The first thing that struck me on reading the background to the “queer history” tour of Kilmainham and watching the original video, as well as reading some of the social media chatter, is that there appears to be an attempt to conflate the histories of prisoners simply on the basis of their sexual preferences.
There were republican prisoners and other leading republicans of the revolutionary period who were gay or whose private lives might suggest that they were gay. Far from being a secret or the reason for them being shunned, this was often known and either a matter of indifference or tolerated in the sort of way that the gayness – for the want of a better word – of people like Micheál Mac Liammóir was accepted.
Mac Liammóir was regarded as a serious public intellectual on the basis of his work in the Gate Theatre and as a self-educated Gaelgeoir at a time when most well known gay people in liberal Britain were absurd sit com characters or pantomime queens. Well, you can see the progress that has been made here.
None of the republicans in question were ever sent to prison either by the British or, if they later found themselves at odds with the Free State or Fianna Fáil, by the Irish state for being gay. Unlike what happened, it might be noted, in Cuba, the totalitarian shambles that is the icon of the current major republican party, where people were tortured, imprisoned and even murdered because they were gay. That especially was the case if it happened that their sexuality coincided with opposition from within the July 26 Movement to the takeover of the revolution against Batista by the Communists.
My main issue with the Kilmainham tour is not that they refer to republican prisoners who were gay, but that it seems to be part of a more general attempt to lump them in with all sorts of other prisoners who were, according to the organisers “queer.”
I have seen the online video presented by Brian Crowley, who is one of the Kilmainham curators and presumably also involved in the current tour. It is quite interesting and provides good background to the Dublin Scandals case on the 1880s which led to the imprisonment of several people who were part of what Crowley portrays as a subterranean gay scene that was “exposed” by failed libel cases.
Gay Community News refers to the fact, not mentioned in the video I watched, that some of the locations referred to were actually “gay brothels.” and that some of the prostitutes involved were also petty criminals. These were the very sort of wretches that the Castle used as informants and witnesses against many people. The criminal prostitution aspect to it all also rather undermines the more romanticised take that also underlies the airbrushing of the violence and squalor that was the basis of the Monto brothels immortalised by Joyce.
Crowley segues from the Dublin Scandals into the story of Kathleen Lynn who has become an icon if you like for those who wish to highlight what they believe is a suppressed history of the involvement of gay people within the republican movement.
While Lynn and Madeline ffrench-Mullen lived together in what Crowley elsewhere describes as a “same sex relationship,” he also states in another podcast that anything about their personal life is “necessarily speculative.”
She may have been gay, but not only had that nothing whatsoever to do with her having been involved in the War of Independence and the Civil War and having been imprisoned but there is no evidence of her having been badly treated in her professional life for her presumed sexuality. Indeed, the state with which she had been at odds over the Treaty and for years after that gave her a full military funeral watched by thousands of ordinary Dubs who lined the streets.
It is difficult to imagine a more contrasting figure to Lynn than the person who was at heart of the Dublin Scandals which occupies a central part in the same Queer History.
He was one James Ellis French, director of the detective branch – the political police – of the Royal Irish Constabulary.
French and the separate G Division at Dublin Castle, Special Branch effectively, were almost universally despised. French, a notorious character in that role, was hated by “puritan nationalist Ireland” not as a gay man but as a central figure in colonial repression.
The trials arising from the scandal took place one year after the 1883 trials of the Invincibles for the Phoenix Park killings, and in the midst of ongoing attempts by British intelligence and the Dublin Castle secret police led by loathsome creatures such as Inspector Mallon and Crown Prosecutor George Bolton to use their network of paid informers and men broken by torture to smash the entire nationalist movement.
This was to culminate in the Parnell Commission of 1888/89 which exposed part of the seedy world of perjury, torture, bribery, forgery and show trials that characterised British rule in Ireland.
The innocent gay men caught up in the Dublin Scandals were collateral victims perhaps of all of that. Victims of the state served by the two key figures in the libel trail, not of “puritan Catholic nationalism,” which had no power at that time.
The scandal broke in 1884 following the publication of articles by William O’Brien in United Ireland regarding French, about whom there had been rumours, that he had raped RIC cadets. O’Brien, who was a Parnellite MP for Cork, had also asked questions in Westminster about a supposed inquiry into all of the rumours about French by the authorities themselves and if such an inquiry had been held why no charges had been brought.
Dublin Castle saw the United Ireland articles as another chance to smash the political wing of the nationalist movement and encouraged the libel actions which turned out to be a disaster not only for French and Gustavus Cornwall Secretary of the General Post Office here, but also for the unfortunate men peripherally caught up in it and who were either called as witnesses or were named by witnesses who had presumably the guarantee of immunity for their own actual criminality.
When the legal cases went unexpectedly in favour of O’Brien, the Castle dispassionately abandoned all of the principals, in what they had hoped to be their successful pursuit of O’Brien and the suppression of United Ireland, to the wolves. They included French who was sentenced to two years hard labour on charges arising out of the libel cases.
No doubt French and the others were subject to harsh times in prison, but to imply that French had anything in common with the courageous Dr. Kathleen Lynn and other republican prisoners who may or may not have been gay is quite frankly an insult to her memory. And it has nothing to do with whether she or they were gay.