Reeling in the Queers: Tales of Ireland's LGBTQ Past

Introduction

The story of LGBTQ liberation in Ireland has, arguably, been one of progress, with significant milestones such as the success of the ‘yes’ vote in the same-sex marriage referendum and the passing of the Gender Recognition Act in 2015. Two years later in 2017, Ireland saw the ascension of a biracial, openly gay son of an immigrant, Leo Varadkar, as the country’s Taoiseach. These events positioned Ireland as a bastion of progressive social change, cementing its status as ‘an island at the centre of the world’ and demonstrating a huge change of heart for what was once a staunchly Catholic country.¹ Significantly, this progress has been considered a culmination of transformative social change catalysed and nurtured by an array of LGBTQ activism and events since the founding of varying Irish gay civil rights movements across 1973 and 1974.

Within the grand and emerging narrative of LGBTQ Ireland, however, are woven intricate threads of ordinary people’s extraordinary stories. This book aims to tell the lesser-told tales of Ireland’s LGBTQ community: stories of those who believed in change and stories of those who simply wanted to have fun. Within LGBTQ archives across Ireland, in the warm kitchens of people’s homes, via Zoom grids and across shared coffees in city cafés are an array of vibrant tales. This book attempts to reel some of them in.

In the summer of 2022 I was speaking with a friend, Rita Wild, who had spent some years as an activist and volunteer with the Belfast lesbian community. I had mentioned to her that I was writing a history of lesser-told stories in Irish LGBTQ life. With a raised eyebrow, she mentioned once being on a bus ‘full of lesbians’ driving from Belfast all the way to Cork and Galway, as part of a Lesbian Line exchange. This piqued my interest, and Rita told me she would see if her old Belfast ‘comrades’ would be interested in talking to me. A number of days later Rita contacted me to share their details, giving me the go-ahead to reach out. She sent a follow-up voice note on WhatsApp to tell me ‘they’re very happy, but really amused’ that someone was interested in this story so many years on. I reached out, hoping to hear about their experiences, stories and memories of their work with the Belfast Lesbian Line and their exchanges with the lesbian community across the island of Ireland. One person in particular, Claire Hackett, was very enlivened by my request. She responded to my email confirming she would participate, but noting, ‘if we realised we were making history, we might have kept better records’.²

This exchange with the former activists of the Belfast lesbian community and the Lesbian Line speaks to the core of Reeling in the Queers, its focus on the significance of ordinary LGBTQ people who did extraordinary things. While many in Ireland’s LGBTQ community may not have changed laws, their actions provided hope, relief, support and, crucially, created enclaves of fun and queer joy.

The imagination and political and cultural consciousness of Irish queer life has, to varying degrees, been captured within the various LGBTQ archives held across the island – their very existence demonstrating a growing conscientiousness around documenting queer life in Ireland. From Edmund Lynch’s newspaper cuttings of any mention of ‘homosexuality’ in the 1970s to the consolidation of the community’s activities in what would become the Irish Queer Archive, the Irish LGBTQ community has always tried to make queer life in Ireland intelligible. While the Irish Queer Archive served as a significant repository, the Cork LGBT Archive, the Irish Trans Archive, the GCN Archive, the LGBT History Northern Ireland Archive and the Irish LGBT Oral History Archive have together allowed me to connect with previous generations and pluck at the finer threads of cultural, political and social life in LGBTQ Ireland. In saying that, the stories of some of the people in this book cannot be found in archives, but rather are waiting to be told in personal documents and memory.

While Reeling in the Queers harnesses queer archives, oral history interviews trace the contours of diverse queer life. Being connected with these individuals, who, like me, faced various forms of discrimination due to their LGBTQ identity, underscored the shared experiences that span generations. The intergenerational dialogue of the oral histories not only serves as a bridge between the past and the present but also provides a conduit through which previously unknown lives and stories can be heard and understood.

I use the term ‘queer’ in a broad sense, encompassing various sexual orientations and gender identities that differ from the heterosexual norm and those identifying with the gender they were assigned at birth. ‘Queer’ is particularly useful when discussing a wide array of cultural practices, as well as when addressing same-sex attraction or gender diversity in historical periods and locations where these practices and identities were not defined as they are today. ‘Queer’ enables us to explore the lives and relationships of people in the past without imposing our contemporary experiences or frames of reference onto theirs. I am also conscious of how ‘queer’ originated as a derogatory insult. My own experience of growing up and going to school in the late 1990s and 2000s saw this evolve to the term ‘gay’ being harnessed and deployed to insult and taunt. The 1980s and 1990s saw activists reclaiming ‘queer’, often used to abuse and humiliate, and turning it towards empowerment and radicalisation against something that was once associated with stigma and shame.

In 1861 the Victorian morality legislation, the Offences Against the Persons Act, while abolishing the death penalty for ‘buggery’, retained its illegality around sex between men and would remain on the statute books until the last decade of the twentieth century. This legislation is significant, as the criminality that emerged from it resulted in a climate of homophobia for many years after. The 1970s later witnessed the emergence of gay civil rights movements, notably the Sexual Liberation Movement in 1973, the Northern Ireland Gay Rights Association (NIGRA) in 1975 and the Irish Gay Rights Movement (IGRM) in 1974, the latter of which established forms of queer socialisation and Ireland’s first designated queer space in the form of the Phoenix Club. While the IGRM later imploded as a result of in-fighting and personality clashes, the National Gay Federation, formed in 1979, founded the Hirschfeld Centre at 10 Fownes Street in Dublin’s Temple Bar, which would bring queer nightlife to a whole new level through the dance club Flikkers while providing a raft of other social services and resources.

In 1982 Jeff Dudgeon, a Belfast shipping clerk, successfully petitioned the European Court of Human Rights to extend the partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality to Northern Ireland. But the 1980s would also see the vulnerability of queer life exposed through the murders of Charles Self in his home in 1982 and Declan Flynn later that year, followed by John Porter in Cork in 1983. The Charles Self murder investigation saw a campaign mounted by the gardaí to collect information and details around Dublin’s gay community. The five perpetrators of Declan Flynn’s murder received suspended sentences, sparking outrage within the queer community and a notable public protest in the form of the Fairview Park March and the Pride Protest March.

The 1980s witnessed the emergence of the AIDS crisis, which was confronted by a number of groups such as Gay Health Action (GHA) in 1985, ACT UP in 1990 and AIDSWISE in 1991. Simultaneously, the Campaign for Homosexual Law Reform, established in 1977 took a challenge to the laws criminalising gay sex acts between men. Led by Irish gay rights pioneer David Norris, the case failed at the Irish High Court in 1977 and Supreme Court in 1983, until eventually it succeeded at the European Court of Human Rights in 1988. Now that Ireland was mandated by Europe to decriminalise, gay law reform became a key issue and saw groups such as the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network (GLEN) emerge in 1988 to campaign for it, eventually finding success when homosexuality was decriminalised in 1993. Transgender activism also burgeoned during the decade: in April 1997 Dr Lydia Foy began legal proceedings having been refused a new birth certificate and legal recognition of her female gender in 1993.

The year 2024 marks half a century since the founding of the IGRM, along with Ireland’s first Gay Pride event, all the way back in 1974. This serves as the perfect juncture to look back at the impact of Ireland’s LGBTQ community on politics, society and culture. The stories, times and topics that this book traverses are by no means a complete history of Ireland’s LGBTQ community, but they do present a window into different aspects of queer Irish culture. While emphasis is often placed on the political aspects of LGBTQ life, in terms of legislative progress and successes, this book also points towards how forms of queer cultural production, socialisation and fun were as crucial to LGBTQ life as political legitimation.

Reeling in the Queers takes inspiration from RTÉ’s beloved television series Reeling in the Years. Just as each episode of that show revisits the events of a specific year through archival footage, reflecting on their contemporary relevance in shaping Ireland, this book aims to do the same by reeling in the stories of LGBTQ individuals, events and figures: stories that have left an indelible mark not just on the queer community but also on modern-day Ireland; stories that bear witness to the resilience of queer culture, a testament to how it emerged and thrived against all odds and the people who made it happen.

1

‘The Two Mothers Got Together and Sorted It Out’

Phil Moore, Parents Enquiry and Gay Law Reform

In April 1989 Phil Moore, a mother of two from Dartry Park in South Dublin, is sitting among the audience of The Late Late Show, then Ireland’s most popular television programme. The evening of joyous candour, with prompted laughter from the studio manager and the potential to interact with one of Ireland’s biggest stars, Gay Byrne, as he interviews a host of celebrities, is wasted on Phil. Instead, she is anxious, then becomes frustrated and is finally furious.

Tonight’s special edition of The Late Late Show features a debate around homosexuality and whether Ireland should decriminalise homosexual acts. The Irish government had just been mandated to do so after David Norris’s Campaign for Homosexual Law Reform was successful in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) a year earlier, in 1988. On the panel, Paddy Monaghan, from the conservative reactionary group Christians Concerned, explains to the studio audience that it isn’t ‘normal for a man to be preoccupied with another man’s back passage’.¹ This anti-gay, anti-decriminalisation discourse gains traction when another member of the panel, Máire Kirrane of the Irish conservative advocacy group Family Solidarity, speaks from her position as a mother, stating that she is concerned about how impressionable children are to being influenced by gay people, before claiming that there are in fact ‘very few actual homosexuals’ and that they are an ‘aberration’ to the ‘law of God’.²

Phil at this point has heard enough. She is the mother of a gay son herself and can no longer stand to hear members of the panel referring to her child as an aberration. Feeling enraged, she intervenes in the debate, declaring to the studio audience and those watching at home that ‘when you are talking about my child, he is wonderful and perfectly normal. It is nothing that he can grow out of, because if a mother says that to a child, that means you’re not accepting him.’³ And it was the love of a mother for her gay son that would lead to one of the most significant shifts in the rights for LGBTQ people in Ireland. Phil Moore was to become an important proponent in implementing gay law reform in 1993 – yet her contribution has not always received the credit that it deserves. This is the story of how a mother changed the course of gay liberation in Ireland, not to mention helping many Irish families along the way.

Born in Dublin in 1933 – only a year after the 31st International Eucharistic Congress, a landmark event demonstrating the powerful influence of the Catholic Church in the State – Phil Moore was of a generation that grew up in an Ireland that was staunchly conservative, entrenched in the moral habitus and ethos of the Church. Having married Harry, a stereo salesman who worked on Dawson Street, the couple carved out a life for themselves and their family in Dartry Park. Phil describes her politics throughout her life as feminist and relatively liberal, but the question of gay identities had never crossed her mind.

That remained the case until, one lunchtime, her sixteen-year-old son Dermod walked into the kitchen. As Phil was sitting at the kitchen table eating a bowl of lentil soup, Dermod said, ‘Ma, I’ve something to tell you that I don’t think you’ll like. I’m gay.’ Phil was taken aback – this she had not been expecting. Relieved that her teenage son hadn’t got himself into trouble, she replied, ‘Oh, you’re only 16! You’ll grow out of it. You couldn’t possibly know.’⁴

Following that initial conversation, as her lentil soup cooled in the bowl, and in the weeks thereafter, Phil’s mind raced with endless possibilities. She was frightened for her son’s future. Would he be lonely? Would he ever be happy? Would he be bullied? Would he be beaten up? Would he have secret love affairs? Phil describes ‘drowning in a huge wave of misery and fear … not realising that there were so many horrible myths and prejudices in my mind concerning gay people’.⁵ Phil began to understand that what she was feeling was a manifestation of institutionalised homophobia, growing up in conservative Catholic Ireland, as she described it, ‘a compound of all the music hall jokes imbibed in a lifetime’.⁶ With her son’s brave disclosure, his choosing to reveal a crucial part of his identity, Phil says that, ‘out on the ground and then out of my pores came prejudices that I didn’t even think I had’.⁷ This served as a turning point for Phil, who realised that ‘you have to take out all these myths and prejudices till you suddenly find out that if there’s a problem with being gay, it’s the parents’ problem’.⁸ Dermod was still the same boy she had raised, and being gay was just part of who he was. So from there on in, together with her husband, she set out to understand what life was like for young gay people in Ireland.

By this stage Dermod was active in the National Gay Federation’s Youth Group, Ireland’s first gay youth organisation, which operated out of the Hirschfeld Centre on 10 Fownes Street in Dublin’s Temple Bar every Sunday from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. For many young people, the youth group was a lifeline, and simply meeting other lesbian and gay people of the same age, who understood the complexity of living as a young gay person in Ireland, was extremely rewarding.⁹ One of the Sundays when Dermod was going to the youth group, Phil and Harry asked if they could join, with the aim of understanding a little bit more about his new world and to get a sense of the community he had built for himself at the Hirschfeld. The young gay and lesbian people there began to confide in this warm, sympathetic older couple: ‘Now, the stories we heard from some of these kids broke my heart. I was really anxious about these kids who were thrown out of their houses, their fathers beat them up, their mothers packing their case saying, I don’t want to see you again. Harry and I looked at each other and said, "This is not