Gay Old Ireland - Whats the Story

PatsytheNazi wrote: »

Well if as you say a how progressive a society is its treatment and acceptence of minorities, are you raising some sort of issue that gay rights weren't included in the 1916 Proclaimation or the earlier writings or speeches of say, Tone, Emmet etc ?

Scott, Andrew George [Captain Moonlite] (1842 - 1880)

Alternative Names:Moonlite, CaptainBirth:1842, Rathfryland, Down, IrelandDeath:20 January 1880, Darlinghurst, New South Wales, AustraliaCultural Heritage:

• Irish

Religious Influence:

• Anglican

Occupation:

• bushranger
• executed criminal
• fraudster
• murderer
• prison escapee
• prisoner
• thief

• Life Summary
• Resources
• Abbreviations

Andrew George Scott [Captain Moonlite] (1842 - 1880), by unknown engraver, 1879, courtesy of La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria. IAN28/11/79/180. .
Image Details

SCOTT, ANDREW GEORGE (1842-1880), bushranger, self-styled 'CAPTAIN MOONLITE', was born at Rathfriland, County Down, Ireland, and baptized on 5 July 1842, son of Thomas Scott, Anglican clergyman, and his wife Bessie, née Jeffares. Young Scott was described as 'dark, handsome, active and full of high spirits', but was known for impulsive acts of mischievous violence. He may have studied engineering in London, and legend has it that he served with Garibaldi in Italy in 1860.
On 22 November 1861 Scott, his parents and brother Thomas arrived at Auckland, New Zealand, in the Black Eagle. A fellow-passenger remembered him as 'very gentlemanly and high-spirited'. His father took charge of Christ Church, Coromandel, and his brother was ordained priest; Andrew taught school for a while but in February 1864 was commissioned in the Waikato Militia; later he transferred to the Auckland Volunteer Engineers Corps. On 6 November 1867 he was refused a post of inspector or sub-inspector in the armed constabulary, although he had been endorsed by prominent members of the Auckland community as 'a gentleman well suited for an office of command'.
Within a few months Scott had arrived in Australia, possibly first in Sydney. About April 1868 he went to Melbourne, met Bishop Perry and in July was appointed stipendiary lay reader of the Church of Holy Trinity, Bacchus Marsh. In November he advertised that he intended to set up as a consultant surveyor and engineer in addition to his clerical duties. However in March 1869 he was sent as lay reader to Egerton near Ballarat, where he made friends with James Simpson, the local schoolmaster, and L. J. Bruun, agent for the town's branch of the London Chartered Bank. As Bruun was returning to the bank late on 8 May, Scott, disguised in mask and cloak, attacked him and forced him to hand over the contents of the safe. He made Bruun write a note certifying his resistance to the robbery; Scott signed it himself with the deliberately mis-spelt 'Captain Moonlite'. Both Bruun and Simpson were charged with robbery but were acquitted; Scott soon left for Sydney.
For some months he lived off the proceeds of the crime, but towards the end of 1870 he began passing valueless cheques. In November he fraudulently bought the yacht, Why-Not, arranged for a skipper and a 'young lady' to accompany him, but was arrested by water police as he tried to leave for Fiji. On 20 December he was given twelve months in Maitland gaol, some of which he spent in Parramatta Lunatic Asylum, feigning madness. While he was in prison Bruun and his friends had detectives set on his trail, and when he was released in April 1872 he was charged with the Egerton gold robbery. While on remand he escaped from Ballarat gaol but was soon recaptured, and on 24 July he appeared before Judge Barry. Scott conducted most of his own defence, cross-examined Bruun for seven hours with 'shrewd and pertinacious questions' and amused the crowd with his facetious remarks. He received ten years hard labour and one year for escaping.
Scott was a recalcitrant and violent prisoner in Pentridge gaol. Released in March 1879, for a while he was a speaker at open-air meetings on prison reform and kindred subjects, but on 18 November with a small band he held up Wantabadgery sheep station near Wagga Wagga for two days. He used the two children of the near-by hotelkeeper as hostages, separating them by force from their parents. Two of the gang (one a boy of 15) and one trooper were killed when the police attacked the homestead. Scott and three others were found guilty of murder and he and one of his accomplices were hanged on 20 January 1880.

Captain Moonlite

Broadcast 6.30pm on 14/06/2004
One hour before bushranger Andrew Scott, (Captain Moonlite) was hung on January 20th, 1880, he asked that he be laid to rest beside the grave of gang member and best mate, James Nesbitt. This wish was not to be granted until more than one hundred years later when a couple of local women became interested in Scott’s letters, and the possibility of a gay relationship between the outlaws.
GEORGE NEGUS: G'day. Another interesting week ahead, starting with our Monday historical look at things, which tonight takes a quite personal turn with a very leading question - what happens when our individual history, as it were, runs out? And later we'll hear about some pretty elaborate funeral customs. But first, remember Captain Moonlite, the bushranger? Well, apparently the not-always-good Captain's heart's desire was to lie beside his best mate for eternity. Strange but true.

SAM ASIMUS: His last words were, "I ask that my body be given to my friends. I want to be buried in Gundagai." And I thought, "Why hasn't he?"

PATRICK SULLIVAN, EDITOR 'GUNDAGAI INDEPENDENT': It was a very romantic thing to do. I think that Sam and Christine actually were having some kind of an imaginary love affair with him by the time he was dug up and brought back.

SAM ASIMUS: It was just basically granting someone's wish and the wish of someone whom I believed was executed unfairly and unjustly. It was righting a wrong for me. Captain Moonlite was Andrew George Scott. He came to Australia in 1868. He actually started as a lay preacher at Bacchus Marsh, a Victorian town. I think it was very much to his liking. He could ride horses and engage in pistol shooting. And by all accounts, he was very charismatic. He was good-looking - intense blue eyes, that wonderful Irish brogue.

PATRICK SULLIVAN: He was allegedly very articulate, very intelligent, well-educated. It's hard to imagine how a bloke with his background could have become a criminal.

SAM ASIMUS: The bank at Mount Egerton was robbed one night. Hardly anyone saw anything. The bank manager was later charged, but he was acquitted. Years later, Scott was charged. He was found with the gold in his possession. He pleaded that he was not guilty. He paid a terrible price for it. He was sent to Pentridge. James Nesbitt was in Pentridge at the same time for theft, and they formed a very close friendship. He was his dearest, truest friend. He wrote to Nesbitt's mother and said, "We have a pure, real, true friendship." I believe he was his soul mate.

PATRICK SULLIVAN: Moonlite did refer to Nesbitt in terms that would suggest perhaps he was gay. But then, on the other hand, if Moonlite was gay, why did he use as his alibi for the Mount Egerton bank robbery the fact that, he claimed, he was with a woman.

SAM ASIMUS: He got out of prison early, after serving 7-odd years of a 10-year sentence, for good behaviour. He linked up with James Nesbitt, starting what he hoped would be a new career in lecturing on prison reform, something he felt very passionately about. But the authorities shut him down. He had too much to tell. He realised he had to get out of Victoria, get away from the persecution. So he linked up with a group of other young men. They actually walked into NSW, where they were hoping for better times. Unfortunately, NSW was gripped in a terrible drought and unemployment was very high. Luck was against them, really. They'd heard of Wantabadgery station, renowned for its hospitality. They were hoping to get food, shelter, perhaps work. Unbeknown to them, it had changed hands. They were turned away. It was absolutely the last straw. I think that they had pinned all their hopes on finding food and shelter there, and something snapped. They came back the next morning, held up the station. Rumours reached
the police in Wagga Wagga that the Kelly Gang had invaded. Over a period of three days, they took 35 people hostage. He treated the women with respect, though some of the men he roughed up. None of the men were shot. He could have. I think in the circumstances, he was probably quite restrained. The police turned up the next morning. Four constables only were sent. Short gunfight. Police fled.

FOOTAGE OF SAM ASIMUS AT RUINS OF BUILDING

This is all that's left of McGlede's hut. This is where the final shoot-out took place between Moonlite, his mates and the police, heavily reinforced after they left Wantabadgery station. It was a scene of great excitement and confusion. It was here that James Nesbitt, the youngest bushranger, Augustus Wernicke, and Constable Bowen were all shot dead. Scott and the surviving gang members were tried in Gundagai and in Darlinghurst, charged with the murder of Constable Bowen. Scott represented himself, and how hard must have that been, two of his friends just freshly buried in Gundagai Cemetery, one his dearest friend. There were times when they said he was so emotional that he had to stop and collect himself. He denied that he fired the shot that killed Constable Bowen.

CAPTAIN MOONLITE: "Though not guilty of the blood of anybody, I am ready to suffer for their sakes and answer for breaking the laws of the country."

SAM ASIMUS: He was sentenced to hang. He used his time in the condemned cells. He wrote volumes - absolute volumes. Letters - letters to so many people. I think he was really, in his mind, trying to square up all his debts, make his final goodbyes. And his letters were all about justice and friendship. They were what moved me in the end, his letters.

CAPTAIN MOONLITE: "I am to die on the 20th instant, and hope that I may rest with my friend. The only thing I long for is the certainty that I may share his grave."

SAM ASIMUS: He was actually hanged on 20 January 1880 at Darlinghurst Court. After that, he was taken...to what is now Rookwood Cemetery and buried in the Anglican part of the cemetery, and there he lay for 107 years...before his last wish was granted. He's buried in Gundagai Cemetery. He is within a few metres of James Nesbitt and Augustus Wernicke. Constable Bowen is not too far away - far enough away to be separate - so that they are all laid to rest in the same place.

GEORGE NEGUS: Quite a tale, and beautifully reconstructed by Kerry Staight and our mates in the GNT Adelaide bureau. Captain Moonlite finally buried with his best mate, James. Sam, by the way, and others chipped in something like six grand to make the Captain's final wish a reality.

William had several male favourites including a Rotterdam bailiff, Van Zuylen van Nijveld. He granted English titles to two of these alleged lovers, who served him loyally as courtiers: Hans Willem Bentinck, who became Earl of Portland; and Arnold Joost van Keppel, who he made Earl of Albemarle.

Arnold Joost van Keppel, 1st Earl of Albemarle, and lord of Voorst in Gelderland (c. 1670 - May 30, 1718), son of Oswald van Keppel and his wife Anna Geertruid van Lintello, was born in Holland about 1670. He became page to William of Orange, accompanied him to England in 1688, and became groom of the bedchamber and master of the robes in 1695. On 10 February 1696/7 William made van Keppel earl of Albemarle, Viscount Bury and Baron Ashford.

In 1700 William gave him lands of enormous extent in Ireland, but parliament obliged the king to cancel this grant, and William then bestowed on him £50,000. The same year he was made a knight of the Garter. Meanwhile he had served both with the English and Dutch troops, was major-general in 1697, colonel of several regiments and governor of 's Hertogenbosch.

http://www.irelandinformationguide.com/William_III_of_England

King Billy ‘preferred pink’ to Orange



A gay activist claims there is evidence William of Orange had male lovers.










Monday July 28 2008

A leading gay rights activist has raised the temperature in the North’s row over homosexuality by claiming there was evidence King William of Orange had male lovers.
Peter Tatchell highlighted the controversial allegation as evidence of hypocrisy over homosexuality in the North, but was condemned by unionists for setting out to deliberately cause offence.
The campaigner. who lobbies internationally for full rights for the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community, will tonight deliver the Amnesty International
Pride Lecture in Belfast. Mr Tatchell’s appearance at Belfast’s week-long gay pride festival comes after senior DUP politician Iris Robinson sparked controversy by branding homosexuality an abomination.
Mrs Robinson, who is the wife of the Northern Ireland First Minister, Peter Robinson, has condemned all attacks on the gay |community, but Mr Tatchell said: "It is particularly hypocritical for unionist politicians to play the homophobic card when their hero William of Orange had male lovers."
King William was married, but some academics have raised hackles by pointing to his promotion of young men to high office as evidence of bisexuality.
A DUP spokesman dismissed the allegation and accused Mr Tatchell of setting out to antagonise.
"This is the kind of deliberately offensive and provocative comment and shock tactics that he has used in the past," the party spokesman said.


http://www.herald.ie/national-news/king-billy-lsquopreferred-pinkrsquo-to-orange-1442148.html

[SIZE=+2]Who is Sheila?[/SIZE]

[SIZE=+1]Dymphna Lonergan[/SIZE]

In 1828 the Sydney newspaper, the Monitor, reported a street fight that had occurred in Sydney on Saint Patrick’s day. The report included the comment that following the fight ‘many a piteous Shela stood wiping the gory locks of her Paddy’. This is the earliest written evidence of the use of the Australian word sheila. The Oxford English Dictionary defines sheila as ‘a young girl or young woman; a girlfriend. Playfully affectionate and predominantly in male use’. The OED also includes the Irish origin of the word:
It may represent a generic use of the (originally Irish) personal name Sheila, the counterpart of Paddy...in any case, it became assimilated to this at some later stage.
We can detect some uncertainty in the OED commentary on the word sheila; a sense that some information does not fit, that something is missing. More recently, the author of The Dinkum Dictionary, Susan Butler, is confident that
‘Sheila’ was a common female name in Ireland, used alongside the name ‘Paddy’ to represent the archetypal Irish couple. From this early usage (dating from the 1820s in Britain) ‘Sheila’ came to mean any female, whether Irish or not. This British use of ‘sheila’ was then transported to the colonies.[1]
I suggest that the reason we have such divergent views on the origin of the Australian English word sheila is because of an etymological error made from the beginning. It is surprising that no one, apparently, has questioned these written assertions that the name Sheila is common in Ireland. It is not. Nor has the name Sheila ever been used in the generic sense of a counterpart to Paddy in Ireland. Neither was the name Sheila common in eighteenth century Australia. Between 1788 and 1828 over two thousand female convicts were transported to Australia from Irish ports.[1] The most common name among them was Mary, followed by Ann/e, Catherine, Margaret, Elizabeth, Brigid and Sara. These, of course, are official first names. Many of these women would have used Irish names or diminutives of the English names, such as: M·ire,¡ine, C·it, Kitty, Kathleen, Peg, Maggie, …ilis, BrÌd, Bridie and Biddy. There were no Sheilas on board those convict ships. The Irish language name SÌle is usually translated into English as Julia. There were no Julias on board these convict ships. That the word sheila as a term for a ‘girl’ or ‘girlfriend’ in Australian English is indisputable. That the generic nature of the name derives from the Irish female first name is disputable. If a generic name, a counterpart to Paddy, had existed at that time it would most likely have been the name Biddy, a shortened for of Brigid. This is a name that was used in America in the nineteenth century as a term for an Irish servant (see entry for biddy in the OED). Given this, the question arises as to why the name Sheila became associated with that of an Irishwoman in Australia, and later as a generic term for Australian women? Why did Australian sheila not also surface in Britain or America, places that experienced a greater number of Irish migrants at any time than Australia? These factors cast doubt on the popular belief that Aus. sheila derived from the Irish female name Sheila. The Irish language, not Irish English, provides a more satisfactory explanation for the origin of the Australian word sheila.
In Ireland, the Irish language word SÌle, which is always written with a capital ‘S’, is used generically in the world of nature and mythology.[1] As applied to humans, however, it is usually a derogatory term, especially when referring to male behaviour. The following are some Irish dictionary definitions:
SÌle: ‘An effeminate man’. ‘A man too fond of
female society, a mollycoddle’. ‘He’s around the
house like an old sheelah’[1]
Sheela: Used in the South as a reproachful
name for a boy or man inclined to do work
or interest himself in affairs properly belonging
to women. See ‘Molly’.[1]
SÌle: HomaighnÈasach
This last dictionary definition translates as ‘homosexual’. It occurs in FoclÛir na CollaÌochta, a recent Irish language dictionary of sexual terminology.[1] The majority of the words in this dictionary do not occur in standard Irish language dictionaries. As the OED suggests, the Australian word sheila is also ‘predominantly in male use’. Furthermore G A Wilkes, in his study of Australian colloquialisms, states that ìno woman would refer to herself as a ‘sheila’î.[1] I suggest that this male connection is where Australian sheila is evocative of the Irish language word SÌle. Both words are also pronounced the same.
The use of the Australian term sheila by males towards males is not generally mentioned in dictionaries which focus on standard Australian English. Significantly, however, The Penguin Book of Australian Slang[1] records a secondary meaning for sheila as: ‘A man who is weak, effeminate, lacking in bravado’. Here, I suggest, is a connection with the definitions discussed earlier of the Irish word SÌle. It is significant that in Australia the official recognition that sheila may be used by males of males arises in a dictionary of slang words. It is likely that Ausralian sheila was originally a taboo word for a homosexual. In Ireland, the only dictionary to admit to the meaning of ‘homosexual’ for the word SÌle, is that recent dictionaries of sexual terminology, a work that is written entirely in the Irish language. Such words are apparently ‘taboo’ in Ireland today. They are reserved for those who use the Irish language. In this they are out of reach of the majority of the population.
In his book Iniskillane,[1] a social study of family and community in the West of Ireland, Hugh Brody outlines the divide in the roles of a typical rural Irish husband and his wife in the 1970s. The daily ritual consisted of the wife rising first and preparing breakfast for her husband and the children. The husband then went to work in the fields. The couple never ate together, and in the evenings it was customary for the husband to visit neighbours or have neighbours visit him while his wife continued with the household and family work. Finally the husband went to bed before his wife. Male and female lived separate lives, in effect, due to 'a highly developed division of sexual roles'.[1] We can presume that any noticeable crossing of this divide would have been commented upon, and in the case of a male, through the use of Irish language terminology such as cistineoir, piteog, and SÌle. Diarmaid ” Muirithe in A Dictionary of Anglo-Irish, provides for the word cistineoir the definition: A cotquean. 'A man who spends a lot of time about the house taking an interest in women's work’. For the word piteog he provides the definition:
An effeminate man. 'A man who prys into things, in
the household or elsewhere, that are supposedly or
understood to belong entirely to the sphere of women.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Irish convicts who were transported to Australia would have experienced not only a change in landscape and climate but also a way of life that was new and no doubt alienating. Especially in those early days when there was a shortage of females, and with the nature of a convict's life in the Penal Colony, work such as washing clothes, cooking and cleaning would have fallen to the male. It may be that those who were seen to be doing this work well, or who may have taken undue interest in it would have been ridiculed for demonstrating effeminacy. It may have been in this climate that the term SÌle was applied to males by males. However, given the double use of the word SÌle in Ireland, to denote not just effeminacy but also homosexuality, we must conclude that the surfacing of this Irish word in Australia may have been prompted by stress following undue exposure to this way of life:
A speaker’s ability to cope with the difficulties
of language varies according to his state of mind,
and it is well known that any kind of emotional
stress, favourable or unfavourable tends to promote
a reversion to the primary language.[1]
Many Irish-speaking convicts under the system of transportation to Australia were men from rural areas, brought up with social norms some of which were peculiar to their own small part of the world. Even before arrival in Australia, conditions on board the convict ships necessitated participation in what may have been considered women's work: cooking, cleaning, the washing of clothes and so on. However, convicts were also entering a world in which, according to Robert Hughes, homosexual activity
was as utterly pervasive in the world of hulks and penal
settlement as it is in modern penitentiaries.[1]
Hughes explains further that homosexuality was also the ‘norm’ in Hyde Oark Barracks in Sydney; young boys especially were preyed upon by old lags. It is likely that few of these boys would have had any homosexual experience before they got to Australia. This would have been doubly traumatic for a young rural Irish Catholic boy, who lived in a society where such behaviour was not only condemned by the Church, but also denied emphatically by society. In 1832 The Molesworth Committee received testimony from the Catholic Bishop of Sydney of the extent of Homosexual activity in the Colony, and its effects on the young. The bishop quoted one particular youth as saying: ‘Such things no one knows in Ireland’.[1] In addition, an 1847 report on Norfolk Island noted that
In general, it was the English who turned to
sodomy; the Irish Catholic prisoners abjured it.[1]
Whether for the purpose of condemning the activity or merely talking about it, the Irish-speaking convicts had a word for a person who took part in homosexual activity; he was a SÌle. This was a word that was known and understood among the Irish convicts and could be passed on to others but yet was a secret word and so safe to use even in the hearing of authorities. The circumstances that were favourable to the utterance of and continued use of the Irish language word SÌle in Australia were: the reversal of male/female domestic roles; homosexual activity of a violent nature; and strong religious beliefs.
The probability that Ir. SÌle meaning ‘Homosexual’ is the origin for Australian sheila is further enhanced when we consider that the word sheila as a generic name for an (Irish) female did not surface in Britain nor in America, countries which experienced far greater numbers of Irish settlers than did Australia. The Australian word sheila is geographical. It reflects the nature of Australian society at that time. Finally the Australian word sheila is a word used almost exclusively by males, is always slightly derogatory when used of females, and, according to The Penguin Book of Australian Slang can also mean
a man who is weak, effeminate, lacking in bravado
In the underworld where slang lives, this connotation for Australian sheila more clearly reflects an origin in Ir. SÌle ‘effeminate male’,’ homosexual,’ than the traditionally held origin of the Irish Christian name Sheila. The Irish language may also provide clues as to how the Australian term sheila is primarily applied to females. Most importantly, we must look to the Irish language directly as a possible source for Australian English words of unknown or uncertain origin. For too long the lure of Irish English has masked this other, more potent, source.
Who Is Sheila?

[1] The most famous is the SÌle na gCÌoch, (often anglicised as Sheela na Gigs), the name given to grotesque female figures of uncertain origin and purpose that adorn the walls of churches in Ireland, and to a lesser extent those of England and France. In the world of nature there is the SÌle na bPÌce ‘earwig’, literally,’ SÌle of the Forks’, SÌle na bPortach ‘heron’, literally, ‘SÌle of the Bog’ and in the phrase SÌle chaoch a dhÈanamh de dhuine, literally ‘to make a SÌle of someone’, figuratively ‘to make a fool of someone’. Finally, the name SÌle is applied to Ireland herself, in the term SÌle na Geira, the word Geira in this case may be a corruption of gadhar, ‘dog’. The histories surrounding these words and phrases have been lost with the loss of the Irish language.

The Hellfire Club

Known locally as The Devil's Kitchen or simply The Hell-Fire Club it is inextricably linked to the infamous Dublin Hell-Fire Club whose viciousness and arrogance is still remembered and whose history is recounted below.

The history of Dublin's Hell-Fire Club, Rathfarnham. Overlooking Dublin city from the south west, at an altitude of 383m (1264ft), is a foreboding ruined hunting lodge, marked on Ordnance Survey maps as the 'Hell-Fire Club'. Current urban lore insists on telling us that it was - and still is - a site commonly used for the practice of 'Satanism' and other occult activities, and that the Devil himself made a brief appearance there at some unspecified time in the past. In a story similar to the one attached to Loftus Hall (a haunted house on the Hook Peninsula), a mysterious stranger seeks shelter on a stormy night, and a card game ensues. A member of the household drops a card, and sees that below the table, the otherwise affable and charming visitor has a cloven hoof. His or her screams made the Devil 'aware of her discovery, and he at once vanished in a thunder-clap leaving a brimstone smell behind him'

At the beginning of the 18th century, a time of sharp contrast between the fabulously wealthy and the destitute, there lived a class of gentry called 'bucks' who spent their lives pursuing enjoyment in a most violent and eccentric manner. Their behaviour was viewed at the time as an insult to the most sacred principals of religion, an affront to Almighty God himself, and corrupting to the minds and morals of young people.

This life consisted; it is said, of gambling, blaspheming, whoring, drinking, violence and even Satanism. The Dublin Hell-Fire Club was founded by Richard Parsons, 1st Earl of Rosse, and Colonel Jack St Leger. Jack St Leger, as his name suggests, had deep sporting instincts and his country house near Athy in County Kildare was the haunt of the leading gamblers and racing men of the day. Huge amounts of money changed hands at parties here, and vast quantities of liquor were consumed. It was in this atmosphere that the Dublin Hell-Fire Club was borne. Its motto was "do as you will".

The club had various headquarters around Dublin such as the now demolished Eagle Tavern on Cork Hill. On occasion at the Eagle, members would sit around a circular table upon which was placed a huge punch bowl of scaltheen, a rancid mixture of Irish whiskey and melted butter. After toasting the Devil and drinking to the 'damnation of the Church and its prelates' the bucks would pour scaltheen over a cat, especially obtained for the occasion, and set fire to the poor creature. Once a wretched animal escaped its tormentors and ran flaming into the street. This caused near panic to the public outside the tavern, as the screaming cat blazed by.

Another favourite meeting place was Daly's Club, College Green. Here the shutters were closed in the morning so that members with hangovers could gamble by candlelight. One gruesome incident occurred when a member, said to be 'Buck' Sheely was caught cheating at cards. A 'court' was convened presided over by 'Buck' English who dressed for the part in the skin, tail and horns of a bull. His verdict was that Sheely was to be hurled through the window of the third floor gaming room. When honour had been satisfied, gambling was resumed. Sheely died in the fall.

The Hell-Fire Club of Dublin really came into its own, though, when it took over Mountpelier House. According to local legend, an ancient cromlech or cairn erected to the old pagan gods of Ireland had been demolished to make way for the lodge. The house was therefore said to be ill-fated but the legend only enhanced it in the eyes of the club members. Its other attributes of its remoteness well suited the bucks and its commanding view of Dublin had a powerful appeal to their insufferable arrogance. For at least 20 years Mountpelier House flourished as a den of all kinds of vice and blasphemy. It was ruined by the bucks in around 1740.

The story of the disaster is well known. At this time the 'Principal' of the Hell-Fire club was a man of enormous wealth called Richard Chappell Whaley. A descendant of Oliver Cromwell, Whaley was a tyrant who was feared and hated by the native population. His nickname was 'Burn-Chapel' Whaley because of his fanatical hatred of religion in general and Roman Catholicism in particular. He used to amuse himself on Sundays by riding around the district setting fire to the thatch of Catholic chapels. His pyromania caused the downfall of Mountpelier House.

After an unfrocked clergyman had performed a Black Mass in one of the two upstairs rooms in Mountpelier House, the ceremony ending in the usual drunken revelry, a footman picking his way through the sprawling bodies spilt some drink on Richard Whaley's coat. Whaley reacted by pouring brandy over the footman and setting him alight. The man fled downstairs clutching at a tapestry hanging by the hall door, trying to douse the flames. Within minutes the whole house was ablaze. Many bucks died, being too drunk and helpless to escape. Whaley managed to leap out of a window along with a few of his more sober companions. Local people watched the blazing pyre convinced that God had taken revenge. Whaley's son, Thomas 'Buck' Whaley was to become, in his short life, the most famous and flamboyant buck of all.

Born in 1766, it was 'Buck' Whaley who rallied the Hell-Fire club from the low ebb to which it had sunk after the burning of Mountpelier House declaring his intention of 'defying God and man in nightly revels'. Black Masses and homosexual orgies were the principal features of these sessions, though Whaley himself had a mistress whom he kept well away from these meetings.

'Buck' Whaley initially squandered the fortune he inherited from his father, but then he won an even greater fortune at the gaming tables as well as in some bizarre wagers. In one wager he won £25,000 from the Duke of Leinster by riding to Jerusalem and back within a year. Needless to say, it was not a pious pilgrimage and he later boasted of having 'drunk his way around the Holy Places'. On an another occasion, for a bet of £12,000, he rode a beautiful Arab stallion in a death-defying leap from the drawing room of his father's house on Stephen's Green to the street some 30 feet below. He won his wager but killed the horse.

Contrition and remorse, however, began to enter into 'Buck' Whaley's mind and so he resolved to seek absolution for his sins. While kneeling in the darkened nave in St Audoen's Church he had a vision of the Devil creeping down the aisle towards him. Seized with terror, Whaley ran from the church and fled Ireland forever.

He lived the last few years of his life, with his mistress, in a mansion he built on the Isle of Man which is still known today as 'Whaley's Folly'. He died at the age of 34 of sclerosis of the liver. In his memoirs, a repentant 'Buck' Whaley wrote that he felt 'no trifling sensation from the prospect that this simple narrative may persuade the young and inexperienced, if the language of truth has the power of persuasion, that a life of dissipation can produce no enjoyment, and that tumultuous pleasures afford no real happiness.'

With his death the Dublin Hell-Fire Club ceased to exist.http://www.rockabillyireland.com/forum/index.php?topic=358.0;prev_next=next

sensibleken wrote: »

edit to add: alternative title for this thread, 'Sodom and Begorrah!'...sorry.

One obvious flaw with Strangers is that it focuses almost exclusively on the upper echelons, a problem Robb attributes to historical record. It is also unfortunate that the book is tilted more toward gay male life than lesbian life. To read Strangers is to hear a lot about Tchaikovsky, André Gide, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Marcel Proust, and John Maynard Keynes, men of privileged intellect or station, or both, who had access to a larger network of people and whose lives were individually documented.

In 1533 Henry VIII passed the Buggery Act 1533, a sodomy law which made anal intercourse (as well as bestiality) an offence punishable by hanging, regardless of gender. Even prior to this homosexuals were tortured and killed for religious reasons.[citation needed] In 1861 section 61 of the Offences against the Person Act 1861 removed the death penalty for homosexuality. However, male homosexual acts still remained illegal and were punishable by imprisonment and in 1885 section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 extended the laws regarding homosexuality to include any kind of sexual activity between males. Lesbians were never acknowledged or targeted by legislation.

Introduction

Religious objections to same sex attraction between men have existed since at least the Middle Ages1 but were first endorsed in law in England in the 1533 Act of Henry VIII, which classified sodomy as an illegal act between man and woman, man and man, or man and beast.2 This law, which was re-enacted in 1563, was the basis for all male homosexual convictions until 1885, when the Criminal Assessment Act extended the legal sanction to any sexual contact between males.2 The end of the 19th century saw the advent of the concept of homosexuality as a pathological medical or psychological condition,3–6 which legitimised treatments to change it. The social construction of the diagnosis of homosexuality occurred within the context of powerful sociopolitical forces against any variation from the heterosexual norm that prevailed for much of the 20th century.6 Though sexual behaviour in private between adult men was decriminalised in Britain in 1967, treatments to change homosexuals into heterosexuals peaked in the 1960s and early 1970s.7 However, we have little knowledge of the patients who experienced, or the professionals who administered, such treatments. We conducted an oral history study of treatments to change same sex attraction in Britain from 1950 tounderstand why people received treatment, how they experienced it, and how it affected their lives.

Sodomy was punishable by death in England until 1861. Forty-six people were executed in England alone between 1810 and 1835.

Strangers builds its case slowly, and the first half of the book almost refutes the author’s thesis. Although Robb credits doctors with giving gays a sense of community, a place to tell their stories, the downside of their diagnoses seems hardly worth it. Many physicians believed that men and women could masturbate themselves into "sexual inversion," as it was then called. The criteria for identifying gays seem even more haphazard. For some reason, the ability to urinate in a straight line was a tell-tale sign. One medical man devised a rather ingenious test. "Throw an object at the lap of a sitting homosexual, said the Berlin doctor Magnus Hirschfeld in 1913, and he will automatically open his legs to catch it. A lesbian, being a natural trouser-wearer, will close her legs."

For the brother of one participant, there was no life after treatment. He died in hospital due to the side effects of apomorphine. Several sought out further treatment, usually private psychoanalysis; none had further behavioural treatments. Some believed that the treatments had helped themto deal with their sexual feelings but not in the way intended:

Treatments

The age at which people received treatment ranged from 13 to 40 years, with most being in their late adolescence and early 20s. Treatments described were mainly administered in NHS hospitals throughout Britain and in one case a military hospital. Those treated privately usually underwent psychoanalysis. The most common treatment (from the early 1960s to early 1970s, with one case in 1980) was behavioural aversion therapy with electric shocks (11 participants). Nausea induced by apomorphine as the aversive stimulus was reported less often (four participants in the early 1960s).
In electric shock aversion therapy, electrodes were attached to the wrist or lower leg and shocks were administered while the patient watched photographs of men and women in various stages of undress. The aim was to encourage avoidance of the shock by moving to photographs of the opposite sex. It was hoped that arousal to same sex photographs would reduce, while relief arising from shock avoidance would increase, interest in opposite sex images. Some patients reported undergoing detailed examination before treatment, while others were assessed more perfunctorily. Patients would recline on a bed or sit in a chair in a darkened room, either alone or with the professional behind a screen. Each treatment lasted about 30 minutes, with some participants given portable electricshock boxes to use at home while they induced sexual fantasies. Patients receiving apomorphine were often admitted to hospital due to side effects of nausea and dehydration and the need for repeated doses, while those receiving electric shock aversion therapy attended as outpatients for weeks or in some cases up to two years.
Oestrogen treatment to reduce libido (two participants in the 1950s), psychoanalysis (three private participants and one NHS participant in the 1970s), and religious counselling (two participants in the 1990s) were also reported. Other forms of treatment were electroconvulsive therapy, discussion of the evils of homosexuality, desensitisation of an assumed phobia of the opposite sex, hypnosis, psychodrama, and abreaction. Dating skills were sometimes taught, and occasionally men were encouraged to find a prostitute or female friend with whom to try sexual intercourse.

http://www.oscholars.com/TO/Appendix/Library/walshe.htm

The First Gay Irishman? Ireland and the Wilde Trials.[1]

Éibhear Walshe

[This essay first appeared as ‘The First Gay Irishman? Ireland and the Wilde Trials’ in Éire-Ireland - Volume 40:3 & 4, Fómhar/Geimhreadh / Fall/Winter 2005, pp. 38-57; and is here republished by kind permission.]

To be sure, sexuality is not a fixed entity, either in an individual or in a culture. Nonetheless, a post-modern idea of Wilde (and everything else) as endlessly elusive can obscure the real determinants in cultural change. Twentieth-century uses of Wilde’s name, certainly, have depended on simplifications, mistaken apprehensions and downright falsehoods. However, the point is not Wilde’s true identity but the identity that the trials foisted on him. It was not who he was but who we have made him to be. I want to suggest that there is unfinished business here; that Ireland, as much as England and the United States, might claim the name of Wilde as a gay icon.
–Alan Sinfield.[2]

Like Sinfield, my interest is with some ‘unfinished business’ in Irish cultural studies, an examination of how Oscar Wilde’s name and his crime provoked public discourse around homosexuality in modern Irish culture. If perceptions of sexual identity evolve partly through public events, how did Irish media and literary sources configure Wilde’s homosexuality during the 1895 trials and after? As Sinfield suggests, the question is not simply about who Wilde actually was, either sexually or racially, but of what we make him stand for. In this essay I chart the revealing ways in which Wilde’s homosexuality became a contested discourse within twentieth-century Ireland, a discourse that became intertwined with Irish cultural nationalism.

Foucault has argued that only in the nineteenth century did the homosexual become a type or a personage with a past and a case history. In Ireland, as in other societies towards the end of the nineteenth century, modern ideas of sexual identity began to take shape and draw meaning from visible mainstream cultural events. In analysing how of the idea of the homosexual was formed, Foucault studied the history of the conditions shaping institutional and discursive notions of homosexuality in Europe. I argue that the study of twentieth-century Irish homosexuality formulation must begin with an account of Wilde’s visible presence as sexual other, through the analysis of the strategies of normalization used to police his unnameable sin within Irish media and literary accounts. In any perception of homosexuality in modern Ireland, Oscar Wilde, famous for his writings and notorious for his sexuality, links Irishness and ‘queerness.’

Much has been written on British media treatments of the Wilde trials, but little or nothing on the Irish sources. We can, however, observe the formulation of the notion of homosexuality in modern Ireland within the island’s media coverage of the Wilde trials and in subsequent Irish accounts of his life and his sexuality. In this essay, I argue that the local media coverage of the trials drew out an ambivalent and often contradictory contestation around Wilde’s sexual sin from within Irish cultural discourse. The Irish newspapers struck a markedly differing note from that of their British counterparts, and subsequent writers from Ireland, notably G. B. Shaw, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Brendan Behan and others ‘nationalized’ Wilde, (a word I borrow from Margot Norris) by claiming him as a figure of affirming dissidence.[3] In this national appropriation of Wilde, these later artists could reconfigure his unsettling sexual sin by seeing it as the causal factor within an episode of anti-imperialist defiance. My argument is that Wilde came to be seen by subsequent Irish writers as a disruptive figure of anti-colonial resistance and this reconstruction, in some ways, mitigated his aberrant homosexuality for those writers and indeed for their society. Even the powerfully homophobic culture that twentieth-century Ireland was to become located strategies by which the unspeakable Oscar could be reclaimed as Wilde, the Irish rebel.

Ambiguities abound in Wilde’s life and work, not least around his own representations of himself as a sexual being. Nevertheless the useful and incontestable fact remains that in May 1895, an Irishman named himself publicly as a lover of other men, although qualifying this declaration of homosexual identity by claiming that his love for other men had never been expressed sexually. At a critical moment in his trial, Wilde defined the love that dare not speak its name by citing a proud genealogy of same-sex lovers. The significance of Wilde’s speech, in this context, is that for the first time we have a public affirmation of homosexual love from an Irishman.

More than ten years earlier, a court case in Dublin had also dealt with this forbidden topic, the so-called Dublin Castle scandal of 1884. Because public discourses around homosexuality had been so very different in this case, it is illuminating to contrast Irish media coverage of the earlier scandal with that of the Wilde trials. In May 1884 The Irish nationalist politician William O’Brien publicly alleged same-sex activities involving Dublin Castle administrators and officers of his newspaper United Ireland. O’Brien’s allegations came from what H. Montgomery Hyde describes as ‘the widespread belief that homosexual ‘vice’ was rampant in official circles in Ireland.’[4] According to historian Leon O’Broin,

gly reports had been in circulation for some time about the sexual perversions of some of the headquarter officers in Dublin Castle. The Nationalist members of parliament attacked Spenser and Trevelyan and imputed them with the misdeeds of their employees. Tim Healy, with typical sarcasm, alleged that Spencer’s services to the state had well entitled him to promotion and suggested that he should become the duke of Sodom and Gomorrah.[5]

This rumour and indirect reporting came to a head when, in a series of events that would be uncannily repeated during the Wilde trials, O’Brien used his newspaper to make allegations, particularly about Gustavus Cornwall, the secretary of the General Post Office. As if anticipating Wilde’s action against Queensberry, Cornwall sued O’Brien for libel, and the trial opened on 2nd July 1884. Extensive evidence was brought against Cornwell and others; not only was O’Brien cleared of libel, but Cornwall and seven other men were now under police surveillance. Subsequently, they were all arrested and tried on 5th August 1884 in Green Street courthouse in Dublin on charges relating to indecency and sodomy. During this second trial, other gay men were called as witnesses against Cornwall, but as they were in danger of losing their own jobs, they were reluctant to give evidence against him. In his memoirs, the profoundly homophobic O’Brien characterizes this reluctance as ‘one of those sudden gusts of infantile fretfulness which are apt to sweep over persons of their peculiar mentality…[when]… the three essential witnesses refused to be examined.’[6] ‘Providentially,’ he further observed, ‘the cowardice of persons thus diseased is commonly as abject as their depravity.’[7]

By the end of 1884, the trials finally concluded, with a number of the men found guilty and sentenced to hard labour and penal servitude. The central protagonist, Cornwall, was acquitted and, due to retire anyway, he resigned his post in Dublin Castle. According to O’Broin, however, ‘Cornwall lost his post office job for having, as a Dublin wag put it, tampered with Her Majesty’s males.’[8] In relation to the Wilde trials, most noteworthy is that the publicity around the Dublin Castle trials provoked widespread Irish media condemnation of homosexuality. All Irish papers distanced themselves from what they chose to see as a foreign vice, using this condemnation for purpose of nationalist rhetoric. In the United Ireland in 7th June 1884, O’Brien wrote of the defendants’ homosexuality as ‘the system of depravity unsurpassed in the history of human crime’ and compared it with ‘the comparatively venial crimes (as far as human society is concerned) of the Moonlighters and Invincibles.’[9] Other accounts stressed the un-Irishness of those accused: The Evening Telegraph’s attacked Cornwall for ‘contaminating the running stream of Irish moral purity by stirring up the sink of pollution implanted by foreign hands in its very edges,’[10] while the Dundalk Democrat’s noted sodomy as ‘a crime that was unmentionable and happily is unknown and was previously unheard of by ninety-nine out of every hundred of the people in this country.’[11]

In the light of Irish media accounts of the Dublin Castle scandal, the response to Wilde’s arrest and trial is striking in some Irish newspapers. Irish newspapers, again obliged to confront the dangerous topic of homosexuality, elided the issue by concentrating on Irish nationalist outrage at British legal injustice. Now that an Irishman was at the centre of the scandal and not a collection of hated Dublin Castle administrators, the discourse around homosexuality became much less direct, more circumspect than that appearing in the British press.

Linked to this circumspection in the Irish media at the time was a tendency within later Irish sources to interpret Wilde’s behaviour in the courtroom of the Old Bailey as heroic and politicised. In other words, Wilde’s defence against the charge of homosexuality and gross indecency was later claimed for the tradition of Irish Republican defiance in the face of British injustice. In particular, when, during the trial, Wilde was asked to define the exact nature of ‘the love that dare not speak its name’, a coded poem about homosexuality by Lord Alfred Douglas, his response would be seen as one of the great Irish anti-imperialist speeches from the dock. Seamus Heaney, for example, asserted a full century after Wilde’s ordeal that ‘during his trials in 1895, Wilde had been magnificent in the dock and conducted himself with as much dramatic style as any Irish patriot ever did’.[12] In truth, Wilde wasn’t exactly being truthful and certainly not being patriotic when he denied the sexual element in the love that dare not speak its name, but his declaration broke the wall of public silence around homosexuality when he dared to bring it to a point of public utterance.[13] His homosexual love did have to speak its name when the law demanded an answer, however partial his answer. The simple fact that he made such a profession of ennobling same sex love is in itself precisely the factor that provoked public disturbance and debate. The vital importance here is the implication of Wilde’s articulation of the homoerotic for Irish public discourse. Martyrs and figures of political rebellion are often constructed retrospectively and this was the case with Wilde in Ireland. Wilde’s downfall would be read by Shaw, Yeats and others in the light of the literary and political career of his mother, Speranza, a view aligning him with the rhetorical traditions of Irish Republicanism and, indirectly, with the many impassioned speeches made by Irish activists in English courtrooms during the nineteenth century. As I will suggest, these later reading of Wilde the Irish rebel served to mitigate the severity of Irish commentators on his sexuality and thus are linked to the Irish media discretion when reporting directly on his trials.

THE WILDE TRIALS AND IRELAND

The three trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895 and the consequent newspaper coverage provide us with a moment of crucial engagement with the question of homosexuality in Ireland. Linda Dowling argues that ‘Wilde’s statement in the trial created a new language of moral legitimacy pointing forward to Anglo-American decriminalisation and, ultimately, a fully developed assertion of homosexual rights.’[14] But did it enable the same language of moral legitimacy for homosexual rights in Ireland? Certainly his disgrace radicalized Wilde’s own sense of his sexuality after his release and subsequent exile in Europe. He wrote to Robert Ross in February 1898, making an implicit link between patriotism and uranian love: ‘A patriot put in prison for loving his country loves his country, and a poet in prison for loving boys loves boys. To have altered my life would have been to have admitted that Uranian love is ignoble. I hold it to be noble – nobler than other forms.’ [15] From the trials onwards, Wilde’s name and his fate elicited very particular perceptions and notions of homosexuality. In Britain, as Ed Cohen and Michael Foldy have shown, the Wilde trials had the effect of drawing out homophobia from the British media.[16] Because of the unmentionable nature of his sexual sin, Wilde’s body became the site for displaced unease. For Cohen

t is hardly surprising that the newspaper reporting of Wilde’s prosecution conjoined the spectacular and the characterological in order to figure ‘Oscar Wilde’ as embodying a new type of sexual offender. As soon as Wilde himself became the subject of legal scrutiny, it was very clear that it was his body that was at stake in the production of public meaning engendered by the case.[17]

In the Irish media, these same issues of unease and sexual phobia are evident, as Wilde’s body also becomes a site for contested meaning. But in Ireland this unease becomes ambivalent and is, to some degree, contested and undermined by resentment of British imperialism.

Until 1895, his Irishness empowered Oscar Wilde as a writer of comedies of manners. Declan Kiberd notes that the ‘ease with which Wilde effected the transition from stage Ireland to stage England was his ultimate comment on the shallowness of such categories…To his mortification and intermittent delight, Wilde found that his English mask was not, by any means a perfect fit.’[18] However, from the outset of the first trial, Wilde’s celebrity was transformed into notoriety by Queensberry’s accusation that he was posing as a ‘somdomite.’ Wilde himself had written in The Soul of Man under Socialism of ‘that monstrous and ignorant thing that is called Public opinion.’[19] Now, this monstrous and ignorant thing moved against Wilde to demonize him as a corruptor of youth and a destroyer of innocence. Foldy shows that ‘the Wilde Trials were unusual in that they provided a single forum and a single frame of reference for all of these otherwise disparate concepts: ‘decadence,’ ‘degeneracy,’ ‘and same sex passion.’’[20] Xenophobia as well as homophobia prompted attacks on Wilde’s decadent foreignness, but his ‘French’ decadence rather than his Irish unruliness fuelled media attacks in Britain. Foldy points out that Wilde

represented a frightening constellation of threats which conflated all these disparate elements and associations: he represented foreign vice, foreign art and indirectly, the legacy of foreign rulers … thus when the newspapers attacked Wilde and condemned his foreign vice, they were also expressing their xenophobic fear of foreigners and foreign influences, their hatred of a useless and parasitic aristocracy, and their intolerance for useless artists and for anyone who would actively try to subvert the status quo.[21]

Wilde’s own foreignness as an Irishman was evidently little used by the British media as a weapon to attack his sexual otherness. And only at a late stage of the trials, when conviction seemed imminent, was his Irishness directly referred to in court. [22] At the end of the third trial, Sir Edward Clarke, the defence lawyer, urged the jury to acquit Wilde using the following mitigating plea of his racial otherness. (Clarke apparently felt that he had no other extenuating plea to offer.)

If upon an examination of the evidence you therefore feel it your duty to say that the charges against the prisoner have not been proved, then I am sure that you will be glad that the brilliant promise which has been clouded by these accusations, and the bright reputation which was so early clouded in the torrent of prejudice which a few weeks ago was sweeping through the press, have been saved by your verdict from absolute ruin: and thus it leaves him, a distinguished man of letters and a brilliant Irishman, to live among us a life of honour and repute and to give in the maturity of his genius gifts to our literature of which he has given only the promise of his early youth. [23]

Noreen Doody comments that Clarke perhaps appealed ‘to the generally accepted nineteenth-century view of the Irish as less responsible than their English ‘betters.’[24] This late reference to the defendant’s racial identity, however, proved futile, and Clarke failed to develop it further. But, as will become apparent in the last section of this study, subsequent Irish accounts of the trials and of convicted man’s decision to face arrest afterwards seized upon Wilde’s national pride and sense of honour as motivating his behaviour. Irish sources came to lionize Wilde for his racial difference, his Anglo-Irish pride, and old-fashioned chivalry.

Since Wilde’s third trial in May 1895 dealt most directly with his homosexuality, the coverage of that trial in a range of Irish newspapers, both in the north and south. is illuminating. Major Irish newspapers like The Irish Times carried daily accounts, but most of these reports were discreet, business-like, and impersonal. (Exceptions were accounts in The Irish News and Belfast Morning News on Monday 27th May informing readers that ‘Oscar Wilde, who lived on an extraordinary reputation, has thus disappeared and let us hope the last has been heard of him.’) Irish newspapers were reticent in reporting court proceedings and reluctant to name the defendant’s crime. As Cohen and Foldy have demonstrated, the British media also avoided direct mention of same-sex activities by displacing that unnameable sin onto Wilde’s body. The Irish press, however, maintained a more discreet distance from Wilde’s sin and from his body: on Friday 24th May, The Evening Herald even ran its coverage of the trials under the heading ‘Wilde’s Defence: Accused extremely unwell and talked with concern about his anxiety.’ The Cork Examiner carried short daily notices concerning the trial from Wednesday 22nd May until Monday, 27th May 1895. But in its coverage, the paper tended to pay much more attention to the parallel story of the public fistfight between the Marquis of Queensbury and his son, Lord Douglas of Hawick, a fracas that took place in the course of the trial. On Wednesday 22nd May, the paper made its first reference to the trial by discussing the ‘specific charges’ concerning Wilde’s co-accused, Alfred Taylor: but these charges are unnamed, as is Wilde. More is made of fight between Queensbury and his son, presumably a safer topic in the reporting on Friday 24th May and on Saturday 25th May; however, the paper does finally mention Wilde as ‘betraying tokens of the keenest anxiety’ on the Saturday. Only on Monday 27th May, when Wilde had been sentenced did The Cork Examiner refer directly to ‘immoral practices,’ but with a great deal of sympathy for the ‘ill and anxious’ defendant.

Such circumspection differs from British coverage. The Belfast Newsletter used the words ‘gross indecency’ about Taylor straight off in Wednesday 22nd May and gave details of the rent boy evidence on Thursday 23rd. But when finally, on Monday May 27th, the newspaper devoted a full length article to the case, it confined itself to talking about ‘certain misdemeanours’ and ‘improper motives.’ This reticence appeared when the English newspapers were far harder on Wilde. For example on 6th April, The Daily Telegraph, the newspaper with the largest circulation in London, reported that ‘[w]e have had enough and more than enough of Mr OSCAR WILDE, who has been the means of inflicting upon public patience during the recent episode as much moral damage of the most offensive and repulsive kind as any individual could well cause.’

Why were the Irish media so discreet in the coverage of the Wilde trials? Several factors may have accounted for such discretion, one being the republican legacy of his mother, Speranza. More crucially, the political climate in Dublin—with the growing pressure in southern Ireland for political autonomy—may well have muted any condemnation of an Irishman at odds with the British legal and political establishment. In the earlier Dublin Castle Scandal of 1884, the investigation reflected not just homophobic unease with same-sex activities, but the antipathy Irish nationalist politicians felt towards colonial administrators. Although Wilde’s nationality failed to protect him during his trials in London, it may have provided him with some mitigating cover within Irish society in a period of rising nationalism.

In contrast to the reticence of other Irish newspapers, however, The Freeman’s Journal of Monday May 27th 1895 carried an unusually lengthy discussion of Wilde’s conviction; but even at this very early stage, the Irish commentators clearly found himself in a tricky, often contradictory position. The anonymous journalist, ‘Our Own Correspondent,’ devotes a substantial portion of his general report on London affairs to condemning Wilde. His discussion of the case and the sentencing follows the usual pattern of condemnation: direct mention of Wilde’s homosexuality is avoided and instead the defendant’s body becomes the site upon which the trial’s sexual significance can be inscribed. In Cohen’s words, Oscar Wilde’s body is now ‘a descriptive trope that personalises the criminal proceedings.’[25] The Freeman’s Journal correspondent employs terms familiar in the London press— such as ‘horrid,’ ‘festering corruption,’ and ‘abominations’— to justify the sentence:

As to the horrid character of Wilde’s crime, it is quite superfluous to add anything to what Judge Wills, who held the scales of justice with scrupulous fairness, said in passing sentence. The remarkable thing is to discover now that Oscar Wilde was a centre of festering corruption seems to have been known in the artistic and theatrical circles in which he moved. But it is satisfactory anyway to feel that even the most brazen effrontery in the pursuit of such abominations does not bring immunity from punishment…It is even said that the police could lay their hands on fifty men well known in society who are equally guilty with him and whose connection with this odious scandal has been notorious for years.[26]

The correspondent’s view of a queer community hidden within artistic and theatrical circles — of a covert secret society with Wilde at the centre — shifts the perception of homosexuality from individual acts of sexual activity towards the notion, albeit hostile, of a community created around sexual preference. The analysis then moves from a general denunciation of the defendant’s culpability and incorporates two accounts of his public appearances in 1895, one just before the trials— on stage at the first night of An Ideal Husband —and the other at the end of the trials in the dock of the Old Bailey. Here, descriptions of Wilde’s body, his dress, and his demeanour are encoded, through the interpolation of terms such as ‘condescending’ and insolence,’ within the rhetoric of sexual decadence and arrogance; such writing provides the evidence that the defendant was indeed ‘a centre of festering corruption’ and focuses public attention on his body. As Cohen notes, ‘the press corps anticipated the legal attachment of Wilde’s body by confining/ defining him within their interpretative gaze.’[27]

Some months ago I saw Oscar Wilde at the first night of ‘An Ideal Husband ‘. He was then in the zenith of his fame… Wilde himself was in a stage box, being flattered and lionized by a party of most distinguished persons – men and women- whose praise he condescendingly accepted. He was dressed in a last note of fashion, faultlessly groomed and assuming airs of semi-royal graciousness to an admiring audience…He strutted in from the wings with an air of contemptuous indifference, one hand in his trouser pocket, and opera hat in his other… The object of this ovation responded with a shrug of the shoulders suggesting a feeling of deprecatory boredom. When silence had been restored, he drawled out a few words of studied insolence and retired. [28]

Then Wilde’s body is reconstructed as in ‘an outing,’ a public exposure of his hidden sexuality. With puritanical glee the writer contrasts Wilde’s bodily frailty and obvious physical strain with his earlier physical arrogance.

I saw Oscar Wilde on Friday last in the dock of the Old Bailey and a more shocking contrast could not possibly be conceived. The aspect of sleek, well fed luxuriousness had vanished, the cheeks were lined and flabby, and wore a most unearthly colour. His eyes were bloodshot and expressive of the last stage of acute terror. – The eyes of a man who might at any time get a fatal seizure from overstrain. His hair was all in disorder and he crouched into a corner of the dock with his face turned towards the jury and the witness box, his head resting on his hand so that it was almost hid from the public…The general impression he conveyed was of a man filled with a vague hopeless terror, not of one filled with shame at the dreadful ignominy of his position. [29]

In this shifting representation of Wilde’s physicality that renders him bestial and inhuman, the body becomes the site for displaced horror at an unnamed sexual sin. No longer the arrogant playwright strutting onto the stage, the terrorized defendant now attempts to hide his body from the public gaze, even as he lacks the appropriate shame and penitence before his sexual aberrance. Until this passage, The Freeman’s Journal account follows patterns of representation and condemnation appearing in English versions of the trials. However, as he discusses the judicial proceedings, ‘our own [Irish] correspondent’ raises issues absent from British coverage. Reminding his readers that the jury in the second trial was dismissed because of its failure to reach a unanimous verdict of guilty for Wilde, he recalls that the abrupt ending of that trial led to press speculation that the jury might themselves have been ‘corrupt’ or biased in Wilde’s favour, thus sexually suspect. ‘Our own correspondent’ then reveals his national identity and his nationalist fervor:

We all know what trial by jury is – in England. It is the palladium of English justice and all the rest of it. It is a peculiarly English institution which the ‘Celtic Fringe’ is quite incapable of appreciating or utilising at its proper value…Mere Irish juries had been accused freely in agrarian or political cases in refusing to place absolute trust in the evidence of policemen or informers but here was a London jury without the suspicion of an Irishman about it accused of being actuated by what among the ‘Celtic Fringe’ would be regarded as an immeasurably baser motive in refusing to find the prisoners guilty. …It is impossible to escape the conclusion that an Old Bailey jury must be very amenable to influences of this kind and that the high-flown eulogies we have been accustomed to from English orators in the House of Commons on the immaculate character of the English juries as compared with Irish are mere pharisaical humbug. [30]

Cohen argues that Wilde’s identification as a homosexual was produced in reaction to its opposite, the heterosexual: for an identity to take shape, it needed its binary opposite. But in the terms of Irish cultural discourse, Wilde as sexual ‘other’ was made safe within another discourse of oppositional types, Celtic versus British. The sexual ‘type’ of homosexuality invoking Wilde’s guilt and ‘festering corruption,’ is collapsed into an anti-imperialist discourse; thus as the writer moves into a lengthy diatribe against British justice, we lose sight of Wilde’s contaminated body. This contemporary Irish account in The Freeman’s Journal is probably the first to subsume sexuality into the national question. Wilde’s downfall, now building on the appeal of national martyrdom, was to be re-imagined by later Irish writers in the light of their own aesthetic and political purposes

NATIONALISING WILDE: JOYCE, YEATS, SHAW AND BEHAN.

This process of ‘nationalizing’ Wilde, claiming him as a figure of transgressive empowerment, continued in the following decades with James Joyce’s March 1909 publication of an article, ‘Oscar Wilde: The Poet of Salome,’ in a Trieste newspaper. Since James Joyce was only thirteen when the trials occurred and eighteen when Wilde died, his view of the earlier writer was constructed at a distance, both temporally and spatially. In the course of his brief essay, written to mark a Trieste performance of Richard Strauss’s opera Salome, Joyce addresses Wilde’s homosexuality directly, with characteristic forthrightness. He opens with a familiar discourse of pseudo-genetic rationalization for Wilde’s sexuality, suggesting an epileptic personality as a causal factor—without supplying any corroborating biographical evidence. Furthermore he cites as ‘a determining factor for [Wilde’s] evolving sexuality,’ or unhappy mania,’ again without evidence, the belief that Speranza wished for a daughter while pregnant with Oscar and then dressed her younger son in skirts (‘dragging’ him to his ruin)’ : ‘There are circumstances regarding the pregnancy of Lady Wilde and the infancy of her son which, in the eyes of some, explain in part the unhappy mania (if it may be called that) that later dragged him to his ruin.’[31]

However, Joyce more pointedly argues that Wilde destabilized the widespread homosocial structures underpinning Victorian British culture, identifying the homophobic panic that his outing unleashed in the male social structures of his time: ’Anyone who follows closely the life and language of men, whether in soldiers’ barracks or in the great commercial houses, will hesitate to believe that all those who threw stones at Wilde were themselves spotless.’[32] For Joyce, the consequent rage against Wilde in Britain represented the fury of a society engaged in self recognition: ‘What Dorian Gray’s sin was no one says and no one knows? Anyone who has recognised it has committed it.’[33] Because Wilde challenges the hegemony of the British Empire, Joyce begets him, as it were, as a precursor for his own aesthetic of exile, disgrace, and defiance. ‘Here we touch the pulse of Wilde’s art— sin. He deceived himself into believing that he was the bearer of good news of neo-paganism to an enslaved people.’[34] Joyce, therefore, saw Wilde as an exemplar; by refashioning him as a subversive and a rebel, the later self-exiled writer afforded Wilde a counter-tradition of Irish dissent. Joseph Valente argues that the two authors, in Joyce’s view, developed related means of expressing resistance to the constraints of their lives.

Mediated by his compatriot Wilde, Oxford Hellenism afforded Joyce a script to be performed or mimicked in his youth and a narrative code to be implemented and manipulated in his fictive representations of that youth. It lent the lived and the written story a shared ideological basis, a discourse of individual self-development that could address and resist in concerted fashion, the main intellectual, sexual and aesthetic constraints of Irish catholic life and the political inequalities of British colonial life. [35]

Two later biographical accounts, both much coloured by the subject’s relationship with the writers in question, further develop the view of Wilde as the Irish subversive. In his 1914 autobiography, W.B. Yeats writes warmly of his relationship with the older writer and acknowledges Wilde’s aesthetic influence and helpful patronage upon his own arrival in London in the late 1880’s. In particular, Yeats describes his visit to Wilde’s house in May 1895, during the third trial, when the young poet was anxious to assist the defendant with letters of support from other Irish writers. Yeats reacted to his fellow Irishman’s disgrace with empathy and support. Although hoping that Wilde was innocent of the charges of sexual immorality, he ‘considered him, essentially, a man of action…and I was certain that, guilty or not guilty, he would prove himself a man.’[36] Because many of his closest friends and associates in London were either homosexual or bisexual, public exposure of Wilde’s same-sex activities failed to alienate Yeats. The poet was concerned, rather, with constructing his friend as the archetype of the Irish tragic artist, the lone figure standing against the commonplace and suffering as a result at the hands of over-sexualized heterosexuals:

I have never doubted for an instant that he made the right decision, and that he owes to that decision half of his renown…Tragedy awoke another self, the rage and contempt that filled the crowds in the street, and all men and women who had an over-abundant normal sexual instinct. [37]

Yeats thus problematized the very heterosexuality that constructed Wilde as sexual other. The poet is also the only source for the belief that Lady Wilde urged her son to stay and face prison rather than leave for France. This otherwise unattested story has become part of the Wilde legend: the rebel mother urging her son to live up to the code of Irish republican honour. Yeats writes, ‘I heard later, from whom I forget now, that Lady Wilde had said,’ If you stay, even if you go to prison, you will always be my son, it will make no difference to my affection but if you go, I will never speak to you again… .’[38] Repeatedly, in these Irish accounts of Wilde, Speranza is figured as pivotal in the determinant of Wilde’s sexuality and also as a driving force in his journey towards public disgrace and consequent aesthetic martyrdom, her republicanism compensating for her overwhelming and damaging maternal influence.

Another Anglo-Irish Protestant writer, George Bernard Shaw, left a very different version of the same events. In 1916 Shaw provided a letter of commentary for his friend Frank Harris’ biography of Wilde, a letter subsequently published as part of Harris’ study. Shaw grew up in Dublin as a contemporary of Wilde’s, and perhaps the two men were rather too close for comfort as Irish writers in London. In any case, Shaw was characteristically sceptical about his co-patriot’s aesthetics and sexuality, although he viewed Wilde’s comedies of manners as part of the tradition of Anglo-Irish dramatic writing in London.[39] As Joseph Bristow points out, Shaw was the first critic to note the connection between Wilde’s Irishness and the subversive subtext of his comedies.[40] When Wilde became the subject of widespread public opprobrium in London, Shaw, like Yeats, supported him and tried to dissuade him from the libel case against Queensbury. But in writing about Wilde’s homosexuality, Shaw displayed ambivalence: a conjunction of supportive broadmindedness, distance, and self-doubt. ‘My impulse to rally to him in this misfortune and my disgust at ‘the Man Wilde’ scurrilities of the newspapers was irresistible.’[41]

I don’t quite know why, for my toleration of his perversity and recognition of the fact that it does not imply any general depravity or coarseness of character is an acquirement through observation and reflection. I have all the normal repugnance to homosexuality- if it is really normal which nowadays one is sometimes provoked into doubting.[42]

Unlike Yeats, Shaw distanced himself from Wilde’s homosexuality, although like others, he blamed Speranza for her son’s ‘perversity.’

Expounding the startling theory (with no medical evidence) that Wilde’s mother, suffered from gigantism and that her son had inherited her physical abnormality and was thus sexually monstrous, Shaw turned to biological explanations for Wilde’s aberrant sexuality. However such unsubstantiated theorizing— a biological determination viewing the mother as the perverting influence on normative heterosexuality—suggests Shaw’s need to explain away the sexuality that led Wilde to prison. Eventually, however, Shaw falls back on a discourse of Anglo-Irish feudal honour: ‘ I still believe that his fierce Irish pride had something to do with his refusal to run away from the trial.’[43] One of Shaw’s most stubborn, if whimsically expressed, beliefs was in the moral strength and tenacity of the Irish Protestant as compared to his English or American counterparts. With his vindication of his own class, the Irish Protestant Shaw concludes his account of Wilde.

Given these biographical re-constructions of Wilde the rebel and tenaciously honourable Irishman, later writers, particularly those representing the homoerotic in fiction, would deploy a discourse of colonial resistance. Wilde’s influence on Brendan Behan, for example, can be directly ascertained. Although Behan’s working-class republican background background seems at a great remove from the Wildes of Merrion Square, in De Profundis and ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ Behan found a heady mixture: of the homoerotic, of defiance of British justice, of letters written from English jails, and of powerful courtroom speeches. While Behan was confined in an English Borstal as a member of the IRA, he first became aware of the emblematic and decadent fellow Irishman. In the Borstal library, he met a young man of about nineteen, wearing a rose coloured silk tie, smoking through a cigarette holder, and reading Frank Harris’ Oscar Wilde. Although the fey young man’s revelation of why Wilde had been jailed was intended to shock, Behan responded sharply that ‘every tinker has his own way of dancing’.[44] His biographer, Michael O’Sullivan, also reports that ‘when among friends, he often used to boast drunkenly of his Herod complex, or preference for young boys’.[45] Behan’s 1954 prison play, The Quare Fellow, pays such direct homage to the influence of Wilde, that O’Sullivan remarks on the inevitability that ‘reviewers in Ireland would make a comparison with Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol,’ noting even that in The Evening Press, ‘Gabriel Fallon found it more profoundly moving and deeply religious than Wilde’s great prison letter’.[46] Wilde became a talisman for Behan, especially in Paris in the late 1940’s, when he was writing homoerotic prose and poetry. A 1949 poem, originally written in Irish, celebrates Wilde on his deathbed in Paris.

The young prince of sin
A withered churl
The gold jewel of lust
Left far behind him,
No Pernod to brace him.
Only holy water,
The young king of Beauty
A ravished Narcissus
As the star of the pure Virgin
Glows on the water.

Envoi.

Delightful the path of sin
But a holy death’s a habit.
Good man yourself there, Oscar,
Every way you had it. [47]


Such nationalizing continues in contemporary Irish writing and the process of claiming Wilde directly as a gay icon, a figure of empowering queer presence in contemporary Irish writing appears in Colm Tóibín's 2002 Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodovar. In this collection, a contemporary Irish novelist connects his recognition of himself as a gay man with the reclamation of Wilde: ‘The personal became political because an Irishman in London pushed his luck.[48] Moreover, Tóibín's 2004 novel about Henry James, The Master, the protagonist James—like Wilde an outsider in London, but unlike him, overwhelming careful to conceal his own homosexuality— muses with fascinated distaste on Wilde’s disgrace and imprisonment. Yet again, the discourse of Wilde the Irish rebel is sounded.

From the moment Henry had first seen him, even when he had met him in Washington in the house of Clover Adams, suggested deep levels and layers of hiddenness… He remembered something vague being told to him about Wilde’s parents, his mother’s madness or her revolutionary spirit, or both, and his father’s philandering or perhaps indeed his revolutionary spirit. Ireland, he supposed, was too small for someone like Wilde, yet he had always carried a threat of Ireland with him.[49]

To conclude, I would contend that over the past hundred years since the Wilde Trials, Wilde’s homosexuality was subsumed into broader debates and discourses around Irish cultural nationalism. This meant that the unmentionable Wilde became Oscar the Irish rebel and thus, even in such a homophobic culture as 20th Ireland, strategies were located for homosexuality to be rendered comprehensible and even marginally acceptable.

· Dr Eibhear Walshe is a senior lecturer in the Department of Modern English at University College Cork. His research interests include modern Irish fiction, Munster writing, Irish drama and Irish Lesbian and Gay writing. His biography Kate O’Brien A Writing Life was published by Irish Academic Press in 2006 and he is working on a study of Oscar Wilde and Ireland. His other publications include the edited collections, Ordinary People Dancing: Essays on Kate O’Brien (Cork University Press 1993), Sex, Nation and Dissent, (Cork University Press: 1997) Elizabeth Bowen Remembered (Four Courts Press: 1999) and The Plays of Teresa Deevy (Mellen Press: 2003.) He was the Burns Visiting Professor in Boston College in summer 2006.