Sean McGovern
A London Irish Story as told to Anna Johnston
I sat down with Sean McGovern from Lanesborough, Co. Longford. Sean is a heritage manager, film curator and former activist who now works for Islington Council. He tells us his London Irish story.
“I feel like Longford is one of the forgotten counties of Ireland, that no one seems to know, but it’s there! My father worked with the ESB and my mother was a civil servant, but my grandfather owned the local cinema in Lanesborough when my mother was growing up. She was introduced to a lot of the old classic Hollywood films being screened at the cinema and I guess she passed down her film knowledge to me. It gave me an appreciation for film and cinema culture from an early age. As an adult I’ve worked in film festivals, both in the UK and Ireland and organised film screenings as an independent film curator. I’ve always been really interested in getting people together to watch these visual stories and I suppose that didn't come from nowhere- It was part of my childhood.
I finished school in 2007 and went to UCD in Dublin to do English and Film Studies. Back then, we were told that going to college to do any course was guaranteed to open doors for you.
When I finished my degree in 2010, the financial crisis was well under way… we all left college not knowing what the future held. I left Dublin and moved to Edinburgh to do a Masters. I was leaving behind a solid group of friends who I’m still close with today, including some who I became close with when I was involved in the Alternative Miss Ireland, something which I’m immensely proud of. Though I did like Edinburgh, I didn’t really meet my kind of people there. I met someone in Edinburgh who lived in London, and I when I came to London, I went to stay with him for 3 days in a warehouse in Manor House. I ended up staying for 3 years. This warehouse space was created by a group of Goldsmith graduates. The rent was very low but the walls were paper thin. There were 12 of us with one bathroom. But it worked! It was in that warehouse that I had the most formative life experiences, because up until that point, I think I lived with a blinkered world view. I considered myself intelligent and forward thinking, but there was so much that I just didn't understand about the world.
While living in the warehouse, I had my mind opened- I met new people, did new things, fell in love (a few times!), had conversations, read books, and the things that I had previously thought were challenged and changed.
Around that time, I was involved in a lot of HIV/AIDS activism, with my then-boyfriend. I began doing monthly film screenings in the Cinema Museum in Kennington for about 3 years. We called it the Vito Project — named after Vito Russo, who was the author of the seminal book The Celluloid Closet but was also an AIDS activist himself.
From this experience I got a job working with the BFI Flare Festival, Fringe! Queer Film Fest, the BFI London Film Festival and then as Festival Programmer at GAZE, Ireland’s LGBTQ+ festival in Dublin.
This knowledge of LGBTQ+ community, culture and history led me to getting a job with Islington Council for their Islington’s Pride heritage project and eventually I joined their heritage team full time. Our job is to collect the stories that tell the history of Islington which has a rich and surprising history in London. The borough, once a central part of LGBTQ+ life is not really known anymore for a large visible LGBTQ+ community, but some of that change is down to growing gentrification, the AIDS crisis that decimated a whole generation of predominantly gay men, but also more positively that LGBTQ+ rights have improved. But we’ve lost many stories by losing those elders. And I think it's fair to say that had AIDS never happened, it might be a very different place in which to be a gay person. Islington’s Pride put together this archive of LGBTQ+ history because throughout the 20th Century, these stories weren’t considered worth keeping. I’m happy to be playing my part in preserving these histories.
There’s are a good few things I miss about Ireland- the humour for one! I’ve figured out Irish humour is part absurdist, part ironic. Irish people can be the funniest people on Earth. There's an energy and exuberance that I get when I'm around other Irish people and when I’m at home in Ireland. But I suppose my story, as a gay man is similar to an awful lot of other queer people in the sense that I didn’t really feel I was going to be happy where I grew up, as you feel quite restricted for the first 18 years of life. And I’m very happy to be gay, and I have a great group of friends. I think not being heterosexual has allowed me to see the world with open eyes. People from the LGBTQ+ community have to do an awful lot of self-actualization and self-reflection, which I think helps us understand the world a bit more, and maybe empathise with the pain that people might be going through. Perhaps that's why I'm in a community service role, because I get to help people feel that they belong in the place that they live.”
For the month of March, Islington Council have organised an Irish Month, jammed packed with events for everyone. Check it out here: licevents.ticketsolve.com/shows
