I got the Luas into Dublin this week, having not been in the city for a good long while. It was at commuter time, so standing room, if even, only.

Two young couples stood near the doors. One woman was in a flouncy, floral-print dress and runners, hair in intricate plaits and carrying a neat bump. Her partner carefully guarded her and her precious cargo the whole way in.

Every now and then she’d laugh and rest her hand on top of his right shoulder for balance, then leaving it there out of easy affection. The pair were smitten with each other, with life and their imminent arrival.

The other couple had different guarding to do. Again in a dress, because we all know the temperatures this week, the young woman wore a trainer on one foot and an orthopaedic boot on the other, to mend her broken foot.

Her husband tried to get her a seat. She refused because it would mean she “couldn’t have the chats” with him.

Instead she leaned on her one crutch and slipped her arm under his for the duration of the journey.

Both couples expressed their affection mindlessly, unconsciously placing a hand on a shoulder or an arm around a waist.

Last Sunday I watched one of this year’s Oscar-winning movies, Call Me By Your Name. If you haven’t seen it, it’s set in 1983 and centres around a 17-year-old Jewish boy Elio who falls in love for the first time with his father’s research assistant Oliver.

Set in summertime Italy, the pair swim in rivers and lakes, cycle around the countryside and share books, ideas and freshly-picked peaches with each other. Their love is pure and palpable, but hidden, forced underground.

They can’t mindlessly catch hands on the street, place an affectionate kiss on a forehead when a joke goes flat or carelessly drape an arm across a shoulder in public — all the things heterosexual people get to take for granted. The movie ends with a heartbroken Elio as Oliver returns to America.

A few months pass and Elio receives a call from Oliver to say he’s engaged to a woman. As Elio remains silent on the phone, with his parents listening on a second handset, Oliver says: “You’re lucky” and that if his father knew who he really was he’d send him to a “correctional facility”.

Sociologist Brené Brown has a definition for shame. After years of research and having interviewed hundreds of people she defines it as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging”. She also refers to that loss of belonging as a loss of connection.

Elio’s parents affirmed to him that he was not flawed, in a society that told him otherwise. They told him that not only was the love he shared with Oliver worthy, but he too was worthy. Whereas Oliver felt his dark secret would out him as wrong or bad or flawed, therefore resulting in the loss of connection from both his family and society.

Fastforward 35 years and to real-time Ireland, we have marriage equality, a Taoiseach who is a gay man and a minister for children and youth affairs who is gay woman. We’re also making legislative progress in relation to gender recognition.

Every time I talk to someone from abroad they remark on Ireland’s social progress from criminalising gay men to electing one as prime minister and from locking women up in laundries to voting overwhelming for reproductive rights.

As always though, appearances can be blindly deceiving because every time I talk to a gay friend or friend who has a gay or trans sibling I hear a totally different interpretation.

One friend told me how he sat sobbing in his mum’s car upon coming to the realisation that he was gay. When his mum and sister returned with the groceries I think he said he pretended to be asleep. It was several years later when he came out. He is not even 30.

Another friend was bullied and humiliated in school because of his sexuality. He’s not yet 40. His cowardly tormentors made him believe, temporarily, that he was somehow “flawed” and his health was greatly impacted. However, this friend today lives an active life where he has contributed to lots of positive social change in Ireland.

This week I heard an Irish woman talking on the Ryan Tubridy Show about how she had tried to “outrun” her secret, because she so desperately did not want to be gay. She had lived in the UK, the US — always keeping bodies of water between her and home.

At 32, just over three years ago, Shauna Keogh an Emmy-nominated TV producer, flew home to Tallaght to tell her beloved parents and sisters that she was gay. Her mum hugged her. Her dad said, “So what?” and joined the hug.

Today, tens of thousands will march in rainbows of colour and smatterings of glitter to celebrate Pride in Ireland.

For you it might just be a case of colourful pictures popping up on your social media feeds, for others it’s about affirming their intrinsic worth as a human being, after years of rejection, humiliation, ostracisation, shame, violence and criminalisation.

For you it might seem like we’re “there”, that Ireland’s an easy place to be gay or “other” in, but for some, today will mean looking at those colourful pictures in the papers wishing that they too, could be all of who they are.

If shame makes us feel flawed and unworthy of love and belonging, then its equal and opposite cousin is a most welcome antidote — because we need and can always do with more Pride in Ireland.