He is a graduate of Hunter College and has worked in the publishing industry for his whole career. * Dermot McEvoy was born in Dublin in 1950 and immigrated to New York City four years later. And I think Brendan might join him.ĭermot McEvoy is the author of "The 13th Apostle: A Novel of a Dublin Family, Michael Collins, and the Irish Uprising." This passage is taken from his recent book “ Irish Miscellany: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Ireland.” This chapter is entitled “Gay Gaels.” Then, in May of 2015, it led the way into the 21st century, when Ireland became the first country in the world to legalize gay marriage by a public vote.ĭublin every June has its own Gay Pride Parade and many of the partiers end up at The George, Dublin’s foremost gay bar on South Great Georges Street, to continue the celebration.īrendan Behan wrote a poem about the death of Oscar Wilde in which he said “No Pernod to brace him/Only holy water.” You just know that if Oscar Wilde were around today he’d be sipping his Pernod Absinthe, straight, at the bar of The George. So, finally, on gay rights at least, Ireland was brought into the light of the 20th century. Finally, in 1993 both laws were repealed. He then brought his case to the European Court of Human Rights (basically suing his own country in Norris v. He challenged the law in the Irish Supreme Court and lost. Norris is an Irish Senator and a Joyce scholar. Yes, you read that correctly.Įnter David Norris. So The Offenses Against the Person Act 1861 (in the vernacular, the anti-buggery act) and The Criminal Law of Amendment of 1885 (the gross indecency act)-laws written by the English-remained on the law books of the Republic of Ireland up until the 1980s.
Apparently, for the Irish, just a change in administrator was needed because the British laws were, well, swell. What he might have been talking about is that after 700 years of occupation and a bloody six-year revolution the Irish adopted most British laws verbatim. Those are the words of Kevin O’Higgins, one of the architects of the modern Irish state and one of the most controversial figures in Irish history. “We were the most conservative revolutionaries in history.”
Despite having a devoted wife and fathering a child, Behan’s homosexuality, which first blossomed when he was serving time in a British borstal for young boys, frightened and disturbed him until his premature death in 1964. Behan’s image of ex-IRA man, saloon-loving iconoclast, contrasts almost violently with his affection for young boys, revealed first by Ulick O’Connor in his Behan biography, Brendan. People forget that Wilde, one of the great flamboyant characters of all time, had a wife and fathered two children before his tragic fall. Two of Ireland’s most well-known writers, Oscar Wilde and Brendan Behan, have more than their occupation and city of birth in common-both were bisexual.
(Ironically, both Casement and Wilde would be pursued and prosecuted, Inspector Javert-style, by Sir Edward Carson, the less than patriotic Orange bigot.) Oscar Wilde was hounded to his grave because he flaunted Victorian law and convention. And you don’t have to look too hard either for great examples-two of the sixteen men executed by the British in 1916 were most likely gay- Sir Roger Casement (definitely) and Padraig Pearse (probably). It’s ironic that this bigotry towards gays should have remained so prevalent in current times, since Ireland’s history has been enriched, yesterday and today, by its gay members.