Queer Irish History Roundtable

Averill Earls, ‘“I love you so much, I can’t express it”: Michael Mac Liammóir, Hilton Edwards, and the Limits of Ireland’s Moral Regime’

Alfred Willmore arrived in Ireland and immediately fell in love; and between 1917 and 1927, he reinvented himself with a Cork accent and Gaelicized name. Thereafter “Michael Mac Liammóir”told people he was born in Ireland. Then he met the second love of his life: Hilton Edwards, another actor. The two were in a show together, but when Edwards fell ill, Mac Liammóir left the production to stay with the man who would become his life partner. Mac Liammoir and Edwards went on to found the Gate Theater Company in 1928, and spent their lives together in a lovely Georgian on Harcourt Terrace, a posh neighborhood just south of St. Stephen’s Green. 

In independent Ireland, sex was sin and same-sex desire the worst kind. Yet Dublin celebrated the camp Mac Liammóir and dour Edwards as the leaders in Irish theater (though neither was actually Irish). At Mac Liammóir’s funeral, the President of Ireland acknowledged Edwards as the chief mourner, as one would a spouse. Their deep and abiding love, 51 years in partnership both business and romantic, was somehow permitted in a society that seemed to shun men like them. In an undated letter to Edwards, Mac Liammóir wrote “I love you so much, I can’t express it.” Yet during their lifetime together, between 1928 and 1989, hundreds of other men were arrested for crimes of “gross indecency” in Dublin, sometimes just a few blocks from the couple’s home. 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, were enough removed to protect them from the legal and social ostracization that so many other men experienced in Ireland. They were not the only queer couples who were able to live together in Ireland, but the records of that love, in dozens of handwritten letters, devotion and familiarity captured in ink and paper, is really quite extraordinary. 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. 

Bio: Averill Earls is an Assistant Professor of History at St. Olaf College, and the Executive Producer of Dig: A History Podcast. Her 2020 article, “Solicitor Brown and His Boy,” published in Historical Reflections, won the 2021 Judith R Walkowitz Prize. Her current book project, Love in the Lav: A Social Biography of Same-Sex Desire in Ireland, 1922-72, is under contract with Temple University Press, and tells a history of same-sex desiring Irish men, the teen boys they loved, and the Gardaí who policed them. She is also co-author of Spiritualism’s Place: A Reflective History of Lily Dale, New York, in production with Cornell University Press. In addition to the podcast, her digital public history projects include hosting on the Irish Studies channel on the New Books Network, and serving as Layout Editor of the collaborative digital publication, Nursing Clio. She is currently an Associate Editor of the Journal of British Studies and a member of the Dissertation Fellowship Committee for the North American Conference on British Studies.


Tom Hulme, ‘Belfast, Books, and Strange Brothers: Men Reading Queer in the Early-Twentieth-Century’

In the nineteenth century, nationalist rhetoric in Ireland declared that sexual sin, whether 'unnatural offences' between men or women selling sex, were largely the result of the colonial British influence. Even though the new jurisdiction of Northern Ireland defined itself through its unionist relationship, it maintained a similar rhetoric that the region was inherently more moral than its neighbour across the water. Neither the churches nor the authorities in Belfast talked openly about the existence of queer men, and the local press largely followed their lead. While homegrown homosexuality remained undiscussed and largely unpoliced, the governors of Northern Ireland could insist that their wee province was not beset by the problems of sexuality that were being uncovered elsewhere. For queer men, this tactical ignorance raised both possibilities and problems: they were mostly undisturbed by the police or moral campaigns taking place elsewhere, but had few public clues to follow to understand their desires. In this paper, I explore how some men in early twentieth century Belfast learned to be queer. I focus on the importance of literature, from homoerotic Victorian poetry to Edwardian sexology, and even pulp novels of the interwar USA. Books such as Carpenter's The Intermediate Sex (1908) or Niles' Strange Brother (1931) may have been published elsewhere, but they were acquired, read and shared by men in Belfast. By tracing these intimate connections between literature, queer men and their friends I show how there were a range of co-existing and sometimes overlapping models of sexual desire in Belfast long before a more open public discussion of 'homosexuality'.

Bio: Tom Hulme is a Reader in Modern British History at Queen’s University Belfast, where he has taught since 2016. He is currently working on a book titled Belfastmen: an Intimate Queer History, and has written on this topic for Gay Times and Irish Historical Studies. Working with Dr's Leanne McCormick, Maurice Casey and Charlie Lynch, he runs an Arts and Humanities Research Council project titled “Queer Northern Ireland: Sexuality Before Liberation”.


Mary McAuliffe, ‘Using the archives to (re) write the histories of Irish revolutionary and queer women'

Tracing the activist, friendship and kinship networks of the suffrage and nationalist women (and men) of early twentieth century Ireland is rightly framed as an integral part of the political and revolutionary histories of the late 19th and early 20th century.  Writing women, particularly queer women, into these spaces can be fraught with difficulty.  This early 20th century Irish world of ‘student societies, theatre groups, feminist collectives, volunteer militias, Irish language groups’ were, as Roy Foster wrote, in his 2016 book, Vivid Faces, ‘linked together by youth, radicalism, subversive activism, enthusiasm and love’. While the world Foster evokes is one dominated by youthful, romantic heterosexual passions, there is no doubt, as with British first wave feminist histories of sapphists and suffragettes, that there were spaces in this radicalism for women who made their lives, political and personal, with other women.  Group experience is often a powerful way to understand the lives of women who operated with the hierarchies of a patriarchal culture, co-existing with and challenging those hierarchies.  In the early 20th century, women of this generation, many of whom came to feminism, socialism, and militant nationalism in the first decade of the 1900’s, not only chose radical politics, they also choose radial lives. It is this group, urban dwelling, radical activists, rebels, feminists, among whom were a cohort who also choose to may their lives with each other whom I have been chasing through the archives. I wish to talk about the obstacles and potentials of taking a gender and queer lens to research their lives in the archives, to question previous subjective, heteronormative constructions and readings of materials; to interrogate ways in which queer femininities, appear in the archive, and understand how these women expressed queer desire, lived queer lives, seeking to transform our understandings of histories of revolutionary sexualities and expand our knowledge of hidden / marginalised histories.

Bio
Dr Mary McAuliffe is a historian and lecturer at Gender Studies UCD. Her latest publications include (co-authored with Harriet Wheelock) is The Diaries of Kathleen Lynn: A Life Revealed through Personal Writing (UCD Press, 2023) and Margaret Skinnider; a biography (UCD Press,2020). Other publications include (co-edited with Miriam Haughton and Emilie Pine) Legacies of the Magdalen Laundries: Commemoration, gender, and the postcolonial carceral state (Manchester University Press, Nov 2021), co-editor of Sexual Politics in Modern Ireland (the 2nd edition of which will be published in 2024). She is currently completing her book Gendered and Sexual Violence in the Irish War of Independence and Civil War, 1919-1923 (forthcoming 2024). She is a past President of the Women’s History Association of Ireland and is a member of the Humanities Institute, UCD and the Women’s Museum Advocacy Group. 

- this seminar is free to attend, but advance registration is required.