ... until now.

Yes, I'm much less lonely in my pink tent on that side of the family. There are just seventeen of us in the present generation (as against 27 on the other side) and out of that we score a much more credible two gays and a lesbian. That's fully 20%.

So, we can clearly see the genealogical curveball at work on my mother's side, and yet not apparently on my father's side, which given the larger family sizes there should perhaps have provided more opportunity for the gay gene to work through.

I suspect for the moment I'm going to have to consign that part of the family history to societal factors and a family dynasty that has always been fiercely patriarchal.

With any luck though I didn't close the door of the closet too firmly behind me as I left and who knows whose face maybe peering through the crack right now. Which cousin or nephew or neice will be the next? Come out, come out, whoever you are! SM/LG