There is an important distinction to be made here.

This is not the story of the abuse that allegedly occurred at BeLonG To — Ireland’s largest organisation for LGBT youth.

Instead, this is the story of why what happened will probably always stay in the realm of “allegations”. This is the story of a respected organisation that did everything in its power to obstruct investigations, intimidate its opponents and cover up all evidence of wrongdoing — even fabricating evidence entirely.

And ultimately, this is the story of a movement in crisis, one that is wilfully ignoring its shortcomings and refusing to adapt to an age when the biggest threat to young LGBT people may not be coming from outside this “community”, but from within.

BeLonG To is a veritable institution of gay Ireland. By last count five years ago, it worked face-to-face with 3,500 young people between the ages of 14–23 per year, a number, it has since stated, has more than doubled. The charity holds considerable political clout; its work has been presented to the Irish government on several occasions, and it receives a sizeable budget of about three quarters of a million euro from mostly public sources.

Drawn to its commitment to “a world where LGBT+ young people are equal, safe and valued in the diversity of their identities and experiences”, BeLonG To has become the pet cause of Ireland’s gay glitterati, with celebrities, lawmakers and other public figures singing the organisation’s praises, joined by a former president and even the United Nations.

But this is not the organisation I knew when I went there as a young teenager eight years ago. I went there looking for the “safe space” they promised in virtually all their published materials, but what I found was nothing short of a living hell. Like most young LGBT people my age, I had experienced homophobia to varying degrees, but it paled in comparison to what went on at BeLonG To.

I was relentlessly belittled, abused and threatened both in person and in texts, calls and messages, exploiting all the vulnerabilities I thought I was safe to bare. Even when I showed this to BeLonG To staff, I was told to just turn my phone off. But ignoring complaints was a pattern there, one that continues to this day, even as bullying escalated into abuse. When I approached staff with my concerns over the threats I had received, I was told that I “should just look after myself”, and that my abusers should do the same. A few hours later I was witnessed being thrown down the stairs and attacked with a broken glass. At other times, I was burned with a lighter, or cut with a piece of metal.

But the physical abuse does not compare to the sexual. Operating under the banner of “sex positivity”, everything ranging from routine, daily harassment, to humiliating and serious assaults, simply failed to register with BeLonG To staff and volunteers in spite of repeated complaints.

What happened at BeLonG To was not just an assault on these young people’s person, but an assault on their sense of identity at a time when they want more than anything to belong. That is what made BeLonG To so difficult to escape from — LGBT people are told every day that their relationship to their “community” is more important than any other. BeLonG To is often these young people’s first experience of gay culture; when it goes sour there is nowhere to turn, and no recognition that LGBT people are capable of being anything other than victims.

Eventually the isolation became too much to bear. There are still some thirty or forty faded scars snaking their way down the veins of my left wrist. I only found out later that this had been the goal all along — when I passed a BeLonG To volunteer on the street, they told me, nonchalantly, “I remember you. They were trying to get you to kill yourself, didn’t you know?”

These were the allegations I made when I submitted a complaint to the Ombudsman for Children, a human rights organisation that investigates child welfare concerns. Importantly, I did not go in empty-handed. In the weeks prior to submitting the complaint, I began to compile a hefty tranche of evidence. I documented the physical remainders of abuse, found doctor’s notes that corroborate the details of my complaint, searched through correspondence to find references to abuse made years earlier, and gathered witness statements.

At the same time, I began to reach out to others I felt had experienced something similar. Ask any survivor of abuse, and they will probably tell you about the loneliness and isolation that is the bully’s greatest weapon. In an environment consumed by a divide-and-conquer strategy, it is a daunting task to try to find an ally. But after many false starts and dead ends, when a reply did come, I was consistently struck by how similar our experiences — and their impacts — had been.

But this was just the beginning. Due to a loophole the Ombudsman for Children could not investigate BeLonG To themselves. Instead, they could only write a non-binding letter, strongly suggesting that BeLonG To meet with me. Two weeks later, on 5th July 2016, I received a reply from Moninne Griffith, BeLonG To’s new executive director, who would be my main point of contact for this whole experience.

This was my first contact with the organisation since my escape almost 5 years earlier. What followed was little more than a continuation of abuse by other means.

In spite of their assurance that their primary concern was for my well-being, weeks drifted by with no meeting, and BeLonG To became increasingly uncooperative. In fact, for much of this time there was a question mark hanging over the whole process, they cancelled two meetings at the last minute, and the prospect that BeLonG To would simply refuse to see me at all grew ever closer.

However, non-cooperation was soon replaced by something that could best be described as a campaign of intimidation. BeLonG To used a former member of their groups as an informant to gain access to private social media posts. Then, as e-mail records show, Griffith censored not only negative passages relating to not only to my complaint, but also any content that cast even their political allies in an unflattering light.

Finally, after nearly half a year spent putting it off, BeLonG To, more specifically Griffith and acting chairperson of the BeLonG To board Ciarán McKinney, finally deigned to meet with me. I was accompanied by my father, not only as emotional support, but also as a witness to leave no doubt as to what happened, and to monitor BeLonG To during the meeting.

And I am glad that he came. BeLonG To did not bring a single document, and had clearly not prepared anything beyond a joint decision not to answer any question of substance, instead simply repeating “I don’t know” to virtually every question. They were unable to answer even the most basic questions about their organisation, and were completely blindsided by topics I had clearly asked them to prepare in advance. Frustratingly, even when I showed them these requests in printouts of their e-mails, they maintained that this never happened, going so far as to tell later investigators that I had kept this from them, that my “grievance was much wider than previously stated”.

Crucially, I provided BeLonG To with a wealth of evidence. I read from my interviews with survivors and described the witness statements. My father spoke of what he witnessed. I listed out all the ways they had been intimidating me — their spying, their censorship, breaches of confidentiality, secrecy, non-cooperation, a failure to follow complaints procedures, and more — all with evidence and examples.

At this, McKinney actually interrupted me to promise “a full investigation” into how they had dealt with me since hearing from the Ombudsman for Children. He recognised that I was “clearly hurt”, and he pledged to see what he could do to help, telling me he would get back to me in a month. He promised on-going support, saying that it was not a one-off meeting, but a process of redress and support. When I asked if it would take six months each time to get any help, he could only tell me that he hoped it wouldn’t Still, at the meeting’s close, I told them that I had no confidence in them.

I was right not to. McKinney missed his own deadline by a day and the “investigation” he returned was little more than an insult. At a paltry 292 words (or 192 when accounting for bloat) it defies belief that it would need a month to write — in fact, it could easily have been written over the day McKinney delayed.

To call it an investigation is a joke. There was no mention of the evidence I had shown them, no recognition of the complaints I had made over their present misconduct, no acknowledgement of the promises or the “hurt” he described just weeks before. All it did was list out the dates of certain e-mails — all information I already had. Rather than a gesture of compassion, it was one last attack.

But the Ombudsman for Children was not the only investigating agency. After consulting with them, I brought the Office of the Ombudsman on board, another human rights agency set up to ensure that organisations deal fairly and respectfully with their clients. Their mandate was clear from the beginning: monitor BeLonG To’s behaviour, hold them to their complaints policy, and investigate their intimidation.

After an eight-week delay, the Ombudsman contacted BeLonG To just as they were exiting our meeting. This was a hugely significant coincidence. Because BeLonG To had pledged to investigate the exact same issues as the Ombudsman, the Ombudsman put the case on hold, to be reopened if McKinney’s investigation was unsatisfactory. When I protested that BeLonG To had delayed long enough, that it was unfair to give them another chance to obstruct and lie, that it was almost certain that they would just continue with their intimidation, I was shot down.

But that is exactly what happened when McKinney returned his non-investigation. After another 15-week delay, the Ombudsman’s new investigator took over. She knew that BeLonG To had promised a full investigation, she had easy access to all the materials that demonstrated their misconduct, to the evidence supporting the alleged abuse, and to a six page report I had written that detailed our meeting. This is what makes what followed so disturbing.

In a document dated 21 April 2017, the Ombudsman tells BeLonG To that any minutes of our meeting would be extremely helpful. Of course, I was at that meeting, I was entitled to see any minutes. At no point during the meeting were minutes taken, and in the more than five months that passed since I had never been provided with any documents that even approached minutes. Simply put, there were no minutes.

Yet somehow over the three weeks BeLonG To took to reply to the Ombudsman’s request, Griffith managed to produce a document she referred to as minutes, which she later claimed had been taken by Ciarán McKinney. Yet even a cursory glance at the single-page document reveals just how fake they were. The filename dates our meeting to 2017, a full year after it really took place. My name is misspelt and my father’s is missing entirely — he is only referred to as “his father” throughout the document, even when it lists out the names of attendees. The chronology it presents is nonsensical, and it misquotes BeLonG To’s own documentation.

While these are relatively minor details, they speak to a much more disturbing pattern. Not only did BeLonG To not care enough to confirm the details, not only did it mean that the core of their counter-narrative was based on falsehood — none of these errors serve to advance BeLonG To’s version of events. What they do instead is advance the theory that so much time had elapsed between our meeting and when this document was actually pulled together, that BeLonG To simply could not recall even the most basic details.

But what is far more disturbing are the details that are simply beyond forgetting.

Any and all references to the evidence I showed them were conspicuously absent. Prolonged exchanges where I backed my complaint up with evidence, excerpts from interviews with other BeLonG To survivors, lengthy descriptions of the lingering impacts I continued to deal with — all were dropped in favour of a narrative in which I was a delusional, bitter complainant, and BeLonG To had never been anything less the perfect organisation it bills itself as.

The way they documented their exchange with my father is nothing short of spiteful, twisting his unequivocal support into doubt. Throughout the meeting, he did not give them any quarter. He described acts of abuse that he witnessed, the effects it had, and BeLonG To’s dismal handling of my complaint. He peppered his phrases with words like “facts” and “no doubt whatsoever”. Facing repeated denials from McKinney, who even went so far as to interrupt me incessantly with interjections like “allegedly” or “what may or may not have happened” whenever I mentioned abuse, he launched a passionate defence, describing how upset he was to hear the abuse being questioned, the way he felt at losing a son at their hands, the anger he felt at their constant denial of the facts.

In their minutes, BeLonG To claimed that he too had turned against me, joining their ranks and questioning if the complaint was not true at all.

To make up for all the details they had slashed, BeLonG To added material — stretching both the truth and their word count. Another extremely scant document (once again skirting under 300 words for a two-hour meeting), they devote two full paragraphs to an exchange that never actually happened — when I apparently made the point that Griffith and McKinney should have taken action before they had even joined BeLonG To.

Still, it is not the outright fabrications that are most shocking about BeLonG To’s conduct. It is where they compress and distort, like when they describe the 30 minutes I spent making clear, detailed complaints about their obstruction and intimidation as: “[He] asked if B2 had failed in following the complaints policy.”

This was significant for a number of reasons.

The complaints I made were extensive and serious, a fact McKinney seemed to acknowledge when he described the investigation not as an option, but an obligation — “We give you our word that that is what we are going to do… Of course we are going to do it because we have a responsibility to”.

I did not “ask” if they had failed, I told them that they had. The complaints I made were backed up in black and white — I even read out examples from our correspondence.

Most importantly, the Ombudsman asked for a simple confirmation of the facts, asking why BeLonG To had failed to investigate clear complaints on breaches of confidentiality, censorship, and using a peer group member as an informant. Despite the fact that I asked McKinney to confirm that it would be a full investigation, this document shows that he opted instead to simply pretend I had never complained at all.

In a document that was fabricated by a board member, at the behest and approval of the highest level of administration, McKinney scoffs at the notion of allegations of “systemic” abuse — placing the key word between inverted commas as if the very idea of the kind of organisational misconduct that they were leading at that very moment was mere fantasy.

This document — I refuse to call it minutes — so significantly and so blatantly defies reality that it goes far beyond accident or coincidence. In an effort to show that they truly cared about their policies and the young people they are supposed to protect, BeLonG To sacrificed both, utterly fabricating evidence to suit their selfish ends.

To see Belong To twist the truth hurt, but to see them believed hurt even more.

This document was a total fraud, a cynical power-play to protect the impunity BeLonG To has long enjoyed. What’s worse, it was an obvious fraud, filled with glaring errors that betrayed BeLonG To’s complete disregard for its responsibilities. Nevertheless, the Office of the Ombudsman accepted them as fact, and very nearly dropped the case entirely. If it wasn’t for the fact that I had recorded the meeting, they definitely would have.

I did not do lightly; in fact, I have consulted every ethics guide imaginable. But the fact is that exposing this injustice falls completely within the public interest. If it were not for BeLonG To’s continuing misconduct, I would not have bothered to take this step. BeLonG To chose not to play fair. BeLonG To chose not to admit to the Ombudsman that they had lied; instead they doubled down and piled lie on top of lie. In other words, BeLonG To chose to take this road.

The responsibility for lying lies squarely with BeLonG To, but it is entirely the fault of the investigating agencies that they allowed themselves to become tools for further abuse.

Take the Office of the Ombudsman for example. By asking BeLonG To for minutes to a meeting I had called, which did not even take place in BeLonG To offices, they were privileging BeLonG To’s account of what happened, transforming it into the official version of events.

But the minutes should not have been necessary. The Ombudsman was well aware of my complaints by the time of the meeting — I had detailed them in multiple emails, and they even confirmed with BeLonG To immediately after our meeting that BeLonG To would fully investigate how it dealt with my complaint.

When McKinney returned a list of e-mail dates and called it an investigation, when their “minutes” were filled with glaring errors, when this document defied a far more detailed, six-page report on the meeting, the Ombudsman should have taken action. Instead, they helped them.

Leaked documents reveal that Griffith had specifically asked the Ombudsman to keep the minutes private and confidential. In terms of personal information, they contained nothing new; the only reason to keep them secret would be to spare them from scrutiny.

Although the recording compelled the Ombudsman to look deeper into BeLonG To, they only agreed to accept the evidence if they could hand it over to BeLonG To first. In other words, facing a clear allegation that BeLonG To had been manipulating investigation, the Ombudsman wanted to give them another chance to twist the truth. When I agreed, on the condition that I would similarly be given access to the minutes, the Ombudsman failed to even acknowledge my request — complying completely with Griffith’s bid for secrecy.

It was only through exercising my legal rights with BeLonG To that I was able to finally get my hands on the documents I had every right to see. I first saw the fabricated minutes a full nine months after the meeting they supposedly documented.

But the irregularities do not end there. At some stage after my meeting with BeLonG To, the Ombudsman dropped my complaint entirely, instead replacing it with an arbitrary e-mail I had sent them with far less content — all without ever informing me. They then refused to even acknowledge any question I asked that wasn’t mentioned in that e-mail, drastically reducing the scope of my complaint — and of their investigation.

Even the most implausible of BeLonG To’s stories went unquestioned. Investigating the “other serious issues” McKinney claimed had been dealt with effectively by BeLonG To’s complaints procedure in his purported “investigation” revealed that only one complaint had been properly monitored between 2010 and 2012, a complaint relating to allegations of bullying between staff members. For three full years, in an organisation dealing with 3,000 young people per year, not a single complaint from a young person was found.

The Ombudsman’s report goes to extreme lengths to discredit the case using nothing more than the fabricated minutes. At no point is any reference made to evidence. At worst, their conduct was outright insulting. They claimed that I had been uncooperative, constantly withholding details from BeLonG To that made it impossible for them to investigate. This is not true. In reality, this was a perpetual excuse for BeLonG To, and records show that they always had full access to these details.

Eventually, citing a lack of fairness, respect, and transparency, I was forced to suspend the Ombudsman’s involvement with my case entirely. I don’t think that this was deliberate collusion. Instead, I think that the Ombudsman simply followed the path of least resistance towards closing the case.

Tusla, whose numerous corruption scandals nearly brought down the Irish government on two separate occasions in 2017 alone was no different. An official body for investigating possible child abuse, Tusla is on equal footing with the Gardaí — Ireland’s national police force. Given the seriousness of the allegations, they were brought onto the case by the Ombudsman for Children.

The degree to which Tusla allowed BeLonG To to interfere with their investigation would be almost unbelievable if it were not so thoroughly documented. Just like they would do to me, BeLonG To flatly refused to meet with Tusla investigators for over half a year. Records obtained through a Freedom of Information request reveal that BeLonG To had failed to show up to preliminary hearings with Tusla on at least two separate occasions in July and November, with no notice whatsoever.

This was no secret. BeLonG To were open in their defiance, telling Tusla that they would only meet with them at their own discretion. Months’ worth of Tusla documents show that the case was passed from social worker to social worker, with each handover making recommendations for follow-up that never came. The first such recommendation estimates the process to take “no more than 8–12 weeks”. In reality, it would be nearly 30.

Phone records from that time reveal an ever-increasing exasperation at Tusla, with one social worker complaining on multiple occasions that BeLonG To’s conduct was “very unusual”. By November, Tusla was promising immediate action, “It’s gone on too long for us. But now either way, this week- so I will talk to them on Monday”.

But a meeting still didn’t happen. In fact, it would be another two months before Tusla would finally make BeLonG To take the mere 140-metre, two-minute walk that separates their offices for an interview. Once again, Tusla’s record of the meeting shows how far BeLonG To were willing to go to protect themselves.

These delays were absolutely vital for BeLonG To to construct a defence, one that was entirely based on falsehood. They brought no hard evidence whatsoever to their meeting with Tusla, instead simply mentioning that they “would remember a complaint as serious as this”, as proof that it never happened. Every word they said was contradicted by the evidence on hand.

In fact, according to phone records, when I offered to provide Tusla with emails explaining how BeLonG To had failed to follow their complaints procedure, they interrupted to refuse, telling me that they had all the evidence, and that it had been passed up the chain. In spite of other offers to provide even more details and evidence, Tusla shockingly passed on speculation to BeLonG To, telling them that it was possible that I had more information that I was not disclosing.

In another recorded call, one that I made after McKinney tried to pass off the dates of emails as “a full investigation”, a social worker can be heard shutting me down before I could tell her about how BeLonG To was caught on tape trying to mislead me, suggesting that it might “prejudice” their investigation.

Of course, in an investigation, evidence and facts absolutely should inform your judgment — that’s what an investigation is all about.

All these lies and half-truths are far from inconsequential. Judging from the report Tusla made of their meeting, they were the sole basis for closing the case with no action taken, just hours after their interview with BeLonG To.

In their final letter to me announcing their decision, Tusla states that “We are also fully confident that any clients of the service who wish to make a complaint can do so in a safe environment”. It is not just that this statement is completely at odds with an organisation that was caught on tape lying and manipulating their processes. It is not just that Tusla sanctioned BeLonG To’s misconduct. The documents show that Tusla based this assessment entirely on policy documents that had simply not been executed in reality.

In fact, when I showed BeLonG To a copy of their complaints policy, they could not even recognise it. They claimed that their policy was actually called “Complaints and Compliments”, and that it had been updated at some undetermined point over the past year.

In spite of repeated reminders and warnings, BeLonG To would break virtually all provisions in their complaints policy throughout this process.

Yet whatever document Griffith had in mind did not make it to her meeting with Tusla — the manifest shows that she brought the very same document she claimed not to know until I showed it to her a month before (titled “Feedback and Complaints”, it is still the only complaints policy on their website).

Just like the Ombudsman, Tusla had never taken the case seriously. Their version of events, that all the witnesses of abuse were mistaken, that the anxiety and depression I was being treated for at the time did not bear mentioning, that a resulting suicide attempt was inconsequential, is so callous that it nearly defies belief.

Even so, Tusla sided with an organisation that had made a mockery of their investigation, and sacrificed their commitment to fairness in the process. When I asked Tusla directly for concrete advice on how to proceed with a complaint or appeal they lied to me, telling me that they had gone as far as they could, that only I could decide what to do next. In fact, it was only in researching this article that I discovered a complaints policy existed at all. It had been deliberately concealed from me.

According to this policy, complaints can be made, “by email… to a Tusla staff member or Tusla office”. In spite of my clear complaint over how Tusla handled my case, this was never followed up on.

One of the very first documents Tusla wrote on the case notes that when I complained of alleged abuse while at BeLonG To, they “accused [me] of being unwell”. In this new complaint, they relied on this tactic once again.

The story BeLonG To gave Tusla actively sought to rob me of my right to be a victim — to grieve, to heal, and to have my pain recognised. Instead, they cast the worst time of my life in an impossible rosy light.

Worse still, BeLonG To even tried to reverse this dynamic — they claimed they were actually victimised by me. In a document BeLonG To claimed represented the timeline of events, Griffith described an “angry reply” I had sent to her, painting me as an irrational bully. But this description was robbed of its context — it was a reply to the second of BeLonG To’s cancellations, made just minutes before we were due to meet. And it is clearly not angry, but hurt, describing the “incredibly stressful routine” of juggling commitments to yet again try to fit a painful experience into my life, all to no relief.

Griffith also alleged that my conduct at our meeting was “extremely angry, hostile, and personal”. Thankfully, the recording shows this to be baseless. In fact, I can be heard actively trying to relieve the pressure on Griffith, and reformulating questions to avoid personal accusations. While Griffith alleges that my “aggressive cross-examination” forced her to leave the room, this was simply not true. She actually left when I made simple, harmless points, like mentioning how difficult the process of making a complaint was, and how it could so easily leave people behind.

These comments are not just untrue, they are insulting. They show just how dehumanising BeLonG To’s cover up could be, not even allowing me to react to their mistreatment. And while their allegations could easily have been refuted, Tusla simply added them to the official record without question.

It is no coincidence that when BeLonG To altered the minutes, it was to depict me as ignorant, unprepared, and not even believed by my own family. Tusla documents show that BeLonG To had even ventured the incredibly insulting theory that I was only making the complaint because I was still “affected… by a break up at the time”. This theory, ridiculous as it sounds, was repeated by Tusla in their closing remarks on the case.

In making the decision to lie about mental health, BeLonG To weaponised the effects what I experienced against me, turning lingering scars into claims that I could not be trusted. When their intimidation intensified, this only got worse. I was forced to contend with their re-traumatisation for over half a year without any respite. As my case was passed from agency to agency, investigator to investigator, it became all the easier for them to read my growing exasperation, coupled with my descriptions of BeLonG To’s extreme misconduct, as the ravings of a madman.

It goes without saying that all this flies in the face of BeLonG To’s public image. BeLonG To places itself as a leader in the field of mental health. They provide trainings to mental health professionals, they have spoken before parliamentary committees on issues like bullying and suicide, a considerable chunk of their public funding is for suicide prevention, and their offices even host a dedicated LGBT officer from respected suicide prevention organisation Pieta House.

But it also flies in the face of what BeLonG To told me at our meeting. Griffith and McKinney sat there and listened to me talk about the toll their organisation had taken on my mental health, about the dark stain it had left over my teenage years, about how it had brought me to the brink of suicide. They sat there, listened, and told me on multiple occasions that it was plain to see how much I had suffered. They told me that BeLonG To was supposed to be a safe place, and it was unconscionable that it could go so wrong for somebody. They told me that they had nothing but empathy for me, but their actions spoke to the deepest contempt.

In lying to me, in going back on their empty promises of support, in fabricating evidence, BeLonG To made a mockery of the hurt I felt, shamelessly treating their public pledge to support LGBT mental health as if it didn’t matter at all.

The same is true for their family support services. BeLonG To hosts a dedicated parents’ group, L.O.O.K. (Loving Our Out Kids), BeLonG To’s website describes the importance of the parent-child relationship in protecting young LGBT people, they provide a “Coming Out Conversation” guide for parents that explicitly recognises the challenges faced by parents of young LGBT people.

None of this seemed to matter to BeLonG To when they heard my father describe the pain he felt at losing a son, the anger he felt at how they were treating me for making a complaint, even the fact that he had been robbed of that coming-out experience when I was outed to him while at BeLonG To. Instead, they decided to ignore him and twist the support he had given me into doubt.

In its vision and mission statement, BeLonG To has listed “empowering [LGBT young people] to participate as agents of positive social change” as a key objective of the organisation. In practice however, BeLonG To has only supported the changes that have benefitted them. The case of these allegations shows just how eager they really were to stand in the way of positive change when it suited them, creating a wall of silence and even resorting to direct censorship to maintain it.

But they were not the only ones to do this; their actions seemed to ripple outwards touching nearly everyone involved in the case, and trapping me in a smothering silence. The Ombudsman, an organisation dedicated to fairness, instead became almost unbelievably opaque, refusing to even acknowledge the basic questions I asked them, suddenly casting complaints aside without warning, and gradually paring back what they would discuss with me until it lost all substance. Tusla was just as stifling. It was a place where you would be literally shouted down, your right to complain deliberately withheld, all to avoid having to face the evidence.

Yet silencing survivors of abuse, particularly LGBT survivors, is nothing new. In fact, I have written elsewhere about the kind of mistreatment LGBT survivors can face from people who would otherwise consider themselves “allies”. Conscious of the fact that allegations of child abuse were once used indiscriminately against all gay people, “allies” can often be our worst enemy, immediately shutting down any discussion of sexual violence with unwarranted accusations of homophobia.

But suppressing the voices of gay people is a deeply homophobic act, one that decimates any chance of building a more just society. BeLonG To listened to the homophobia I had experienced, and once again did nothing. Homophobia is BeLonG To’s raison d’être, it underpins everything they do. And yet they were willing to sacrifice even this most fundamental principle to avoid making amends.

This is no accident. In fact, BeLonG To has used homophobia to advance their cause and avoid scrutiny before. When their patron and longstanding supporter, Senator David Norris, had his presidential aspirations scuttled by a string of scandals relating to his views on paedophilia, BeLonG To doubled down. Rather than condemn his words and actions for the impact they had on young LGBT people, BeLonG To offered their full support in an article by former director Michael Barron, entitled, “I Know How David Norris Feels, I Was Smeared Too”.

According to Michael Barron in his defence of David Norris (above), “Our young people continue to be at great risk in Ireland, but this risk is not coming from the LGBT community or our leaders”. Photo by Stéphane Moussie | Flickr.

The many controversies, which included belittling victims of clerical abuse in a recorded interview, advocating for the abolition of a codified age of consent on multiple occasions, interfering in the prosecution of his former partner for child sex, and supporting poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh after documentary filmmakers uncovered evidence of his sex tourism with impoverished Nepalese boys, are described by Barron as nothing more than a “deplorable smear campaign”, as are BeLonG To’s own past child welfare concerns. In writing this article as a representative of BeLonG To, Barron dismisses LGBT victims of abuse and violence, going so far as to treat the very idea as — “the oldest trick in the homophobe’s handbook”.

It is hard to imagine BeLonG To coming to Norris’s rescue if he weren’t gay. Similarly, BeLonG To emerged as one of the few LGBT organisations to express their support for Leo Varadkar’s ascension to Taoiseach (Prime Minister) last year. In a paradoxical press release, Griffith praises “the fact that this political race focused on policy and the issues, and not sexual orientation”, without referencing a single one of his policies, which have included opposition to both gender recognition legislation and to providing universal access to the HIV prophylactic PrEP. Their support rested solely on his homosexuality. The irony was not lost on their supporters however, and the document caused a minor controversy on BeLonG To’s social media.

Yet where BeLonG To have supported others, they have received support in turn. One of the most disheartening aspects of this case was the sheer number of people within BeLonG To who were willing to break their promises to support young LGBT people in favour of maintaining their prestige. When it came from external accomplices, whether in the form of political support or assisting in their attempts at intimidation, it was even worse.

When I met with BeLonG To, I ventured a number of theories to explain why so many people, inside and outside their organisation, would choose to join in on this subterfuge. Surprisingly, they featured somewhat accurately in McKinney’s fabricated minutes. Looking over them months later, it was striking how much of it still rang true.

They were, briefly, that cooperating with Tusla and other agencies would jeopardise BeLonG To’s good name and feed into stereotypes about gay people they had staked so much on dispelling, that they saw their work as so vital that they could not countenance any interruptions or outside scrutiny, and that they were simply unable to recognise that gay people are more than just victims — they are capable of victimising others.

BeLonG To, David Norris and their ilk all emerged from a time of virulent homophobia, a time where keeping a secret and closing ranks were instilled as a necessary self-defence. Yet once created, their culture of silence, just as proficient at protecting abusers as it was victims, was impossible to control. To these people, circling the wagons and protecting each other felt like the natural, even the good, thing to do — even when it meant harming the vulnerable people they should have been protecting.

The damage that this kind of attitude can cause cannot be understated, and resurfaced again and again when interviewing the victims it had left behind. One conversation in particular sticks out, and it is one I brought to BeLonG To’s attention at our meeting:

“[BeLonG To] drained me of my ability to become friends with other people who are gay… I sometimes do think about BeLonG To, but like remembering someone else’s memories… It was a toxic environment”

I remember this conversation so well for a number of reasons. It is not just that it is deeply upsetting, or that it corresponds so closely to my own experiences. It is that it is almost impossible to refute.

For many, the gay “community” is not a safe space, but rather a place of profound hypocrisy, a place that claims to celebrate diversity even when it is punishing difference. In the age of #MeToo, of scandals in charities worldwide, when so many have stood up to say “no more”, gay culture needs to recognise that it is not opposing systems of oppression, but echoing and amplifying them.

For survivors of abuse and violence, it is a place of ridicule. David Norris is joined by the likes of Harvey Milk, whose tryst with a 16-year-old when he was 34 led to the boy’s suicide, and Oscar Wilde, who sexually abused child prostitutes in Morocco, on the long list of questionable gay icons.

At our meeting, I butted heads with BeLonG To over the negative messages their youth magazine was signalling through full-page, hypersexualised ads for services like “Squirt.com — Where Irish Men Cruise”. But BeLonG To is far from alone in this. Virtually every piece of gay culture thoroughly objectifies the young male body (something mainstream media has at last begun to spare the female form) to the extent that young gay men and boys can feel as if they have no value to the “community” other than what they can offer as a sexual object.

Preliminary interviews with preeminent LGBT experts around the world exposed the myriad ways queer individuals can hurt one another through homophobia, biphobia and transphobia — a laundry list of discriminations most would think belong solely in the realm of heterosexuality. One of the most memorable came from Australia, from a trans-woman who listened to my experiences and empathised:

“Your examples are terrible reminders of the damage we do to others of us in similar situations. Your examples are of gay people. As a trans-woman, I’m acutely aware of similar de-legitimising, vilification and belittling of pre- or non-op trans women by some post-op trans women, as well as the sometimes vicious rejection of trans women by some sectors of the lesbian community.”

Oddly enough, this moment of solidarity, of sharing stories of rejection, was probably the closest I had ever come to knowing what a real community would be like.

The same goes for people of colour. Even BeLonG To could acknowledge that the “community” had failed in this regard, noting in a 2012 report that black gay men are often assumed to be sex workers, while black lesbians are assumed to be straight (their solution is not changing these attitudes, but encouraging people of colour to just ignore discrimination and join in regardless). This is a global phenomenon, one that crops up in the voting habits, the public statements, and the discriminatory conduct of gay people from Canada to France.

It is not fair that BeLonG To and others should be able to enjoy all the benefits of a community, the cycle of favours it has brought them, when the people who need it the most find themselves rejected from it. But the truth is that until there is a community that accepts all its members equally, there is no community at all. Or to paraphrase Audre Lorde, a queer, black feminist, “I am not free while any queer person is unfree, even when their shackles look very different from my own”.

BeLonG To did not respond to requests for comment before publication. However, they have always maintained that they have no record of a complaint made by me from 2010–2012, and that their policies, Tusla-approved, are “robust and fit for purpose”.

Still, that distinction remains important.

This is not the story of the alleged abuse at BeLonG To, but rather the story of how that organisation treats the most vulnerable people it can come into contact with. To get the all-clear from Tusla and the Ombudsman, they were forced to lie, to fabricate evidence, even to cover up another complaint I made on tape — all in a paradoxical attempt to show how much they cared, how committed they were to honesty and integrity, and how unlikely it was that the original complaint I made all those years ago could slip through the cracks.

But there is no integrity in the decisions they made. They would never ask a victim of homophobic bullying at school to provide incessant details before they would offer help. They would never try to twist what he said into self-serving deceit. They would never ignore his cries for help, and instead simply add to the abuse. But that is exactly what they did here.

At its most fundamental level, this is the story of a respected organisation that was faced with a choice.

When presented with a complaint from a young person who needed the help they promised, they could have been honest. They could have made good on their pledge that their primary concern was for my well-being, and provided support and genuine care. They could have done what has now become a common slogan in our #MeToo, #TimesUp, #IBelieveHer world and believe the victims. Had they done that, it is hard to imagine that they would be the subject of this investigation.

Instead they chose to act in a way that was truly monstrous, that was so devoid of empathy and so self-centred that it tried to pass off my hurt as irrational anger. In doing so, they showcased the worst aspects of the community they claim to represent. In doing so, they exposed themselves for the world to see, dropping the artifice and the glamour for a moment, revealing exactly how they treat the people who depend on them behind closed doors.

And to think, all they had to do was apologise.