A Social Biography of Same-Sex Desire in Postcolonial Ireland

FAIN: FT-291128-23

Averill Earls
St. Olaf College (Northfield, MN 55057-1574)

Research and writing leading to a monograph on the history of sexuality and state-building in Ireland from 1922 to 1973.  

A Social Biography of Same-Sex Desire in Postcolonial Ireland is a seven-chapter history of sexuality and state-building from 1922 to 1973. Historians have neglected queer history between Irish independence and the rise of the Irish gay rights movement, primarily because the sources are so few. Using social biography methods, I weave together evidence from courtroom testimonies, fiction, and genealogical sources with the larger historical contexts in which they were embedded, to piece together a narrative of individual experiences. While commemorating the lives ruined by state-enforced homophobia, I argue that the persecution of same-sex desiring men was central to Irish postcolonial state-building. Further, this book models social biography as a methodology that allows humanities scholars to find and tell the stories of ordinary people, even when those people left few traces of their lives.

Associated Products

Love and Sex Between Men in Dublin, 1884-1973 (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Love and Sex Between Men in Dublin, 1884-1973
Abstract: In an undated letter to his life partner, Michael Mac Liammoir wrote “I love you so much, I can’t express it”. Hilton Edwards, in turn, was so bereft after Michael's death in 1978 that he hardly left the house they'd shared for decades. And yet it is likely surprising to some to learn that two men so deeply in love as all that had a happy and fulfilled life together in Dublin, Ireland, from the time they settled here in 1928 until their deaths. Certainly Catholic social pressure and legal restrictions prevented many same-sex desiring men and women from pursuing relationships in independent Ireland. But as court records, newspapers, and even some love letters demonstrate, men loved and had sex with other men in Ireland despite (or in spite of) societal expectations and legal consequences. For this talk, Dr. Averill Earls of St. Olaf College (Northfield, Minnesota) will give a brief overview of the history of love and sex between men in Dublin, as well as the role of class, nationalism, and policing in shaping the sexual subculture of Dublin, from 1884 until 1973.
Author: Averill Earls
Date: 01/24/2024
Location: Mansion House, Dublin
Primary URL: https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/love-and-sex-between-men-in-dublin-1884-1973-tickets-795327364557
Primary URL Description: Event Brite ticket website for the talk
Secondary URL: https://www.youtube.com/@DublinCityCouncil/videos
Secondary URL Description: Once edited and produced, recording of talk will be posted on the DCC youtube

Love in the Lav: A Social Biography of Same-Sex Desire in Ireland, 1922-1972 (Book)
Title: Love in the Lav: A Social Biography of Same-Sex Desire in Ireland, 1922-1972
Author: Averill Earls
Abstract: Love in the Lav uncovers Ireland’s queer lives of the past. Averill Earls investigates how same-sex-desiring men lived and loved in a country where their sexuality was illegal and seen as unnatural. Across seven social biographical chapters, each highlighting individuals at the nexus of these histories, Earls constructs a narrative of experiences through the larger contexts in which they are embedded. Earls uses courtroom testimonies, police records, and family history archives as well as “educated speculation” to show how structures governing male same-sex desire in Ireland played out on the bodies of the men who desired men, the teen boys who sold sex to men, and the way the Catholic-nationalist ethos shaped the Gardaí who policed them. Love in the Lav examines the experiences of people such as cabbie James Hand, who was put on trial for gross indecency, to provide a window into the queer working-class subculture of 1930s Dublin. Earls also focuses on issues of consent, especially with teens, and the unregulated queer Irish world of public figures, including Micheál Mac Liammóir, Hilton Edwards, Ronald Brown, and John Broderick. By examining twentieth-century Ireland through the lived experiences of ordinary same-sex-desiring Irish men who were relegated to obscurity by Irish society, Earls reveals the contradictions, possibilities, and magnitude of postcolonial Irish Catholic nationalism.
Year: 2025
Primary URL: https://search.worldcat.org/title/1500467990
Primary URL Description: WorldCat.org entry
Publisher: Temple University Press
Type: Single author monograph
Copy sent to NEH?: No

“‘I love you so much, I can’t express it’: Love Between Two Men in Ireland" (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: “‘I love you so much, I can’t express it’: Love Between Two Men in Ireland"
Author: Averill Earls
Abstract: Michael Mac Liammóir and Hilton Edwards founded the Gate Theater Company in 1928, and then spent their lives together on Harcourt Terrace, a posh neighborhood just south of St. Stephen’s Green in Dublin, Ireland. During the period covered by their 51 years together, hundreds of men were arrested for crimes of “gross indecency” in Dublin, sometimes just a few blocks from the couple’s home. In independent Ireland, sex was sin and same-sex desire the worst kind. Yet Dublin celebrated the camp Mac Liammóir and dour Edwards; though neither was actually Irish, they were considered leaders in Irish-language theater. At Mac Liammoir’s funeral, the President of Ireland acknowledged Edwards as the chief mourner, as one would a spouse. Their deep and abiding love, five decades of partnership both business and romantic, was somehow permitted in a society that shunned men like them. In an undated letter to Edwards, Michael Mac Liammóir wrote “I love you so much, I can’t express it.” This presentation will examine the lives and love of Mac Liammóir and Edwards in the context of independent Ireland’s moral regime, revealing the limits of the Catholic-nationalist state while celebrating the archival evidence of love between men. Mac Liammóir and Edwards were not touched by Ireland’s campaigns to enforce a facade of sexual purity because they had literal and figurative doors and walls to shield them. Their social class, their association with the theater, their intimate friendships with men in high places, and the private domesticity they cultivated on Harcourt Terrace was enough removed to protect them from the legal and social ostracization that so many other men experienced in Ireland. Their life together offers an extraordinary lens for examining queer love, nationalism, and identity in Ireland in the twentieth century.
Date: 6/12/2024
Primary URL: http://clgbthistory.org/conferences/queer-history-conference-2024/qhc-2024-conference-program/
Primary URL Description: Conference Program

‘Not Recommended for Borstal’: Sexuality, Empire, and Moral Reform of ‘Boys’ Aged 15-21 in Ireland (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: ‘Not Recommended for Borstal’: Sexuality, Empire, and Moral Reform of ‘Boys’ Aged 15-21 in Ireland
Author: Averill Earls
Abstract: After a century of prison reform, Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise founded the first Borstal Prison near Kent, England in 1902. Modeled on an American system that treated young male offenders as reformable future citizens, the Borstal was quickly exported throughout the British Empire. Its regimen promised provide the misguided “juvenile-adults” (aged 15-21) with an education and a trade. Through strict daily routines and firm moral instruction, the ‘boys’ recommended to the Borstal would emerge proper British men. With a glut of under- and unemployed boys in Dublin at mid-century, Ireland’s Borstal in Clonmel was constantly at capacity. This paper examines the boys deemed unreformable by the Irish state - those whose crimes strayed too far afield from Ireland’s moral order. The “boys” who were implicated in same-sex sex crimes were often “not recommended for Borstal” by medical examiners and judicial officials. This paper considers the Borstal in its imperial context, as an English institution designed to establish standards of British ‘respectability,’ masculinity, and morality. Even as the postcolonial Irish state forged distinctly Irish definitions of what respectability, masculinity, and morality meant and looked like, they defined who and what was incompatible with Irishness.
Date: 11/12/2023
Primary URL: https://www.nacbs.org/past-conferences-1/baltimore
Primary URL Description: Conference Program

Queer Loneliness and Desire in the Republic of Ireland (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Queer Loneliness and Desire in the Republic of Ireland
Author: Averill Earls
Abstract: From 1951 to 1966, 43% of 42 men charged with gross indecency in Dublin were exonerated in court. As the conviction rate declined significantly, so too did the overall arrests in Dublin. That did not mean, of course, that cruising same-sex desiring men weren’t harassed, beaten, or shamed by the garda; certainly, like the 1982 example of Declan Flynn, some queer men were even murdered with virtually no consequences for the murderers. Being gay and Irish was dangerous and deeply lonely in the 1960s and early 1970s. Francis Dermody and Thomas O’Shea were charged with having sex with each other in 1962. Dermody was found guilty, but allowed to pay a fine and “keep the peace” for two years. Bizarrely, O’Shea was acquitted. Their story is representative of the majority of cases in the 1960s, when juries were less likely to convict alleged gross indecency offenders unless children were involved, and judges commuted most sentences to fines. But did this shift evidence a turn toward a “thaw” in Irish culture? When presented alongside the works and lives of Aodhan Madden and John Broderick, two writers who drank too much, died too early, and whose work has barely received the acclaim it deserved, the answer is no. Instead, the burden of homophobia shifted to informal policing. This paper argues that, while arrests and trials may not have been worthwhile expenditures of the Garda’s time, there were other ways for the state to express that queer was anathema to Irishness.
Date: 6/30/2023

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