A new exhibition was launched at Áras Uí Chonghaile last week before going on the road. ‘Irish Republicans & The Gays – Cherishing All The Children of the Nation Equally’ is critical to understanding the evolution of modern Irish republicanism and the sacrifices and risks taken by republican lesbians and gays and their allies in the Republican Movement. Here, Dr Jeff Evans, research lead and project coordinator, who spent years researching the subject writes about the provenance of the project and what he learnt.
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This project began eight years ago by chance. In February 2018, amid the spectacular surroundings of Belfast City Hall, with the launch of Ireland’s first OUTing the Past International Festival of LGBT+ History, hosted the following day by the Ulster Museum.
One of the main speakers included allegations of a decades-long IRA pogrom against gays. A vivid description was provided of northern Irish kneecapped gays fleeing South and being stretchered off trains at Dublin’s Connolly Station. No surprise was evident among the large audience listening to such horrific, albeit unsubstantiated allegations. The following day these remarks of IRA anti-gay-pogrom campaigns were reported by the Belfast Telegraph. Sinn Féin’s Alex Maskey forcefully rejected the claims. Interestingly, subsequent attempts to obtain evidence substantiating such claims were met with silence.
But the perplexing question remained: how could such claims of a horrific, reactionary and rabidly homophobic Republican Movement, not be more widely reported and known? There has been a voluminous British/republican Irish military-related history reported but the allegations would appear to have gained traction because of a paucity of Irish republican social history. Such historical voids are not uncommon, especially outside of elites. And as such, these silences are ideal breeding grounds for all kinds of speculation, fantasy and politically-motivated spin.
Identifying gaps in the historical record is quite easy when compared with the task of trying fill them. For the last five years I and other comrades have been focused on collecting the evidence. This exhibition does not pretend to offer a ‘history’. However, it is the very first public outing of a growing archival collection. That allows us, for the first time, to begin to start seriously addressing the question, what is the relationship between Irish republicanism and ‘The Gays’.
Bloody Sunday march, Derry
The failure to historise, especially the social reality of the republican past, is not itself unusual. It is only in the post-WWII period that such silences have consistently been addressed by remarkable pioneering scholars studying the pasts of largely-ignored groups such as; working-class communities, women, black, LGBT, colonised people, etc. All of which have provided rich, nuanced and complex understandings of our collective past.
The evidence uncovered and collected by this project strongly challenges the common republican homophobic narrative, instead indicating that republicans played a seminal role in many of the advances in gay life in the North. The evidence also appears to mark out Irish republicanism as different from other national liberation struggles, one that promoted and created ‘gay spaces’, directly addressing, facilitating, the second stage of the Revolutionary Gay Manifesto ‘Coming Together’. We await the historisation of the South African Liberation Struggle, the other obviously pro-gay movements, to accurately assess how similar the trajectory of these liberation movements were on this issue.
As noted above, this exhibition can only showcase a small fraction of that new material collected, a task that was only made possible by a partnership between OUTing the Past, The Bloody Sunday Trust (Museum of Free Derry) & Áras Uí Chonghaile/ The James Connolly Visitor Centre, Belfast.
Obstacles We Had To Overcome
The creation of any accurate reading of the past is not a swift process and one that is made even harder, as in this case, when there is little evidence on which to build. A task that is especially problematic in the north of Ireland for a number of reasons directly related to the conflict.
Political Interference: the subject matter is still part of an ongoing political conflict, with many prominent politicians in the North still unable to accept the reality of human sexual diversity.
Archival Bias: State-run archives established within any sectarian state in theory are dedicated to the collection and archiving of evidence of all our collective pasts but have previously been either disinterested, hostile and/or not trusted to care for such material. That has resulted in many invaluable republican archives still being held in inaccessible public collections, people’s attics, basements, boxes in cupboards or, worse still, destroyed. This makes the members political collection held by the Linen Hall Library a stand-out public resource. It is an optimistic development that Sinn Féin have commenced discussions about professionally cataloguing their stored material and making it publicly accessible, thereby helping ensure future accurate readings of their past.
Also, working-class communities don’t commonly generate much written material and in times of mass civic protest such records would be further problematic. Surviving poverty or near poverty is the overriding priority, dealing with the day-to-day realities of security, armed troops on the streets and the vagaries of Catholic employment opportunities etc.
Therefore, this project has had to generate a body of evidence based on oral testimony, cross-referenced with limited archival material. This project is greatly indebted to all those veteran activists who have generously given their recorded testimonies, alongside the growing collection of archival material generated by this project. What should also be noted is the number of veterans (gay and straight) who felt able only to offer selective ‘off-the-record’ insights, testament to enduring post-war trauma and the resilient power of sexual taboos. But the wealth and nuance of those cross-referenced testimonies provides a clear narrative charting the accommodation of Irish republicanism with the Radical Gay agenda.
The evidence showcased here begins to answer the question of how two apparently very different and antagonistic political ideas and realities—Irish national liberation and ‘Revolutionary’ Gay Liberation (today aka ‘LGBTQ+’)—found common ground.
An answer to that must be important not just to accurately understand our past but also to help better understand its contribution to today’s hundreds of thousands participating in the annual gay pride marches held throughout Ireland.
How two seemingly opposing political movements, one depicted as being socially and sexually conservative, and the other ‘outrageously’ promoting social and sexual revolution, converged, was perhaps best summarised by an IRA volunteer over thirty years ago. Brendi, one of the first republican prisoners to ‘come out’, was born and brought up in Ardoyne, North Belfast. In 1995 he explained his understanding of seamless symmetry between his republicanism and ‘The Gays’.
The struggle that developed from Stonewall in1969 involved gays and lesbians confronting the state of America, and here in the Six Counties people were also taking on the state. There are many similarities within both these struggles. In America it was about rights and liberties denied on the basis of sexuality. Here, the struggle was being waged by a people discriminated against in every aspect of their lives because they were Catholic/Nationalist.
We hope that you find the exhibition of interest and are able to celebrate this past. We hope that it also promotes the question: why has such a remarkable past been hidden for so long and still denied? What other important episodes of our collective past are still missing?
I would like to make an appeal to readers. If you have any evidence and or memory of the relationship between Irish republicanism and the gays/LGBT+ Movement during this period and might be happy to share such, we’d be very keen to hear from you. Contact: jgm.evans@btinternet.com
