Dr. Ciara Kelly

Coming out in later life.

I did an interview with Tommy Fleming, who huge amounts of people in Ireland will know and outside Ireland as well, where he revealed, he said in it, he said, maybe it's not the best kept secret because some people knew, but the general public did not know.

It was his 55th birthday and he came out on air on radio as gay and he talked about all the issues that I suppose led him to be in the closet and why it took him so long and all of that.

And since then, I've been inundated with messages, but we've also talked to other people on the radio show who were gay, who were younger and are out, but about the journey to...

expressing your sexuality in a world where homophobia still exists and how challenging it is.

One of the things that stayed with me from the interview with Tommy was he said he was 13 or 14.

It was in the sort of later 80s and the AIDS thing was huge and there was stuff on the...

Stuff on the news.

Yeah.

And, you know, there was all stuff about Freddie Mercury and there was all stuff about what was happening with AIDS and people didn't really understand it as well then and all of that.

And he said he was in his house and his uncle was there and a neighbour.

And basically they were all watching the news and they were talking about, you know, gay men being affected by this disease.

And his uncle said they should all burn in hell.

And he was 13 at the time and knew he was gay.

And he said that just pushed it all down inside him.

And he was thinking, I can never say this.

And I suspect that that story resonates with a huge number of people.

There's still a bar in the George.

The George has just turned 40, the kind of iconic gay bar in Dublin.

It's 40 years old and it was open before, it was open in 1986 because it's 40 years, exactly.