Gay Old Ireland - Whats the Story

Bannasidhe

CDfm wrote: »

Lesbian relationships were never illegal or prosecuted.

When the laws were being updated in the 19th century no-one would explain lesbian sex to Queen Victoria.

The decriminalisation of homosexuality was all about male same sex relationships.

Other than the high profile cases - I cant see prosecutions in Ireland. (though I cant imagine a landlord who does not worry about famine worrying about tenants getting prosecuted for homosexuality) .

Reading up on witch prosecution in Ireland once I saw that in Ireland witch prosecutions were an English protestant import.

So what actually happened- I cant find any prosecutions ?

It's generally acknowledged now that the story re: Victoria and lesbianism is an urban myth. A far more plausible an explanation is that in Victorian times women (with the exception of Victoria herself) simply had so few legal rights and such a slim chance of ever living an independent life that there was no point in anti-Lesbian legislation. Remember, this was a Laissez Faire political system which believed in 'small' government - as women were firmly under the legal control of their nearest male relative the onus would have been on him to police her behaviour. For a woman to gain any measure of independence she would have had to be the widow a man with no close male relatives AND have no sons.

Re: Witch Trials - there was one:

Alice Kyteler: Accused Irish Witch
The Woman At the Center of Ireland’s First Witch Trial (1324-1325)


Nov 2, 2008 Alanna Muniz


Witch Shadow - Carlos Paes
As the first person to be tried for witchcraft in Ireland, Lady Alice Kyteler faced sorcery and heresy charges a century before the start of the European Witch-Hunt.

Lady Alice Kyteler was one of the richest residents in Kilkenny, Ireland. Descending from a prosperous, merchant family, she had the advantage of accumulating even greater wealth through a succession of four marriages. Her first marriage to wealthy banker and money-lender, William Utlagh, produced a son by the same name. Lady Alice’s son took up his deceased father’s trade, and over time, many local nobles became in debt to both mother and son.

Witchcraft Accusations
The strongest antagonism directed at Lady Alice and her son came from the stepchildren of her later marriages. Lady Alice’s first three husbands died, and her fourth husband became ill with a mysterious wasting disease. With family jealousies over money and inheritance playing a motivating role, Lady Alice’s stepchildren and sickly husband began accusing her of poisoning her current husband and bewitching her former husbands to death with black magic potions and powders.

Bishop of Ossory
In early 1324, Richard de Ledrede, the Bishop of Ossory, held a formal inquiry into the accusations against Lady Alice. He indicted her, her son William, and their associates on charges of both maleficium (harmful magic) and demon worship. The bishop was convinced Lady Alice was the leader of a band of heretical sorcerers.

Charges
Lady Alice and her associates were indicted on seven counts. They were accused of concocting powders and ointments to cause death, illness, love, and hatred. They were said to perform incantations while boiling dead men’s nails, animal entrails, and the brains and swaddling of unbaptized babies in a decapitated robber’s skull.

They were charged with denying Christ and Christianity, and seeking counsel from and sacrificing to demons during nocturnal meetings. Lady Alice was charged with obtaining her wealth from an incubus demon and of using sorcery to bewitch her husband and stepchildren.

The Bishop (and her stepchildren seeking inheritance money) tried to discredit Lady Alice from her financial success; the charges the bishop listed clearly stated her wealth came from a demon and diabolical means. Moreover, the witnesses who testified against Lady Alice were many of the nobles who were in debt to her and her son.

Kilkenny Trial Outcome
Lady Alice’s wealth and family status became her lifesaving supports. Ledrede failed to have her arrested; she used her own authority to have him arrested for seventeen days. Her son William was arrested for heresy, while her maid Petronilla was burned alive after confessing under torture to heresy and orgies. Lady Alice fled and lived out the rest of her life in England, and ironically, Ledrede later was accused of heresy.


Lady Alice’s trial was a landmark case in the history of European witchcraft. Her case marked the first time witches were associated with an organized and heretical devil-worshiping sect. In the 14th Century, the educated elite began to merge their learned ideas about demonological heresy with popular beliefs about witchcraft. This merging of beliefs brought together magic and heresy and the idea of organized and conspiring sects of witches worshipping the devil.

These specific ideological developments that occurred within Kyteler’s trial were some of the necessary prerequisites for the commencement and promulgation of the European Witch trials.



Read more at Suite101: Alice Kyteler: Accused Irish Witch: The Woman At the Center of Ireland’s First Witch Trial (1324-1325) http://www.suite101.com/content/lady-alice-kyteler-a76332#ixzz1Gdba2CmK


What this article fails to comment on it that this was Ireland's only witch trial as it caused such a scandal that the Anglo-Irish parliament debated the issue at length and came to the conclusion that there was no such thing as witchcraft - and effectively made witch trials illegal in Ireland.

In Gaelic Ireland there was no concept of criminal law - all law was 'civil' and based on compensation so witch trials didn't exist.

Bannasidhe

The Infamous Dolly Wilde - niece of Oscar and lover of many of the leading lights of the thriving Lesbian scene in Paris in the 20s/30s.

ATLANTIS RISING

"I am a darting trout; shifting, glancing & flashing my iridescent tail in a hundred pleasant pools!..."
–DOLLY WILDE, letter to Natalie Barney


"She looked, said everyone who knew them both, remarkably like her uncle Oscar. She had the same artfully posed, soft, white hands, the same elongated face, and the same air of indolent melancholy which Aristotle insisted was always the natural accompaniment of wit.

She spoke remarkably like her uncle too, or, rather, like a brilliantly female version of Oscar – for there was nothing parodically male about Dolly Wilde. And although she would occasionally dress up as her uncle in borrowed, too-tight pants, a great flowing tie and a famously ratty fur coat (perhaps it was Oscar's favorite coat after all, the one Dolly's father Willie was supposed to have pawned when Oscar was imprisoned), she looked most like Oscar Wilde when she was dressed up as herself: a beautiful, dreamy-eyed, paradoxical woman – wonderfully stylish and intermittently unkempt, spiritually illuminated and clearly mondaine. She stares out at us from her few significant photographs with a distinctly contemporary gaze; conscious of the camera, casual about her audience.

For sixty years she was a delicious rumor: Oscar Wilde's enchanting niece Dorothy, born in 1895, a scant three months after her uncle's notorious trials and shameful imprisonment. In titled, artistic, and carefully closeted circles in Paris and London and Hollywood, stories of the outrageous things Dorothy Ierne Wilde said and did were passed around like canapés at a book launch. Photographed by Cecil Beaton and the Baron de Meyer, adored by the Sitwells, the Cunards, and French Academicians such as Edmond Jaloux, attracting people of taste and talent wherever she went, Dolly Wilde was almost – as her friend Janet Flanner wrote – "like a character out of a book...like someone one had become familiar with by reading, rather than by knowing" – too literary, in short, to be believed.

Although she could only have been produced by the follies and grandeurs of the 1920s and the 1930s, Dolly Wilde seems sensationally contemporary. Her tastes for cutting edge conversation and "emergency seductions" (as she called the sexual adventures which she applied like unguent to her emotional wounds), for fast cars and foreign films, for experimental literature and alcoholic actresses, are still right-up-to-the minute, and it is too easy to forget that she has been dead – and deader still for being unnoticed – these sixty years.

Stories of Dolly's life usually start out with stories about other people's lives - her uncle Oscar's fabled conversation, the duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre's bal masqué, Natalie Clifford Barney's famous salon - because Dolly Wilde always did. She adored listening to people, a trait which everyone said came from her fatal "paresse," her indolence. And while it flattered her friends to have such a brilliant speaker listening so brilliantly to them – for Dolly was surely the world's most active audience – this tendency of hers to delay things was the first drug that imprisoned her early on. Like many fascinating people, Dolly was easily fascinated. Charming herself, she could be charmed into putting off anything, even the narratives she loved so much.

"Go on," Dolly would say to her friend Victor Cunard, the London Times correspondent to Venice, as he hesitated between the irresistible desire to pour out his secret life to her and the fully justified fear that his secret would be instantly betrayed. "Go on," she would say disarmingly in her "bird-charmer's" voice to the New Yorker magazine writer Janet Flanner who was telling her a particularly violent fairy tale, "but tell it slowly, tell every word so that it will last longer." Dolly Wilde's life was full of such interesting, unfinished, delayed relationships through which she was sometimes tempted to try and fulfill herself.

Although Dolly often behaved like a luxury item let loose in a lavish era – treating even the maisons de santé where she was regularly disintoxicated like private suites in European spas – her family had undergone a famously public deconstruction. Her mother was left so impoverished that she could not afford to keep her at home; whatever her father possessed in the way of character had dissolved itself in alcohol by the time she was born; her uncle's dirty linen had been washed in every scandal sheet in Europe. Unlike her family, however, Dolly herself kept many secrets, telling – such was the refinement of her indiscretions – only the ones in which she was not involved.

For someone who loved stories as much as Dolly did - loved telling them, loved hearing them, loved their facts, their fictions, and all their complications - she was strangely silent on the subject of her own childhood. All her life, she avoided talking about her early years, and she resolutely refused to supply herself with a "history." Like most self-created people, she was infinitely more comfortable without the inconvenient explanations supplied by an actual, painful past.

There was only one anecdote from her childhood that Dolly Wilde ever told, and she only told it once. But with unerring instinct she told it to the best raconteuse in Paris, Bettina Bergery. And Bergery - wife of the French diplomat Gaston Bergery and originally one of the three beautiful Jones girls for whom the phrase "keeping up with the Joneses" had actually been invented – remembered the appalling little vignette for the rest of her life and wrote it down.

What Dolly told Bettina Bergery was this: when Dolly was very young, she used to like to take lumps of sugar, dip them in her pretty mother Lily's perfume, and eat them."

Bannasidhe

A contemporary of Dolly was

Eileen Grey (August 9, 1878 – October 31, 1976)

Modernist, designer and architect. Grey was one of the trend setters of her day and her work is now enjoying a revival. There is a permanent exhibition dedicated to her at National Museum of Ireland, Collins Barracks.

Among the exhibits is a photograph of Damia.

Gray was bisexual. She mixed in the lesbian circles of the time, being associated with Romaine Brooks, Gabrielle Bloch, Loie Fuller, the singer Damia and Natalie Barney. Gray's intermittent relationship with Damia (or Marie-Louise Damien) ended in 1938, after which they never saw each other again, although both lived into their nineties in the same city. Gray also had for some time an intermittent relationship with Jean Badovici, the Romanian architect and writer. He had written about her design work in 1924 and encouraged her interest in architecture. Their romantic involvement ended in 1932.

CDfm

Bannasidhe wrote: »

Re: Witch Trials - there was one:

Alice Kyteler: Accused Irish Witch
The Woman At the Center of Ireland’s First Witch Trial (1324-1325)


Kilkenny Trial Outcome
Lady Alice’s wealth and family status became her lifesaving supports. Ledrede failed to have her arrested; she used her own authority to have him arrested for seventeen days. Her son William was arrested for heresy, while her maid Petronilla was burned alive after confessing under torture to heresy and orgies. Lady Alice fled and lived out the rest of her life in England, and ironically, Ledrede later was accused of heresy.

These specific ideological developments that occurred within Kyteler’s trial were some of the necessary prerequisites for the commencement and promulgation of the European Witch trials.


In Gaelic Ireland there was no concept of criminal law - all law was 'civil' and based on compensation so witch trials didn't exist.

I looked up some Irish Witchcraft around a year ago

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055739655&page=3

You also had Florence Newton in Youghal - but Alice seemed like an old fashioned bi-sexual money grabbing poison dispensing serial husband killer. :eek:

You have a point on the independence bit and financial jealousy could have been a reason for her to be denounced. Naked dancing allegations could have been a euphenism . I wonder.

The two most famous Irish homosexuals of the 20th century were Micheal McLiammoir & Hilton Edwards

The Boys: A Biography of Micheal MacLiammoir and Hilton Edwards

Contemporary Review, Jan, 1995 by Richard Whittington-Egan



My father did not know Lloyd George, but he did know - or thought he did - Micheal MacLiammoir, back in the old days in Dublin. What he did not know was that there wasn't an Irish bone - except for the wish-bone - in MacLiammoir's body; or for that matter anywhere in the body of his ancestry.
I, as my father's son, knew, and was known to, Micheal, was hand-fed cherries by him at Chez Solange, as, Oscar Wilde left behind in a dressingroom crumple of fine nineteenth-century velvet and linen, his living shade - ill-fitting toupee'd, orange-faced with heavy-handed pancake refurbishment - held court and ate post-performance supper at his favourite London restaurant.


And never by blink or flicker did that consummate actor, Grand Old Man of the Hibernian Theatre, betray the fact that the greatest role of his life was playing Himself. For the astonishing truth - rarely pure and never simple, as Oscar assayed it - revealed thunderbolt in Mr. Fitz-Simon's sensitively written, outstanding biography, is that Micheal was, like Grey Owl before him, a, literally, self-made man. He was born Alfred Willmore, lived in Purves Road, Kensal Green, and learned the Gaelic at nightschool at Ludgate Circus, long before he had even so much as pointed a toe on the emerald sward. Liam is the Irish form of William. So, Wilimore became, in dog-Erse, Liam moir (for more), with a Mac in front for good measure, and a Micheal for a touch of archangelic luck.
Further passages in this book of revelations disclose the dubious provenance of Micheal's life-long life-partner, Hilton Robert Hugh ('Bobby') Edwards. His easy assumption of public school blazer and brave tales of 'varsity days at Cambridge matched the imaginings of the transmogrified Alfred. But it is not meet to strike judgemental pose, for, whatever the harmless little vanities of their pretences and pretensions, 'the bhoys' were indeed 'true green' in their dedication to their adopted Mammy country, and their joint contribution to Irish theatrical culture, the Celtic limelight, was as solid and impressive as the Giant's Causeway. The Gate became a floodgate of great classical drama.
As the years wore on, Alf from Willesden, the charm school graduate professional Irishman, and Bobby from East Finchley, blossomed now into a grandee of the theatre, trotted in tandem, the stages of the world their artificial pearl oyster. The partners, carrying always, Micheal his make-up box and Hilton his little case of remedies for a vade-mecum-full of complaints to which flesh is heir, stepped, ageing, into the 'seventies. They grew cantankerous, occasioning mutual perturbation, accusatory spats - 'Micheal is so insensitive. We went to this viewing, and in the darkness I took my teeth out ... Micheal stubbed out his cigarettes on them!'
Domestic tensions were unrelieved by the ameliorations of old age. When, following the conferring of an honorary LL.D. of Dublin University upon Micheal, a telephone caller asked: 'Is that Dr. MacLiammoir?' a peeved Hilton replied: 'No, this is Nurse Edwards!'
During the last fifteen years of his life Micheal had a number of operations on his eyes. At last, virtually blind, he underwent brain surgery, emerging from Mount Carmel Hospital, without wig and make-up, a 'distinguished, white-haired, elderly gentleman'.
In this last guise, Micheal MacLiammoir died, in 1978, vir varius et multiplex, of whom Tyrone Guthrie, known for his fierce non-partiality to Gaelic Ireland and its appurtenances, had said: 'He's a very nice, good person under all the disguises'.
Now let his epitaph be written: His life was a brilliant circumlocution. Hilton lingered on alone and lonely in Regency refinement at Harcourt Terrace, their shared Dublin home, for four more desolate years - 'tired of living, and feared of dying' (the quotation is from Jerome Kern's Showboat), crushed beneath a burden of needless guilt by contrite memories of pointless rows and petty spites which had pock-marked their days. The welcome dark visitor arrived one November Thursday in 1982.
On November 22nd, the bogus bhoys, fake and fraud, weighed down with Erse honours galore, were reunited in the soft earth, bedded, 'Until the day breaks', in the long shadow of the Hill of Howth.
RICHARD WHITTINGTON-EGAN

These two were openly gay.

Oh, and McLiammoir claimed to have had a relationship with the Blueshirt Leader General Eoin O'Duffy

CDfm

Another Irish actor.

CDfm wrote: »

His early career was that of an Irish Times cub reporter and he trained as an actor in the Abbey & the Gate.

I share a birthday with him and he is Willfred Brambell who played Paul McCartneys Grandfather in A Hard Days Night



He was also Albert Steptoe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVlF-vqePxg

A very dapper man he had a difficult relationship with his Steptoe Co Star Harry Corbett who really did not like being famous for that show.

CDfm

Fans of the original Knight Rider will know this guy but will not be aware that he was from Carrigaline in Cork.

CDfm wrote: »

Edward Mulhare from Cork co-starred with the Hoff in Knight Rider









Born in 1923 career as a leading man of stage, screen and TV spanned from the 50's until his death in 1997 with appearences on Baywatch.He started of in the Gate in Dublin and worked with Gielgud in London.

He took over his first major role from Rex Harrison on broadway in 1956 as Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady which in itself was a major accomplishment and appeared on the Ed Sullivan show -the major chat show in the USA from which both Elvis and the Beatles launched their careers -3 times in 1957.

He also appeared in movies such as Von Ryans express and was a regular guest in many TV shows.

I never knew he was a Corkman

Mulhare had a cult following and also starred in the Ghost & Mrs Muir.

I included him in the Green & the Greasepaint thread as an actor and Corkman.

So these guys went on the be very sucessful - I do wonder if there is a Heritage story out there from other careers.

CDfm

Here is something that is a must read for people looking at the issue taken from
Modern British and Irish criticism and theory: a critical guide

By Julian Wolfreys


There is a chapter on criticism of LGBT studies - again 10 or 20 pages but it gives you a chance to evaluate what you read.

http://books.google.ie/books?id=G1eR4tAS-SUC&pg=PA151&lpg=PA151&dq=irish+gay+society+history&source=bl&ots=FZ3YlYeCfN&sig=N08hURhRXvknBqb4BLl_EAVEVAs&hl=en&ei=v2KBTdPqAoGZhQfMn9nLBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CEEQ6AEwBzgK#v=onepage&q&f=false

What got me looking this up was something Marchdub commented on.

Now people of my grandfathers generation & my grandfather were no more interested in a persons sexual orientation than the man in the moon. Let alone seeing people prosecuted.

After Irish Independence you had the Civil War, Anglo Irish Trade War, The Emergency (WWII) the TB epidemic, the Polio Epedemic and that brought us to the 1960's.

I am not saying there was not prejudice but it was not a liberal or open society for anyone really.Judging it by todays standards would be difficult as other issues were of more importance.

Now it could be that I grew up in a more tolerant house -I do not know - but I doubt it somehow.

cgcsb

Bannasidhe wrote: »

It does seem as if a 'don't ask/don't tell' ethos prevailed. I know in Cork the euphemism often used for men was 'he's very good to his mother.' [Danny le Rue was apparently fabulous to his mother]. For women it was 'ah sure, she/they never married...sigh' - I often wondered about that sigh. It quite often had a wistful quality to it.

CDfm - I do think you may be on to something when you referred to a liberal attitude prevailing in Cork. I know that when I came out in the early 1980s I never experienced any negative attitudes in Cork - but was frequently subjected to abuse in Dublin. The fact that I did actually come out was, however, unusual for the time. Despite the existence of a 'women's space' in the then newly opened Quay Co-Op - it focused mainly on feminist issues with sexual orientation as a by-line. Most of the women involved were heterosexual and the few who were out tended to be students from outside Cork.

I know a UCC history graduate started a project collecting 'stories' of being gay in Cork about 3 years ago. He is organising these 'stories' by decade, but one common factor is the relative lack of homophobic outbursts by Cork people. The main attitude seems to have been, and remains, - 'Leave them alone like, they're one of our own!' [i.e. from Cork - which down here trumps everything].

I also think the amount of innocence regarding sexual matters - the common notion that sex was a marital duty which women endured and certainly didn't enjoy (John B Keane is damning about this issue in the Bodrán Makers) provided protection for lesbians. Many people simply couldn't conceive of 2 women voluntarily doing 'that'. I suspect that being a Catholic country the concept of female virginity and its links with spiritual purity was an added protection. A women could infer she was emulating the Virgin Mary but sadly did not have a vocation so she had no option but to live a sad and lonely life sharing her home with her 'friend' (who, coincidently, was in the same fix) for 'economic' reasons. Women in Protestant countries did not have this handy smoke screen.

My mother has often spoken of two women she remembers from her childhood in the late 30s/ early 40s who lived together in Pouladouff in Cork- although she can remember a few nods and winks which were quickly shh'd when they came up in conversation, she also remembers them as being very much part of the local community - She is now convinced they were lesbians -I must ask her for more details.

Little research has been done yet on women who entered religious orders - I know of one who entered a nursing order as soon as she turned 16 in the late 70s. Although discussion of such matters usually descents quickly into childish comments about ' lesbians in nunnerys = child in a candy store' this is to miss the point. The woman I know took the decision because she did not wish to marry and wanted a fulfilling role where she could help people - she kept her vow of celibacy. Ironically, the best means of attaining a degree of independence for women, plus educational opportunities, was via the religious orders.

CDfm -Sonja Teirnan has done some interesting work which can be accessed on:

http://nd.academia.edu/SonjaTiernan/ResearchInterests

Given that Sonja's PhD was on Eva Gore-Booth I am sure there will be many references to her.

Re: Cork being liberal towards the gays. It's actually the only place I've experienced homophobia on a personal level. I got a filthy look from some old man and I was within ear-shot of a: "be Jaysus boi, there's a fierce amount of quaarreees on this bus". Mind you, this was in 2010.

CDfm

cgcsb wrote: »

Re: Cork being liberal towards the gays. It's actually the only place I've experienced homophobia on a personal level. I got a filthy look from some old man and I was within ear-shot of a: "be Jaysus boi, there's a fierce amount of quaarreees on this bus". Mind you, this was in 2010.

LOL

There's always one.

I always imagined homophobia as a Dublin thing and that was thru media reports - was there an Irish Culture of Homophobia.

Are there records of incidents ?

Bannasidhe

CDfm wrote: »

LOL

There's always one.

I always imagined homophobia as a Dublin thing and that was thru media reports - was there an Irish Culture of Homophobia.

Are there records of incidents ?

I know of several serious incidents in Limerick over the last 20 years. A friend of mine was jumped by a gang of about 6 teenagers a few years ago and they tried to beat the living crap out of her. What they didn't realise was that the entire pack from Munster's women's team were following on behind - lets just say those lads got more than they bargained for!

Many urban centres now have dedicated Garda Liaison officers for the LGBT community - they would have figures, but to be honest most people don't bother reporting it as the response is usually being told you have to take out a civil action against your abuser.

CDfm

So gay bashing exists but is it part of "Irish Culture". Where are attitudes recorded and how do we assess it ? This is a History & Heritage Forum .

There were gay murders & there was a social scene . What were they.

You wont have prosecutions but are there records in the press or books to it.

Was homosexuality discussed in the Dail.

Sir Roger Casement's body was repatriated and he was held in high esteem by the Irish people and Eamonn Devalera put that in a letter to the British Government.

So people like Eamonn DeValera & Willie Cosgrave who both were Taoiseach at various times and fought in 1916 would have probably known him or known of his sexuality.

What were their attitudes and do we know ?

If we do a cut off point in the mid 80's what was Ireland like?

Just to set the scene here , in the 1970's 80's RTE had an openly gay TV & Radio presenter Vincent Hanley who died are an Aids related illness and an RTE Set Designer Charles Self was murdered

[FONT=Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif] [FONT=Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif][SIZE=-1]page: 1 2 3 4 [/SIZE][/FONT] [/FONT] [FONT=Trebuchet MS,Trebuchet,Times,Times New Roman,serif] [/FONT][FONT=Trebuchet MS,Trebuchet,Times,Times New Roman,serif] [/FONT]
[FONT=Trebuchet MS,Trebuchet,Times,Times New Roman,serif]Glbtq people were long a largely invisible segment of the population and absent from the public discourse. A rare exception came when the government banned a novel, The Land of Spices (1941), by lesbian writer Kate O'Brien (1897-1974). At issue in the case was the depiction of gay male rather than lesbian desire. O'Brien did write of lesbianism in other works such as her 1958 novel As Music and Splendour.[/FONT]
[FONT=Trebuchet MS,Trebuchet,Times,Times New Roman,serif]In many countries the 1960s were a time of considerable social and political activism, but for gay men and lesbians in Ireland little changed. Emigration, often to England or the United States, was the choice of many glbtq people seeking to escape the homophobia<a href="/glossary.php?word=homophobia&part=" target="_blank">homophobia</a> of Irish society.[/FONT]
[FONT=Trebuchet MS,Trebuchet,Times,Times New Roman,serif]
<img src="http://b.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=2&c2=6035232&c3=&c4=&c5=&c6=&c15=&cj=1" /> <a href="http://www.quantcast.com/p-85pvd3d23u7MU" target="_blank"><img src="http://pixel.quantserve.com/pixel/p-85pvd3d23u7MU.gif" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt="Quantcast"/></a>
[/FONT][FONT=Trebuchet MS,Trebuchet,Times,Times New Roman,serif]Post-Stonewall Organizing[/FONT]
[FONT=Trebuchet MS,Trebuchet,Times,Times New Roman,serif]A watershed event for the Irish gay rights movement occurred not in the Republic but rather in New York City. The riots at the Stonewall Inn in June 1969 proved the catalyst that led to the formation of gay rights organizations in Ireland. According to activist Kieran Rose, the "gay liberationist values [of American organizations] were to provide the ideological bases of the first generation of Irish gay rights activists."[/FONT]
[FONT=Trebuchet MS,Trebuchet,Times,Times New Roman,serif]Among the earliest of the Irish gay rights groups to achieve a certain visibility and prominence was the Irish Gay Rights Movement (IGRM), founded in Dublin in 1975. In addition to providing social activities for gay men, IGRM had a telephone help-line, a women's group, and a law reform committee. Branches were established in other cities around the Republic including Cork.[/FONT]
[FONT=Trebuchet MS,Trebuchet,Times,Times New Roman,serif]The law reform group had the goal of expunging the repressive 1861 and 1885 statutes from the books. To this end David Norris, an activist and James Joyce scholar, mounted a challenge to the constitutionality of these laws. Begun in 1977, this action initiated an odyssey through the courts of Ireland and Europe.[/FONT]
[FONT=Trebuchet MS,Trebuchet,Times,Times New Roman,serif]Faced with financial difficulties and divisions over mission and direction, IRGM disbanded in 1983. Meanwhile other gay and lesbian associations had organized, including the Cork Gay Collective and the Gay Defence Committee, which evolved into the Dublin Lesbian and Gay Men's Collectives (DLGMC).[/FONT]
[FONT=Trebuchet MS,Trebuchet,Times,Times New Roman,serif]Murders of Charles Self and Declan Flynn[/FONT]
[FONT=Trebuchet MS,Trebuchet,Times,Times New Roman,serif]The Gay Defence Committee formed in response to the actions of the gardaí (police) after the murder of Charles Self, a gay man.[/FONT]
[FONT=Trebuchet MS,Trebuchet,Times,Times New Roman,serif]Self was stabbed to death in his Dublin home on January 20, 1982, perhaps by a man whom he had met in a gay cruising area that night. The gardaí, who had a description and sketch of the suspect, interrogated, photographed, and fingerprinted nearly 1,500 gay men, almost none of whom resembled the man sought. The interrogations often centered on the private lives of the men questioned rather than the solution of the murder.[/FONT]
[FONT=Trebuchet MS,Trebuchet,Times,Times New Roman,serif]The Gay Defence Committee spearheaded the effort to end the harassment. They organized a picket of the main gardaí station on Pearse Street (ironically, named for the writer of homoerotic verse). Support from other civil rights groups--including the Irish Council for Civil Liberties--and media coverage of the gardaí's practices eventually brought a halt to the wholesale interrogations.[/FONT]
[FONT=Trebuchet MS,Trebuchet,Times,Times New Roman,serif]The gardaí never arrested anyone for the murder of Charles Self.[/FONT]
[FONT=Trebuchet MS,Trebuchet,Times,Times New Roman,serif]A few months after Self was killed, another man, Declan Flynn, was beaten to death by a homophobic gang of youths in Fairview Park, a gay cruising spot. This time the assailants were brought to trial and found guilty, but the judge suspended the sentence and released the convicts, whereupon they held a "victory march" in Fairview Park. The DLGMC countered with a second march calling for an end to violence inspired by homophobia and violence against women. The march, which had the strong support of feminist groups, drew a large crowd but unfortunately did not lead to any improvement.[/FONT]


[FONT=Trebuchet MS,Trebuchet,Times,Times New Roman,serif]http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/ireland,2.html
[/FONT]

Also, did we have prominent gays in media & entertainment, sports and politics.

Irelands drag queen from the 1970's was an Englishman Alan Amsby " Mr Pussy "






There was even a Mr Pussy's Resteraunt run by Bono's older brother Norman

Big brother
THE nuances are too fleeting for a photograph to capture, but as soon as he opens his mouth and looks sideways out of his blue eyes it's there in spades.

"You're very like him, " I can't help saying. "You think so? If I dyed my hair black, " Norman Hewson says, grasping tufts of white hair with a broad grin, "I could have a third stab at life perhaps. Except I can't sing. But then he couldn't either when he started."

We are sitting in the window of Hewson's Nude restaurant in Dublin. Like an elephant in the smoothie fridge, the subject of Being Bono's Brother has to be faced. Norman Hewson has pointed out (extremely pleasantly) in the run-up to the interview that while he is indeed Bono's brother it is not the only thing he is in life.

He is a 52-year-old successful restaurateur with an idea that one day may go global, and a kid brother who's more famous than God.

Hewson is proud of the cafe, with its clever lime green, brushed steel and bare concrete look. When he looks down over the refectory tables towards the busy till he can remember the smoke-filled room of banquettes, the mezzanine floor where the Thursday-night transvestites used to sit, and before that the steak restaurant for which his customers queued down the street.

The building on Suffolk Street has been his home as a businessman for nearly two decades. First as Dillons Steakhouse in 1986, then on through the lunacy and mayhem that was Mr Pussy's Cafe Delux, finishing with Nude. It is not difficult to see number 21 as a reflection of the city's changing palate. Here it has shifted from coronary-on-a-plate steaks through the best fun (but least lucrative time) of his career with Mr Pussy's to now. Chick pea salads, wheatgrass shots and ambitious plans to take on Michael O'Leary and Ronald McDonald.

Is it hard not to be wistful for a time when the only shots consumed on the premises had strictly no health-enhancing properties? Not really. The Mr Pussy days . . . "two years of total insanity" . . . nearly killed him.

Why the heavy toll? "Because I always had somewhere to go after the nightclubs closed.

I was coming home at seven, eight o'clock in the morning, hammered out of my head. The kids would be getting up going to school and I'd say, 'this has got to stop.' Mr Pussy's was ahead of its time and it was too small and it never made any money. But it was great fun."

One famous night went down as life's most memorable dinner for a handful of customers.

As they ate, the door opened and a man walked up through the restaurant to a table at the top with a tiger on a lead. He sat down at the table as if to order and the tiger lay at his feet.

Forks had frozen midway to mouths as the animal's powerful flanks passed within inches of diners' legs. Then the Chipperfields Circus handler took his animal onto the stage and customers realised it was another Mr Pussy's event.

His favourite Mr Pussy story centres on the night of the trannies and the dentists. Thursday nights was Name that Tune night MC-ed by Mr Pussy, Alan Amsby. The clientele ranged from the regular group of about eight transsexuals and a group of dentists on a night out.

One from each group was pulled up as a contestant along with a third punter.

"It was always cheesy Eurovision hits. I'd be up here running the tunes. The tranny never answered any of the questions, even under prompting from Mr Pussy. At the end of it all one of the guys won and Mr Pussy said to me 'I'm going to go find out why he didn't participate. He knew all the answers. He was here every Thursday. It's the same **** every Thursday.'" Amsby got his answer when the silent tranny told him the dentist was his next-doorneighbour. Underneath the heavy panstick and wig he had been struck dumb with the fear that if he uttered a syllable his neighbour might recognise his voice.

Dumbstruck trannies were a long way from Craig Gardner, the old Dublin accountancy firm where Hewson started his career, training to be an accountant.

Somewhere in this dim, distant past his younger brother Paul was plugging away at the band stuff. Being seven years older, Hewson was part-time band driver.

"In fact, I drove them to the Late Late Show when they were first on it. I think it was myself and Adam Clayton's mother. There were two of us anyway.".
2005-08-21 12:00:00#
http://www.tribune.ie/archive/article/2005/aug/21/big-brother/

CDfm

Anyone interested in looking up historical Dail Debates can do so here

http://search.gov.ie/sites/debates.oireachtas.ie/?q=homosexuality&x=30&y=11

Reading Dail Debates is often very mundane and questions are often about reading something into the record but use the search facility.

But sometimes you hit some real nuggets

For example , the Charles Self murder was mentioned in debates on DNA testing and the Data Protection Acts in 1988 & 1989 following his murder in 1982.

http://debates.oireachtas.ie/dail/1990/03/01/00007.asp

http://debates.oireachtas.ie/seanad/1988/07/06/00005.asp

valen

Bannasidhe wrote: »

All of the evidence shows that Gaelic Ireland was secular in nature- divorce was common place, it was sexually permissive, had no concept of illegitimacy and allowed women a far greater level of freedom than other European societies

You've a strange idea of "far greater freedom"; women had no legal standing, other than to give witness about sexual or paternity. They could own no land, other than that acquired through inheritance - but even then, they couldn't bequeath it to their children; it was considered family land, on loan.

Women were owned by their parents as children, their husbands in middle life, and their sons in old age. A woman wasn't expected to leave the house; there was no such thing as rape if a woman was in a tavern or in a forest alone.

A very strong case can be made that Gaelic Ireland was not concerned with policing people's sexual activity but rather sought to ensure that any children who were the result were protected and cared for - so there are extensive provisions which outline the rights of children who were conceived as a result of sex with people with mental health problems, disabilities or other forms of coercion or 'incapacitation' at the time of conception such as rape or intoxication.

Sounds about right. Most of the laws that did exist were there to enrich the nobility and keep the subsistance-farming peasants in their place. Sexuality just didn't matter enough. Early Irish Satire has lots more detail on the mores of early Ireland. It's as you'd expect.

John

Bannasidhe

valen wrote: »

You've a strange idea of "far greater freedom"; women had no legal standing, other than to give witness about sexual or paternity. They could own no land, other than that acquired through inheritance - but even then, they couldn't bequeath it to their children; it was considered family land, on loan.

Women were owned by their parents as children, their husbands in middle life, and their sons in old age. A woman wasn't expected to leave the house; there was no such thing as rape if a woman was in a tavern or in a forest alone.



John

Valen - I don't want to go into too much detail here as it would be off topic but you are mistaken.

The communal nature of Gaelic landownership meant no individual, regardless of gender, could inherit Clan lands. If land passed into private ownership - usually via being used as security for a mortgage then it was up to the owner to decide to whom to will it to. Women could and did extend mortgages. Women also owned land - as evidenced by Tiobóid na Long á Búrc petitioning for land held by the Uí Máille's of Murrisk which he successfully demonstrated had personally belonged to his grandmother Mairead N Mháille and should therefore have passed to her only child Gráinne.

Women retained ownership off ALL of their portable property upon marriage - this included Gallowglasses in the instances of Agnes Campbell on her marriage to Turlough Ua Neill and Fionola Inion Dubh Mac Donnall on her marriage to Calbach Ua Donnell. And of course Grainne Ni Mháille personally possessed a fleet of ships.

If you look at Fergus Kelly's Guide to Early Irish Law you will see there were severe penalties for rape.

I think you are confusing Gaelic/Brehon law with Common law in which women did have essentially no rights. Women under Common Law also 'lost' ownership of all their property upon marriage.

I would suggest the works of Donnacha O Corrain - an article on Early Irish marriage can be found at http://www.ucc.ie/celt/marriage_ei.pdf.
K.W. Nicholls in an essay on Women and Property published in Women in Early Modern Ireland (Eds M Mac Curtain & M O Dowd) demonstrates that women retained their rights into the 17th century.

Also worth looking at would be the writings of Gillian Kenny, Katherine Simms, Mary McAuliffe and Christine Meeks.

valen

Grace O'Malley's times were hardly 'early Ireland'; most of the Brehon law books were written a thousand years earlier. Those were the laws I'd meant.

By Grace's day, the English had spent a few hundred years trying to get Irish lords to take English laws, and Ireland had a female queen. Lords frequently chose English or Brehon laws, depending on how they suited them.

You couldn't inherit 'clan' lands, but you could own lands in your own name - this could be passed on by men, but not by women. Any private land that women inherited returned to being 'clan' lands. When you think of it, this was to avoid women marrying outside the clan, and thus 'losing' land to children of outsiders.

Early Brehon law had punishment for rape, yes, but I was highlighting that it was not as total as under common law, and had certain notable exceptions - like when out of range of her guardian.

BTW, by saying women had no legal standing, I'd meant they couldn't make contracts or stand as witnesses, not that they couldn't own property. But it was very difficult to acquire new property without making contracts to exchange cattle etc.

John

cgcsb

CDfm wrote: »

LOL

There's always one.

I always imagined homophobia as a Dublin thing and that was thru media reports - was there an Irish Culture of Homophobia.

Are there records of incidents ?

homophobia knows no geographical boundary, and Cork certainly isn't an island of sanity on the issue

CDfm

cgcsb wrote: »

homophobia knows no geographical boundary, and Cork certainly isn't an island of sanity on the issue

cgcsb - the comment wasn't aimed at you but the old geezer -bang went my theory . Sorry.

Homosexuality is never ever brought up in Irish history unless its somehow controvercial. Thats why I want to learn a bit more.

The Self & Flynn murders underline how serious an issue it was even in the 1980's.

Bannasidhe

Letter written by Constance Markievitz which discusses the activities of Dr Kathleen Lynn and her partner Madelaine ffrench- Mullen among other 'fighting' women during 1916.

Fighting Women
A memoir by Countess de Markievicz
(Prison Letters, 1934)

You ask me to write you an account of my experiences and of the activities of the women of Easter Week. I am afraid that I can only give you a little account of those who were enrolled like me in the Irish Citizen Army, and those who were with me or whom I met during the Week. Some were members of Cuman na-mBan, and others, just women who were ready to die for Ireland.

My activities were confined to a very limited area. I was mobilised for Liberty Hall and was sent from there via the City Hall to St. Stephen's Green, where I remained.

On Easter Monday morning there was a great hosting of disciplined and armed men at Liberty Hall.

Padraic Pearse and James Connolly addressed us and told us that from now the Volunteers and the I.C.A. were not two forces, but the wings of the Irish Republican Army.

There were a considerable number of I.C.A. women. These were absolutely on the same footing as the men. They took part in all marches, and even in the manoeuvres that lasted all night. Moreover, Connolly made it quite clear to us that unless we took our share in the drudgery of training and preparing, we should not be allowed to take any share at all in the fight. You may judge how fit we were when I tell you that 16 miles was the length of our last route march.

Connolly had appointed two staff officers - Commandant Mallin and myself I held a commission, giving me the rank of Staff Lieutenant. I was accepted by Tom Clarke and the members of the provisional Government as the second of Connolly's "ghosts." "Ghosts" was the name we gave to those who stood secretly behind the leaders and were entrusted with enough of the plans of the Rising to enable them to carry on that Leader's work should anything happen to himself Commandant Mallin was over me and next in command to Connolly. Dr. Kathleen Lynn was our medical officer, holding the rank of Captain.

We watched the little bodies of men and women march off; Pearse and Connolly to the G.P:O., Sean Connolly to the City Hall. I went off then with the Doctor in her car. We carried a large store of First Aid necessities and drove off through quiet dusty streets and across the river, reaching the City Hall just at the very moment that Commandant Sean Connolly and his little troop of men and women swung round the corner and he raised his gun and shot the policeman who barred the way. A wild excitement ensued, people running from every side to see what was up. The Doctor got out, and I remember Mrs. Barrett - sister of Sean Connolly - and others helping to carry in the Doctor's bundles. I did not meet Dr. Lynn again until my release, when her car met me and she welcomed me to her house, where she cared for me and fed me up and looked after me till I had recovered from the evil effects of the English prison system.

When I reported with the car to Commandant Mallin in Stephen's Green, he told me that he must keep me. He said that owing to MacNeill's calling off the Volunteers a lot of the men who should have been under him had had to be distributed round other posts, and that few of those left him were trained to shoot, so I must stay and be ready to take up the work of a sniper. He took me round the Green and showed me how the barricading of the gates and digging trenches had begun, and he left me in charge of this work while he went to superintend the erection of barricades in the streets and arrange other work. About two hours later he definitely promoted me to be his second in command. This work was very exciting when the fighting began. I continued round and round the Green, reporting back if anything was wanted, or tackling any sniper who was particularly objectionable.

Madeleine ffrench Mullen was in charge of the Red Cross and the commissariat in the Green. Some of the girls had revolivers, and with these they sallied forth and held up bread vans.

This was necessary because the first prisoner we took was a British officer, and Commandant Mallin treated him as such. He took his parole "as an officer and a gentleman" not to escape, and he left him at large in the Green before the gates were shut. This English gentleman walked around and found out all he could and then "bunked."

We had a couple of sick men and prisoners in the Band-stand, the Red Cross flag flying to protect them. The English in the Shelbourne turned a machine-gun on to them. A big group of our girls were attending to the sick, making tea for the prisoners or resting themselves. I never saw anything like their courage. Madeleine ffrench Mullen brought them, with the sick and the prisoners, out and into a safer place.

It was all done slowly and in perfect order. More than one young girl said to me, "What is there to be afraid of? Won't I go straight to heaven if I die for Ireland?" However it was, they came out unscathed from a shower of shrapnel. On Tuesday we began to be short of food. There were no bread carts on the streets. We retired into the College of Surgeons that evening and were joined by some of our men who had been in other places and by quite a large squad of Volunteers, and with this increase in our numbers the problem of food became very serious.

Nellie Gifford was put in charge of one large classroom with a big grate, but alas, there was nothing to cook. When we were all starving she produced a quantity of oatmeal from somewhere and made pot after pot of the most delicious porridge, which kept us going. But all the same, on Tuesday and Wednesday we absolutely starved. There seemed to be no bread in the town.

Later on Mary Hyland was given charge of a little kitchen, somewhere down through the houses, near where the Eithne workroom now is.

We had only one woman casualty - Margaret Skinnader. She, like myself, was in uniform and carried an army rifle. She had enlisted as a private in the I.C.A. She was one of the party who went out to set fire to a house just behind Russell's Hotel. The English opened fire on them from the ground floor of a house just opposite. Poor Freddy Ryan was killed and Margaret was very badly wounded. She owes her life to William Partridge. He carried her away under fire and back to the College. God rest his noble soul. Brilliant orator and Labour leader, comrade and friend of Connolly's, he was content to serve as a private in the I.C.A. He was never strong and the privations he suffered in an English jail left him a dying man.

Margaret's only regret was her bad luck in being disabled so early in the day (Wednesday of Easter Week) though she must have suffered terribly, but the end was nearer than we thought, for it was only a few days later that we carried her over to Vincent's Hospital, so that she would not fall wounded into the hands of the English.

The memory of Easter Week with its heroic dead is sacred to us who survived. Many of us could almost wish that we had died in the moment of ecstasy when, with the tri-colour over our heads we went out and proclaimed the Irish Republic, and with guns in our hands tried to establish it.

We failed, but not until we had seen regiment after regiment run from our few guns. Our effort will inspire the people who come after us, and will give them hope and courage. If we failed to win, so did the English. They slaughtered and imprisoned, only to arouse the nation to a passion of love and loyalty, loyalty to Ireland and hatred of foreign rule. Once they see clearly that the English rule us still, only with a new personnel of traitors and new uniforms, they will finish the work begun by the men and women of Easter Week.

CDfm

ok - i did not live in Ireland when the laws on homosexuality changed so looking up the Dail Debates interested me and some of the politicians are still around.

Dáil Éireann - Volume 432 - 23 June, 1993
Private Members' Business. - Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Bill, 1993: Second Stage.
Minister for Justice (Mrs. Geoghegan-Quinn) Máire Geoghegan-Quinn
Minister for Justice (Mrs. Geoghegan-Quinn): I move, “That the Bill be now read a Second Time.”
The primary purpose of this Bill, which forms part of a comprehensive programme of reform of the criminal law which I have under way at present, is to decriminalise sexual activity between consenting mature males. The Bill also contains a series of measures designed to protect the vulnerable; and to review and update the law on prostitution and related offences with particular emphasis on sanctions in relation to the clients of prostitutes and those who organise prostitution......................................................................................................We are saying in 1993, over 130 years since that section of criminal law was enacted, that it is time we brought this form of human rights limitation to an end.


http://historical-debates.oireachtas.ie/D/0432/D.0432.199306230101.html

The arguments probably reflect society and perceptions people had.

CDfm

An alternative history of Bishop Atherton

Peter Marshall explains how a chance reference in an old local history book led him to reconstruct the story of a 17th-century church scandal, and its afterlife in literature, culture and politics.


Sometimes historical research and writing is a thoroughly methodical business involving the testing of carefully-formulated hypotheses. At other times it feels much more akin to investigative journalism: the historian senses a ‘story’, follows up intriguing leads, and seeks to make connections. Just such a process has led me over the past few years to a preoccupation with the life, and violent death, of John Atherton (b.1598), Protestant bishop of Waterford and Lismore in Ireland. Atherton was hanged in Dublin in December 1640 for the crime of sodomy, making him the only Anglican ‘gay bishop’ ever to pay the ultimate penalty for his orientation.
The trail leading me to the extraordinary career of Bishop Atherton began with a ghost – not metaphorically, but literally. Some years ago my attention was drawn to a set of papers in the National Archives. This contained the testimony of a group of people from Minehead in Somerset, who in 1637 claimed under oath to have witnessed several apparitions of a recently deceased old lady.
The lady in question was Susan Leakey, widowed mother of a distressed Mine*head merchant named Alex*ander Leakey. The witnesses included Alexander’s young wife, Elizabeth, who had actually spoken with the ghost during a tense encoun*ter in her bedchamber. Seven*teenth-century ‘ghosts’ were often seen as a way of sorting out disagreements about property and inheri*tance, and on the surface this case seemed to fit the pat*tern. The apparition, so Eliza*beth claimed, had assigned her and her husband owner*ship of a valuable golden chain, currently in the possession of a kinswoman in Barnstaple. There was also something about a secret message to be delivered to Alexander’s sister, Joan Atherton, in Ire*land, which Elizabeth refused to divulge, a detail which seemed inter*esting, but obscure and unfathomable.
At the time I was col*lecting materials on ghost beliefs in early modern England, and there was much of interest here. Elizabeth reported that Mother Leakey had on her deathbed threatened to return ‘in the devil’s likeness’. She also linked the apparitions with the loss at sea of several of Alexander’s ships. But I was missing something vital, and failing to ask myself an (in hindsight) obvious question. Why were the authorities taking such an interest? The statements were collected by three Justices of the Peace, and sent up to the royal Council in London, where they were carefully scrutin*ized by Charles I’s leading minister, Archbishop William Laud. Neither the state nor Church authorities usually paid much attention to stories about ghosts, unless some crime were being alleged, or the reputation of some great personage was involved.In the spring of 2001, while working in the Somer*set Record Office, I hap*pened to pull off the shelves a History of Minehead, pub*lished by a local vicar in 1903. He blithely informed me that what I had assumed to be an obscure nugget of cultural history was in fact ‘the famous Minehead ghost story, immortalized by Sir Walter Scott’. From that point, I became increasingly obsessed with trying to establish how the Minehead ghost had come to the attention of Scot*land’s greatest Romantic novelist, and why the tale was evidently still familiar at the end of Queen Victoria’s reign. What I began to dis*cover was that the depositions from Minehead represented only the tip of an iceberg of rumour and scandal.

Scott (who referred to the case in his poem Rokeby and in his 1830 Letters on Demon*ology) got his information from a printed source of the early 1700s. From there I worked back to a set of pamph*lets about the case pub*lished in the mid-seven*teenth century, and began to piece together the con*nec*tions between the Leakeys and Bishop Atherton. Atherton was a Somerset clergyman who had married Mother Leakey’s daughter Joan in 1620. In 1630 he took his family to Ireland, where his career was advanced by the Lord Deputy, Sir Thomas Wentworth. Thanks to Wentworth’s good offices the king appointed him bishop of Waterford in 1636 (an event that seems to have been the trigger for Elizabeth Leakey’s visions).
Atherton’s elevation had nothing to do with spiritual qualities, and everything to do with his abilities as a tough church lawyer. The established Protestant Church of Ireland in the 1630s was in deep crisis. Not only was the great mass of the population, in defiance of the law, still Catholic, but many of the Church’s lands had fallen into the hands of (usually Protestant) lay landowners. The diocese of Waterford was in a partic*ularly impoverished state, and Atherton’s brief was to use the courts aggressively to over*turn leases and return revenues to the Church. In the process he made enemies, not least the great*est landowner in Ireland, Richard Boyle, earl of Cork, who had acquired numerous ecclesiastical estates. Atherton also ant*agonized many Prot*es*tants among the English and Scots settlers. Deputy Wentworth, like Archbishop Laud in Eng*land, was keen to restore ceremony and ritual to Pro*testant services, and Atherton was in the vanguard of this movement. To oppo*nents, this seemed tanta*mount to bringing back ‘popery’. Little wonder then, that, that Laud’s ears should have pricked up when he heard ‘strange news out of Somer*setshire’ about super*natural messages for Bishop Ather*ton, or that he kept Went*worth closely briefed about developments, includ*ing the Justices’ conclusion that it was all an ‘imposture, device and fraud’.
At the beginning of the 1640s, a wave of Protestant hostility to ‘Laudian’ innov*ations swept across Charles I’s three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland. The king was forced to summon parliaments in both England and Ireland to raise money to repress Scottish rebellion, and those parliaments them*selves were soon centres of resistance. In June 1640, the Irish opposition in Ireland gained a notable scalp. The parliament in Dublin received a petition from Bishop Atherton’s steward, accusing him of a capital offence – sodomy with the steward himself. Atherton was arrested, and accusations of other acts of sodomy, as well as fornication with single women, and adulteries with married ones, began to pour in. In November, Wentworth himself was put on trial in the House of Lords of the Long Parliament. One of the charges was that he had pro*moted ‘popish and infamous persons, as the Bishop of Waterford and others, to the prime rooms in the Church of Ireland’.
Atherton was tried and convicted at the end of that month, and hanged in Dub*lin on December 5th. Because the new Lord Deputy had died suddenly two days earlier, a ceremony of ‘deconsecration’ had to be cancelled, and Atherton died wearing his cassock, still fully a bishop. The case caused huge interest for a few weeks, until greater events overtook it: Catholic rebellion in Ire*land in 1641, and Civil War in England the following year.
But what of the ghost and its message? At this point a whole other dimension of the case began to open itself. A scurrilous pamphlet published a few months after Atherton’s death claimed that he had first fled to Ireland because of ‘incest committed with the sister of his wife’, and that this was the crime the ghost wanted him to repent. This revelation sent me back to the records of the Somerset church courts, which confirm that in 1623 Joan Atherton’s younger sister Susan Leakey had been charged having with sexual relations with her brother-in-law, and that parishioners believed there had been a child.
There were attempts to keep these skeletons firmly in the cupboard. In 1641, the clergyman who had minis*tered to Atherton in prison, Nicholas Bernard, published a long account entitled The Penitent Death of a Woeful Sinner. Bernard sought to deflect damaging scandal from the Church by stressing Atherton’s remarkable final repentance of all his sins. He made no mention of a ghost, of incest, or even of the crime for which Atherton was convicted, and urged readers to ‘let him die in your thoughts for his life, but let him live in your memories by his penitent death’. The work was reprinted several times in the seventeenth century.
The ghost, however, made a dramatic comeback. In 1709-10, two London ‘Grub Street’ publishers, Edmund Curll and John Dunton, printed a lurid account of the ghost story, now including, among other colourful details, the claim that Mother Leakey and Atherton had together murdered the illegitimate child, and hidden its body after smoking it in a warming pan, ‘that it might not stink’. The ghost’s message thus concerned infanticide. Their source was a manuscript by a south-western Presbyterian clergy*man, John Quick, who in 1690 had written down what local people were telling him about the case in the 1660s. These new revelations sparked a counter-attack from some ‘high Anglicans’, who interpreted them as an attack on the Church. They began to insist that Atherton had been innocent of all serious charges, and was in fact framed by his enemies, including the earl of Cork. In the eighteenth century, Ather*ton’s memory became something of a political foot*ball between Whigs and Tories, with the latter tending to give him benefit of the doubt (an exception was the Irish-born Jonathan Swift, who wrote scathingly about him in a poem of 1730). In the course of these debates, some new and frankly bizarre allegations emerged, such as that the cause of Atherton’s downfall was ‘the sin of unclean*ness with a cow and other creatures’.

http://www.historytoday.com/peter-marshall/sex-scandal-and-supernatural

CDfm

Motoring on a couple of hundred years into the 20th Century what do you get.

Well in Ireland Roger Casements homosexuality was widely known about and DeValera did not seem particularly bothered. His body was repatriated to Ireland in the 1960's and homosexuality in England was viewed differently as a result of the Wolfenden Report. Still criminalised, the Beatles Manager Brian Epstein had a conviction of some sort.

Wolfenden Report

For 400 years male homosexuality was a crime in Britain, punishable by years in jail or hanging. Many reputations and lives were ruined. But this report, controversial at the time, helped change not only the law but public attitudes and acceptance

Wolfenden Report, 1957, conclusion
Copyright © The British Library Board
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What was the legal status of homosexuality before Wolfenden?

Male homosexuality was made a capital offence in England under the Buggery Act of 1533. (Female homosexuality was never specified.) The first man to be convicted was playwright and schoolmaster Nicholas Udall in 1541, who was imprisoned for a year. The law became permanent in 1563 until replaced by the Offences Against the People Act of 1828.
The death penalty was the punishment until 1861 (1889 in Scotland), though it was only exacted a few times, such as when Methuselah Spalding was hanged for sodomy in 1804. Thereafter punishment became imprisonment for between ten years and life.
Then the law became stricter: the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act made any homosexual act illegal, even in private. Amongst the prosecutions was, most famously, that of Oscar Wilde in 1895.
Why was the Wolfenden Report commissioned?

Arrests and prosecutions for homosexuals had increased since the end of World War II. For example Alan Turing, the cryptographer who helped break the German Enigma code and who is generally recognised as the father of modern computer science, was victimised for his homosexuality. Charged with 'gross indecency', he had to choose between prison or hormone treatment. He also lost his job. His death in June 1954 was treated as suicide.
The trial of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu made headlines the same year. He was found guilty and imprisoned for 'gross offences', though he always maintained his innocence.
This and other cases led the Conservative government to set up a Departmental Committee under Sir John Wolfenden, Vice-Chancellor of Reading University, to consider both homosexual offences and prostitution. The Committee published its report in September 1957, priced five shillings (about the cost of three pints of beer).
What did the report say?

Wolfenden's main conclusion was direct and clear: "We recommend (i) That homosexual behavious between consenting adults in private be no longer a criminal offence".
The second recommendation was: "[We recommend] that questions relating to "consent" and "in private" be decided by the same criteria as apply in the case of heterosexual acts between adults."
Wolfenden clearly took great care to avoid the sort of widespread prejudice of the time, and to reach his conclusions dispassionately. He believed the law's role is to protect the public, not to interfere in private life: "There must remain a realm of private morality and immorality which is, in brief and crude terms, not the law's business", he wrote.
The Report caused much controversy and polarisation of views. Indeed, one of the committee members, James Adair, felt compelled to disassociate himself from recommending legalisation. He wrote a lengthy response, included in the final report. He believed that "so soon after two world wars... is not a time when... the approval of homosexual conduct should be introduced", worried about legalisation's "serious effects on the whole moral fabric of social life", and so on.
Other committee members attached their own brief observations at the end, though these were about the details of punishment for various offences in specific circumstances.
What happened in the wake of the Wolfenden Report?

Various individuals, led by Tony Dyson, formed the Homosexual Law Reform Society in March 1958. The government continued to be cautious and a proposal by Kenneth Robinson in June 1960 to enact the Report's recommendations failed by 213 to 99. It was not until February 1966 that Humphrey Berkeley's Sexual Offences Bill was passed in a free vote by 164 to 107. It became law in England and Wales in July 1967.
Homosexuality was not legalised in Scotland until 1980 and Northern Ireland until 1982. The age of consent has since been reduced and is now 16 in England, Wales and Scotland, and 17 in Northern Ireland.
The 2004 Civil Partnership Act allowed same-sex couples who unite in a civil partnership to receive the same pension and tax benefits, immigration, inheritance and property rights as married couples.

CDfm

For an idea of what the reaction was in Ireland check out the DAIL Reports

Wolfenden is raised in Debates a few times but the real catalyst to changing the law was David Norris

Seanad Eireann - 16/May/1990 Larceny Bill, 1989: Recommittal and ...
... On the Second Stage of this Bill on 1 March 1990, Senator Norris quoted — with approval
I presume — the Wolfenden report, which described the two Acts of ...
http://debates.oireachtas.ie/seanad/1990/05/16/00006.asp - 13 Sep 2010

Dáil Eireann - 08/Feb/1972 Garda Síochána Bill, 1971—Second ...
... Some years ago in England they had the Wolfenden Report on Crime which made a very
detailed examination of the whole problem. Debate adjourned. ...
http://debates.oireachtas.ie/dail/1972/02/08/00047.asp - 15 Sep 2010

Seanad Eireann - 18/Feb/1959 Public Business. - An Bille um an ...
... He adopted an ‘unpopular’ attitude to the controversial Wolfenden Report; he spoke
up against the retention of capital punishment (a decision which, he ...
http://debates.oireachtas.ie/seanad/1959/02/18/00007.asp - 15 Sep 2010

Seanad Eireann - 12/Dec/1990 European Court of Human Rights ...
... piece of English legislation which was rightly condemned by Sir John Wolfenden as
the ... has drawn the attention of the House to the Law Reform Commission report. ...
http://debates.oireachtas.ie/seanad/1990/12/12/00009.asp - 13 Sep 2010

Seanad Eireann - 16/Dec/1976 Family Planning Bill, 1974: Second ...
... Members of the House. The debate took place on the 20th February, 1974, and
I said at column 205 of the Official Report: I should like ...
http://debates.oireachtas.ie/seanad/1976/12/16/00004.asp - 14 Sep 2010


Seanad Eireann - 01/Mar/1990 Larceny Bill, 1989: Second Stage.
... Why do I think it is relevant here? Because no less a person than Sir John Wolfenden
in his report described the 1861 and 1885 Act as a blackmailer's charter. ...
http://debates.oireachtas.ie/seanad/1990/03/01/00005.asp - 13 Sep 2010

Seanad Eireann - 21/Feb/1974 Family Planning Bill, 1973: Second ...
... Having been instructed in the Billings method he came back two months afterwards
to report that they were now using the Billings method and things were much ...
http://debates.oireachtas.ie/seanad/1974/02/21/00006.asp - 14 Sep 2010

So here is an extract from a debate in the Senate in 1990 following Norris winning his EC Judgement

European Court of Human Rights Judgment: Statements.

Wednesday, 12 December 1990

Seanad Eireann Debate
Vol. 127 No. 1
Mr. Fallon: In regard to this item, I wish to state that the time allowed for statements relating to this matter shall not exceed a period of three hours in the aggregate. The statement of the first Senator shall not exceed 20 minutes and the statement of any other Senator shall not exceed 15 minutes.
Minister for Justice (Mr. Burke): I welcome this opportunity to explain the position of the Government on the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in relation to the question of male homosexual behaviour.
The judgment of the European Court was delivered on 26 October 1988. It found that our laws in relation to homosexual offences are in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights in that they interfere with the right to respect for private life under article 8.1 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The legislation is at sections 61 and 62 of the Offences Against the Person Act, 1861 and section 11 of the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 1885. Section 61 of the 1861 Act provides that whosoever shall be convicted of the “abominable crime of buggery committed with mankind or with any animal shall be liable to life imprisonment.” Section 62 provides that an attempt to commit buggery carries a penalty on conviction of up to ten years imprisonment. Section 11 of the 1885 Act makes it an offence for any male person, in public or in private, to commit or to be a party to the commission by any male person of any gross indecency with another male person.
If we did not already have legislation which penalises homosexual acts in private between consenting male adults, I do not think that today any reasonable person could seriously argue for such legislation. I do not, for example, hear of any demand to penalise homosexual activity between females. However, we do have on our Statute Book legislation proscribing male homosexual acts and we [71] are faced with the problem of dealing with it. Precisely how one goes about doing that is the question that needs to be considered.
The Law Reform Commission examined the judgment on the basis of the referral of the question of sexual offences generally to it by the Attorney General under section 4 (2) (c) of the Law Reform Commission Act, 1975. The commission issued a report on rape and allied offences in May 1988, which gave rise to the Bill at present before the Oireachtas. The commission then examined the law on child sexual abuse. While engaged in this examination the European Court of Human Rights issued its judgment. The commission took the opportunity afforded by the work in progress to examine that judgment. The commission's provisional recommendations in relation to the law proscribing homosexual acts were outlined in its consultation paper on child sexual abuse in August 1989. Their final recommendations are contained in the report on child sexual abuse published in September 1990.
It would have been precipitious to have brought forward proposals for changes in the law while the matter was being considered by the Law Reform Commission. The commission's final report was published only a few weeks ago, in September, and its recommendations on homosexual activity are being examined in my Department. For that reason I do not intend to comment on those recommendations today but I will, for the information of Senators, briefly outline the main recommendations of the commission under the heading in the report of homosexual activity.
First of all, the commission proceeded on the assumption that our laws will, in due course, be brought into conformity with the judgment of the European Court.
The commission recommended that sections 61 and 62 of the Offences Against the Person Act, 1861 and section 11 of the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 1885, should be repealed and there should be the same protection against [72] both homosexual and heterosexual exploitation of the young. It follows from this recommendation that the “child sexual abuse” offence which they recommended should be created to replace the present offence of “indecent assault with consent”, should apply equally in the case of homosexual activity. The present minimum legal age of 17 for heterosexual acts would also be a minimum legal age for homosexual acts.
The commission recommended that vaginal sexual intercourse with girls between the ages of 15 and 17 should cease to be an offence, save where the male participant is a “person in authority” or is more than five years older than the girl. However, they also recommend that anal penetration of boys and girls continue to be an offence. Finally, they recommend that the new offence of child sexual abuse should continue to be an offence in the case of boys and girls between the ages of 15 and 17 where the perpetrator is a “person in authority”.
Senators will be interested to know that I will be bringing forward proposals to Government during the next year to change the law with regard to homosexuality, taking account of the European Court's judgment. I want to emphasise, in saying that it will be during the course of the next year, that it is not the intention to delay this legislation. It is merely from the point of view of being totally frank with the House that I want to ensure that the resources are available to me within the Department with the legislative programme that I have, which is quite extensive, as Senators know. I do not want to make a false promise here in relation to a specific time.
I assure the House that as early as I can within a year it will be brought forward. Having said that, I will listen with interest to these statements to hear suggestions as to what should be included in the forthcoming legislation. I will bring it forward and introduce it in the House during the course of next year.
Mr. Norris: I welcome the Minister's statement which gives some ground for optimism. Within the short space of time [73] allowed it will not be possible to go into all its ramifications. Perhaps it would be possible, since the Minister has indicated goodwill in this regard, for me to have some discussions with him or with his officials. It is an area in which, over the last 20 years, I have acquired a fair amount of knowledge.
The whole subject is rapidly becoming rather tedious to me. After 20 years I will be heartily glad when this matter is disposed of because there are other things on my agenda and I am quite sure there are other things on the Minister's agenda as well. I note his very wise and balanced comment that if this legislation did not exist on the Statute Book he did not believe the Irish people would consider it an appropriate use of their parliamentary time to introduce such proposals. It is important to put this in context without being too academic. What the Minister referred to was “our” laws. I do not believe they are our laws. As an Irishman I repudiate them totally. They did not originate in this country. They were never discussed in this country. They were never debated in parliament. The 1885 Act was not. The Offences Against The Person Act, 1861, was a liberalising statute that mitigated the penalty which up to that had been death by hanging. It reduced it to life imprisonment. Although I know that a subsequent Act of Parliament permitted a judge to impose a lighter sentence — it was an Act of the late 1890s — at the same time technically on the Statute Book there still exists this law of 1861 which says that for this offence whether or not there is consent, no matter what the age — it is a broad sweep — the penalty shall be from ten years to life imprisonment. If you look at the language in which the provisions are couched, they reveal the source of prejudice — buggery and sodomy. These words do not actually properly describe any activity at all because the definitions of buggery in various jurisdictions, across America for example, can cover a very wide and disparate range of sexual activities, including quite a number that take place [74] between married persons within the privacy of their home.
In the state of New England, for example, everything except the strict missionary position No. 1 is classified as an act of sodomy. Where did it come from? Sodomy comes from a misinterpretation of the Old Testament story of the city of Sodom. I am sure the Minister's advisers are aware that the evidence of the Palestinian pseudepigrapha indicates quite clearly that the inclusion of the question of homosexuality was a subsequent addition to a previously existing legend which referred entirely and exclusively to a violation of hospitality rituals. Buggery comes from the middle French word for Bulgaria, the Boulgre, because in the time of the Albigensian heresy charges were laid by the central authorities in the Vatican against those engaging in unnatural sexual practices. It was a political targeting. These two words which people imagined are perhaps an onomatopoeic description of these specific acts, are nothing other than indicators which show precisely the origin of the taboo against male homosexuality and expose it as being fundamentally a religous one.
In the Old Testament, in Leviticus, there is a tabulation of behavioural codes which include other things such as, for example, the eating of shellfish and the wearing of worsted cloth, which carry equal penalities. I had a prawn cocktail with my lunch. I committed an offence, in the eyes of the Old Testament prophets, equal to the act of buggery. I am wearing worsted cloth. I did it twice. Why do we need to retain outdated ideas? We have modified our views with regard to the eating of shellfish, the wearing of worsted cloth and also other sexual crimes. Adultery is considered in religious terms as a sexual crime in the Old Testament and a woman taken in adultery shall be stoned to death. Yet we have modified our view in this area. Why can we not do so with regard to the question of homosexuality?
The religious background is important because homosexuality only became a crime by accident when in 1537, or whenever it was. I cannot remember the exact [75] date but it was sometime in the 1530s, Henry VIII as part of his lust for power grabbed the monasteries and coincidentally, he grabbed jurisdiction over the ecclesiastical courts. It was the ecclesiastical courts who adjudicated on the question of the sin of sodomy or buggery. By accident, this question of homosexuality came into the civil law as a result of the action of Henry VIII seizing the monasteries. As the Minister probably knows, by some technical quirk this did not extend to Ireland. There was a sensational case in the 1630s involving an Irish peer. It was found as a result of this that the provisions of the English law did not extend to Ireland and a campaign, a kind of primitive “save Ireland from sodomy” campaign was launched by a Bishop in Wexford. The Bishop, John Atherton, did this for purely political purposes, to advance his own career. He succeeded in having this law written into the Irish Statute Book and I am very glad to be able to inform the House that he was charged with the crime himself and suffered the ultimate penalty of being executed for sodomy outside Christ Church Catherdral on Christmas Day, 1637. So those who urge extreme penalties in this area should beware.
The law continued until 1861 when the penalties were reduced to ten years or life imprisonment. But in 1885 there was a much more serious development and that was the introduction of the so called Labouchere amendment, the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 1885. This was a particularly nasty piece of legislation because what it criminalised was any form of indecency, gross indecency between males. Perhaps somebody more learned and more intelligent and more perceptive than I can define “gross” indecency. When does indecency stop being merely indecent and become gross indecency? I have to say that the learned judges who sat in my case betrayed a quite extraordinary absence of commonsense when they decided on the question of discrimination between lesbians on the one hand and gay men on the other, that whereas men were capable of [76] gross indecency women were only capable of indecency. Women could not be capable of gross indecency. This was absurd and I feel that the intellectual processes stutter when certain kinds of mind are confronted with what is sometimes an embarrassing subject of intimate sexual behaviour.
The Labouchere amendment was never discussed at all. It was introduced after midnight in the House of Commons by the Liberal MP for Liverpool, Henry Labouchere, as an adjunct to a Bill which principally addressed the subject of the seduction of minors and the abduction of young girls. It had no direct relationship to the body of the Bill. It was accepted by the government. It was never discussed. There was no debate and there was no vote. It was scarcely very democratic. I do not claim this nasty legislation as ours. I do not think there is anything particularly Irish about it. It is a prudish, nasty, villainous piece of English legislation which was rightly condemned by Sir John Wolfenden as the blackmailer's charter and that is precisely what it is.
With regard to the 1885 Act, its operations are pernicious in the extreme because there is no definition, as I have said, of gross indecency so you rely on case law to tell you what constitutes gross indecency. In the fifties in England two airmen were successfully prosecuted and convicted under this legislation on the basis that they had, and I quote, “exchanged lascivious looks”. It is quite extraordinary and insupportable in a democracy that this kind of absurd, discredited and disgraceful legislation should be allowed to continue.
I am very heartened that the Minister, whom I have just spent some minutes complimenting for his foresight and vision on the Criminal Law (Rape) (Amendment) Bill, has drawn the attention of the House to the Law Reform Commission report. This is the precise context within which the legislation should be framed. I will be looking for nothing less than the full implementation of the Law Reform Commission recommendations. After all, I have waited 20 years for this. I was brought up in a [77] society that was not understanding of my particular circumstance. The laws under which I have lived out my 46 years of life are the exact and direct parallel of the Penal Laws which discriminated against Roman Catholics in this country, to the shame of the then Government. I am discriminated against in precisely the way Roman Catholics were discriminated against under the Penal Laws; in precisely the way black people in the southern states of America were discriminated against and in exactly those areas where Roman Catholic civil rights activists charged the Stormont Government with discriminating against them. I look forward to an anti-discrimination Bill from this progressive Minister which will outlaw discrimination in areas such as housing and employment because that is where the matter will bite.
With regard to the acceptability of this legislation the Minister has not said very much about it except that he feels that people would not now want to introduce such a law. I have been working in this area for about 20 years. The distinguished statistician/researcher/sociologist Professor Michael MacGrail produced a book in about 1969-70 before I or my colleagues had any impact on the public consciousness of this country. It was called “Prejudice and Tolerance in Ireland” and among the tables Professor MacGrail shows that at the turn of the sixties just coming into 1970 a plurality of Irish people believed that the criminal law should not be sustained, that it should be changed. That is an important fact and it bears out what Senator Ryan said about the Irish people and their qualities of tolerance and decency. I have no doubt that figure has significantly increased. I direct the Minister to, for example, I suppose a sort of vox populi, the Gay Byrne radio show, on which during a debate recently, there was what they call a tele-poll. I am not suggesting that it is necessarily completely accurate.
Everybody dismisses polls when they do not suit them and accept them warmly when they do, but in that poll of 11,000 people — it could not possibly have been [78] rigged — 66 per cent thought the law should be changed. Maybe it is a little bit more, maybe it should be a little bit less, but it is a very interesting indicator of the kind of support that could be anticipated.
The Law Reform Commission came down four square on equality with regard to the age of consent for heterosexual and homosexual intercourse. I fully endorse that. The law in Britain is spectacularly bad with regard to the age of consent and the conditions of privacy. I would like the Minister to take into consideration in framing this legislation——
Acting Chairman (Mr. R. Kiely): Will the Senator move the Adjournment, please? It is six o'clock.
Mr. Norris: I so move. May I finish this statement? I want to read in a table of the ages of consent. I will start with that afterwards, if that is all right.
Acting Chairman: Is that agreed? Agreed.
Sitting suspended at 6.5 p.m. and resumed at 6.30 p.m.
Acting Chairman (Mr. Hussey): I understand there is a vote in the other House and it is proposed that we adourn until 6.40 p.m. Is that agreed? Agreed.
Sitting suspended at 6.30 p.m. and resumed at 6.40 p.m.

Now this Debate occured after I had finished College and emigrated had kids and the like.

A classmate emigrated because of his homosexuality and this at the same time years after Danny LaRue had had a Civic Reception in Cork.

I only recently found out that a mechanic I have known for years is gay and he had done his apprenticeship in the Army. He is as secretive then as he was now even though he is in a relationship for years.

So while prosecutions may not have occured there were other issues which caused practical life problems.

CDfm

There seems not to be very much written about homosexuals on Brehon society but I found an article on Vikings which might give some insight.

Brehon laws did not have primogeniture ( firstborn males) but it was an advantage and marriage was also a way of forging alliances.

Some extracts and links here

A man’s reputation was worth more to him than his life. I’m trying to remember the name of the saga, but hopefully better informed readers can tell me the one I’m thinking of; the hero has been captured and held as a servant by a strong household. Eventually, he contrives to escape without anyone in the household knowing about it. He’s on the brink of getting entirely away when he thinks to himself ‘what am I doing, sneaking out like a slave or a woman?!’ Horrified at the thought that everyone will know he behaved like a coward, he turns back, kills everyone, and then escapes, happy that this time he has dealt with the matter like a man.

This was a culture which valued men for their hardness, and where reputation was all. As a result, there could be no worse thing that your enemies could do to you than to publically insult you and call you soft. In fact, the Vikings were extremely touchy about the whole subject of insults.





To quote from Gunnora Hallakarva, whose essay is the best treatment I’ve seen on the subject:

The Old Norse word used in the law code and literature for an insult was níð , which may be defined as “libel, insult, scorn, lawlessness, cowardice, sexual perversion, homosexuality” (Markey 75). From níð are derived such words as níðvisur (“insulting verses”), níðskald (“insult-poet”), níðingr (“coward, outlaw”), griðníðingr (“truce-breaker”), níðstöng (“scorn-pole”) (Markey 75, 79 & 80; Sørenson 29), also níða (“to perform níð poetry”), tunguníð (“verbal níð”), tréníð (“timber níð”, carved or sculpted representations of men involved in a homosexual act, related to niíðstöng, above) (Sørenson 28-29). Níð was part of a family of concepts which all have connotations of passive male homosexuality, such as: ergi or regi (nouns) and argr or ragr (the adjective form of ergi) (“willing or inclined to play or interested in playing the female part in sexual relations with another man, unmanly, effeminate, cowardly”); ergjask (“to become argr”); rassragr (“arse-ragr”); stroðinn and sorðinn (“sexually used by a man”) and sansorðinn (“demonstrably sexually used by another man”) (Sørenson 17-18, 80). A man who is a seiðmaðr (one who practices women’s magic) who is argr is called seiðskratti (Sørenson 63).

Calling a man by any term which suggested he played the ‘passive’ or ‘feminine’ part in homosexual sex was considered an insult so severe that the person who had been insulted had the right to avenge it in combat. Just the insult itself might be enough to get a man outlawed.

There is no apparent equivalent derogatory term for a man who played the ‘active’ part in homosexual sex. Indeed in ‘Guðmundar saga dýra’ Guðmundar plans to rape a male captive in order to break his spirit. This reflects badly on the slave, but not on the rapist, who is merely demonstrating his manliness.

Both castration and rape of defeated foes was seen as a good way of making them more effeminate, and therefore easier to control.

In this context – where the penetrator is regarded as perfectly normal and admirable, but to be the one being penetrated is to be shamed, broken, treated as a slave and ridiculed thenceforth as unmanly – it’s hard to imagine many m/m relationships existing as between equals.


http://historicromance.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/viking-attitudes-towards-homosexuality/

My personal research into homosexuality in the Viking Age shows clearly that the Vikings had words (and therefore mental constructs and concepts) of same-sex activity; however since the needs of agricultural/pastoral living require reproduction not only to work the farm but also to provide support for the parent in old age, it was expected that no matter what one's affectional preferences were that each individual would marry and reproduce. There are no recorded instances of homosexual or lesbian couples in the Viking Age: moreover, the idea of living as an exclusively homosexual person did not exist in most cultures until present day Western civilization appeared. One's sexual partners mattered little so long as one married, had children, and conformed at least on the surface to societal norms so as not to disturb the community. Those Scandinavians who attempted to avoid marriage because of their sexuality were penalized in law: a man who shunned marriage was termed fuðflogi (man who flees the female sex organ) while a woman who tried to avoid marriage was flannfluga (she who flees the male sex organ) (Jochens 65). The evidence of the sagas and laws shows that male homosexuality was regarded in two lights: there was nothing at all strange or shameful about a man having intercourse with another man if he was in the active or "manly" role, however the passive partner in homosexual intercourse was regarded with derision. It must be remembered, however, that the laws and sagas reflect the Christian consciousness of the Icelander or Norwegian of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, well after the pagan period. The myths and legends show that honored gods and heroes were believed to have taken part in homosexual acts, which may indicate that pre-Christian Viking Scandinavia was more tolerant of homosexuality, and history is altogether silent as to the practice of lesbianism in the Viking Age.

The intriduction of Christian Attitudes

ATTITUDES ABOUT HOMOSEXUALITY INTRODUCED BY CHRISTIANITY
The secular laws of Viking Age Iceland do not mention homosexuality. The only place where homosexuality is documentably prohibited is by the Christian Church. The Icelandic Homily Book (ca. 1200 C.E.) has a sermon which states that among grave sins are "those appalling secret sins perpetrated by men who respect men no more than women, or violate quadrupeds." Bishop Þorlákr Þórhallson of Skáholt's Penetential (ca. 1178-1193 C.E.) lists penances of nine or ten years that include flogging for "adultery between males, or that committed by men on quadrupeds," and says of lesbianism that "if women satisfy each other they shall be ordered the same penance as men who perform the most hideous adultery between them or with a quadruped." (Sørenson 26) Christian belief condemns both the active and passive roles of homosexual intercourse, whereas the pagan Scandinavians attached disapproval only to the male who was homosexually passive.

And Lesbians gaining the upper hand

LESBIANS IN VIKING SCANDINAVIA
There is little mention in the sources regarding lesbianism in the Viking Age. When the feminine form of the word argr, (org), is used about a woman, it does not indicate that she is homosexual, but rather lecherous or immodest. (Sørenson 18). Staðarhólsbók, one of the existing versions of Grágás, prohibits a woman from wearing male clothing, from cutting her hair like a man, bearing arms, or in general behaving like a man (chs 155 and 254), however it does not mention behaving sexually in the male role. After the onset of Christianity, of course, lovemaking between women was condemned by the Church as mentioned above. During the Viking Age, however, women were in short supply, at least in Iceland. Exposure of infants (barnaútburðr) was a Viking Age practice, and female infants were preferentially exposed, leaving fewer women (Jochens 86). This meant that every woman who survived to reproductive age was going to be married to at least one man in her lifetime and would bear his children unless she were barren. This gave women quite a lot of their apparent power as reflected in the sagas, as a woman could control her husband quite well by threatening divorce (Clover 182). However, men also could have concubines so long as these were lower class (thrall) women (Karras). In many societies when there are several women living in a household who are all sexually tied to a single man, especially when the woman had no say in the arrangement of marriage or concubinage, then lesbian relationships could and did exist. There is good reason to see an almost "harem" atmosphere prevailing among the Vikings... the women tended to gather in the kvenna hús (women's quarters) (Jochens 80), or in the dyngja (weaving room) where a man could not go without accruing shame for unmanly interests excepting only truly mighty ---i.e., virile--- heroes. Helgi Hundingsbana was able to hide disguised as a maid in the kvenna hús, but for any lesser man such an act would have been regarded as cowardice, and the man who braved the dyngja would have been labeled as níðingr and ragrmann simply because the location was so strongly associated with women's activity and central role in the society as weavers (Helgakviða Hundingsbana II 1-5). In most societies where polygamy is common and women are denied sexual outlets other than their husband, there is frequently lesbian activity to fill not only sexual but also emotional needs. If a husband had objected to his wife having a lesbian relationship, there would have been little he could have done about it, as she could always divorce him if he complained. This gave women, lesbians or not, quite a bit of power due to the relative scarcity of marriagable women, so long as they fulfilled their societal roles as wives and mothers.

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/pwh/gayvik.html

another article here

http://historicromance.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/viking-attitudes-towards-homosexuality/

Now in Irish Culture it is mostly supposition

Sculpture in Ardee, County Lough, of Cuchullain carrying Ferdia's body.

Celtic culture was ever a warrior culture, no matter where and when they resided, and as such were part of the virtually global tradition of warrior lovers.
Celtic language, culture and traditions once spanned most of the continent of Europe, bringing it into contact with the classical societies of Greece and Rome for hundreds of years. Celts at their widest expansion, that is, by 275 BC, ranged from the Ukraine west to Spain, France and, of course, the British Isles. Rome sought to incorporate these peoples as they conquered their lands, but Germanic migration forced the contraction of Celtic language and cultures until they occupied only parts of the British Isles and Brittany.
Celts themselves relied entirely on oral tradition for perpetuating their way of life; so Classical scholars and military leaders recorded much of what we know about these peoples. It is remarkable that coming from a culture that recognized and honored same sex relationships, the Greek teacher Aristotle comments in his Politics (II 1269b) on the greater enshrinement of warrior lovers among the Celts. Coincidental with this was a sometimes-disputed tradition of warlike women, or at least greater liberty for women in and out of matrimony. Brehon law, which governed Irish tribes, for example, permitted divorce initiated by wives.
In ancient Irish mythology, male warriors paired off much as the great male lovers of ancient Greece, such as Achilles and Patroclus and Alexander and Hephaestion. They shared a bed and fought as a team. Perhaps best known of these couples is Cuchullain and Ferdia. Cuchullain was semi-divine, almost invincible and able to turn into a ravening beast in battle. In the legend, the two lovers are forced to meet in battle to the death. At the end of each day of hand to hand combat, they met in the middle of a ford to embrace and kiss three times. When Cuchullain finally kills his friend, he mourns, singing over his body,

Dear to me thy noble blush,
Dear thy comely, perfect form;
Dear thine eye, blue-grey and clear,
Dear thy wisdom and thy speech.
(Quoted in “A Coming Out Ritua“l)

Even after the Christianization of Ireland the record in regards to acceptance of same sex relationships is ambiguous. According to Brian Lacey’s new history of homosexuality in Ireland, Terrible Queer Creatures: A History of Homosexuality in Ireland, St. Patrick traveled with a lifelong companion his that he is recorded as having great affection for and sleeping with. In the famous illuminated gospel, The Book of Kells, there are numerous illustrations of men embracing. In typical Christian revisionist manner, the Church has interpreted these illustrations as calling for the eradication of sodomy.
One person in a chieftain’s household, the poet/bard called the ollamh was afforded great access to his lord physically, sharing his bed and demonstrating affection with him in public. In songs or poems the ollamh often referred to the chieftain as a beloved or even a spouse. It is interesting in Dorothy Dunnett’s sexually ambiguous Lymond Chronicles the protagonist in the second volume, Queen’s Play, masquerades not as any other sort of bard but as an ollamh. The tradition continued well into the Middle Ages.

http://historicromance.wordpress.com/?s=ireland

Then

http://www.timelessmyths.com/celtic/ossian.html#Pursuit

How reliable is any of this is anyones guess as what you are often looking at is the modern treatment of Celtic Legends and Saga's.

Do they reflect society at the time or are they wishfull thinking?

wonderfulname

I was doing a bit of research for a blog post on the legislative side gay history in Ireland when I came across the Criminal Law Bill 1921. I have yet to find a copy of the Bill but I have found refrence to it in Sexuality and the Law: Feminist Engagements.

Absent in life, the topic of lesbianism is also largely absent from law. That
is not to say that lesbians have not suffered under English law, but lesbian
sex was never specifically criminalised (except in the armed forces) as were
sexual acts between men in the years 1885–1967. The old chestnut of Queen
Victoria’s refusal to accept the existence of such a vice is hardly an adequate
explanation for the absence of a criminalising law.
48
But we know that some
of those who opposed the attempt to include lesbians in the Criminal Law
Amendment Bill 1921 argued that silence was a better policy than criminalisation. After suggesting in the House of Commons debates that lesbian
perverts could be dealt with by the death penalty or the lunatic asylum,
Lieutenant-Colonel Brabazon went on:
The third way is to leave them entirely alone, not notice them, not advertise them. That is the method that has been adopted in England for many
hundred years . . .
49

48 By 1885 the sovereign had long since lost any genuine power of veto on legislation.
49 House of Commons Debates Vol 145 (8), Columns 1802–3.

It seems that such a bill was deemed too controversial, and that making it law would do more harm than good. I find it an interesting reflection on the views held by society as a whole. A House of Commons debate on the subject shows little care for anything about the bill other than the controversy that it may cause;

Viscountess ASTOR asked the Lord Privy Seal whether he has Deceived copies of two Resolutions passed at a meeting held in the House of Commons in support of the Bishop of London’s Criminal Law Amendment Bill, at which practically every organisation interested was represented, promising to abstain from introducing controversial Amendments; and whether, under these circumstances, he will undertake to give facilities for the passage of the Bill this Session?

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN The answer to the first part of the question is in the affirmative. I cannot, however, at present add anything to the answer which I gave my hon. Friend on the 12th April last.

Viscountess ASTOR Since that answer we have had a meeting, and as this is not a controversial question, could not the right hon. Gentleman really see his way to make time for it, as it will cost the country nothing? It is one of those Bills which the Government could get through. It would do a great deal of good, and I would urge the right hon. Gentleman to find time for it.

Mr. CHAMBERLAIN I quite understand the importance attached to this Measure by a very large section of public opinion, and I am anxious that it should be considered by the House this Session, but I cannot make a pledge to find time for it at this stage, though I hope it may be possible to do so later.

Major C. LOWTHER Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that this Bill would be by no means uncontroversial, and that it is likely to lead to considerable controversy?

Viscountess ASTOR Only by a certain section.

CDfm

I posted the fantastic story of Jennie Hodgers in the Irish Womens History Thread

CDfm wrote: »

Probably the most famous women soldiers of the American Civil War

Jennie Hodgers

Private
December 25, 1843 - October 10, 1915



There are over 400 documented cases of women disguising themselves as men and fighting as soldiers on both sides during the Civil War. The case of Jennie Hodgers is one of the most famous, because she continued to live as a man after the war and was not discovered until a couple of years before her death.
Related Battles

• • Mansfield
  • Vicksburg
  • Kennesaw Mountain
  • Jonesborough
  • Nashville

Hodgers was born on December 25, 1843 in Clogherhead, County Louth, Ireland. Not much is known about her early life, as the only account available was given by Hodgers when she was suffering from dementia in 1913.
This much is certain—on August 6, 1862, Hodgers, a resident of Belvidere, Illinois, enlisted in the 95th Illinois Infantry under the name Albert Cashier. Although she was the shortest soldier in the regiment, and kept mostly to herself, Hodgers was accepted as “one of the boys” and considered to be a good soldier.
Hodgers’ regiment was part of the Army of the Tennessee and fought in over 40 engagements, including the siege of Vicksburg, the Battle of Nashville, the Red River Campaign, and the battles at Kennesaw Mountain and Jonesborough, Georgia. There is an account of Hodgers being captured and escaping by overpowering a prison guard, but no further details of this event exist.
Hodgers served a full three year enlistment with her regiment until they were all mustered out on August 17, 1865 after losing a total of 289 soldiers to death and disease.
After the war, Hodgers returned to Illinois where she settled in Saunemin. She continued to masquerade as a man, and held many different jobs, including farmhand, church janitor, cemetery worker, and street lamplighter. Hodgers even voted in elections (at the time, women did not have the right to vote) and collected a veteran’s pension.
In November of 1910, Hodgers was hit by a car and broke her leg, and her secret was discovered. The local hospital agreed not to divulge her true gender, and she was sent to the Soldiers and Sailors Home in Quincy, Illinois to recover. Hodgers remained a resident of the Home until March of 1913, when due to the onset of dementia, she was sent to a state hospital for the insane. Attendants there discovered her sex and forced her to wear a dress. The press got a hold of the story and soon everyone knew that Private Albert Cashier had been a woman in disguise.
Many of her former comrades, although initially surprised at this revelation, were supportive of Hodgers, and protested her treatment at the state hospital. When Hodgers died on October 10, 1915, she was buried in her full uniform and given a tombstone inscribed with her male identity and military service. In the 1970s, a second tombstone, with the name Jennie Hodgers, was placed next to the original grave.



http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/biographies/jennie-hodgers.html

CDfm

Despite all the recent election controvercy Ireland has had a "gay" head of state.

I came accross this piece on a thread on the Battle of Aughrim.

Speculations about William III's sexuality have been countered by his English and American biographers, who have been unwilling to entertain the idea that a man of his nobility of character and special historical significance could have loved other men. Dutch writers on the other hand have been much more willing to accept the evidence that William was, indeed, bisexual.
William was born at the Hague in 1650, the posthumous son of William II, who died a few days before he was born, and Mary Stuart, daughter of the late King Charles I of England, who had been deposed by English Parliamentarians. William was thus an important figure in European politics from the day of his birth, since he not only inherited his Dutch titles, but was fourth in line to inherit the British throne should it be restored.
Sponsor Message.

His claim to the British throne was reinforced in 1677, when he married the daughter of James, Duke of York, who was to succeed to the British monarchy in 1685.
William III acceded to the British throne when the English ousted James II in the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688. He and his wife, Mary II, ruled together until her death in 1694. After her death, he ruled alone until he died in 1702. The couple was childless, so he was succeeded by Mary's sister Anne.
As "stadholder" (military commander) of the Dutch Republic, William had opposed the aggressions of Louis XIV that threatened the Netherlands and neighboring states. For this he was hailed by the Dutch as the "Redeemer of the Fatherland."
When he brought England into the coalition against France he became the acknowledged champion of Protestant Europe. It is this preeminence as an international hero that has made it hard for Anglophone admirers to candidly assess William's sexual orientation.
William had close and affectionate relations with two notable favorites, William Bentinck, whom he brought to England and made Earl of Portland, and a handsome younger Dutchman, Arnold van Keppel, whom he created Earl of Albemarle.
A spate of political satires accusing William of intimate relations with both men circulated during his reign. These scurrilous poems are quite explicit in their allegations, and are obviously the work of Tory partisans who favored James. For this reason they have been discounted by William's defenders.
One satire begins: "For the case, Sir, is such, / That the people think much, / That your love is Italian, your government Dutch. / Ah! Who would have thought that a Low-Country Stallion, / and a Protestant Prince should prove an Italian?" (Italy was the country most notably associated with sodomy in the seventeenth century.) Jonathan Swift also referred to William's "infamous pleasures" with Keppel in a manuscript note. All this has, however, been dismissed as the malicious gossip of Tory enemies.
Nevertheless, rumors were also rife among those favorable to the king. These include the redoubtable "Madame," Duchess of Orléans, who was married to France's most flamboyantly conspicuous homosexual, "Monsieur," and whose correspondence makes up a veritable encyclopedia of homosexuality in that country and England. Her letters are admiring of the king but speak repeatedly of "men who share King William's inclinations."
Rumors also circulated in the Dutch army, which was fanatically loyal to the house of Orange.
Most telling, however, are the remarks of Bishop Gilbert Burnet, who praised William unstintingly as "a person raised up by God to resist the power of France and the progress of tyranny and persecution." Yet in considering matters that might make it difficult for William to assume the English throne, Burnet refers to one "particular . . . too tender to be put in writing," which under the circumstances can only be interpreted as a reference to William's sexual nature.
To nineteenth-century liberal historians such as Thomas Macaulay, William III ranked as one of England's greatest kings for his fostering of religious and political liberty and for his leadership of the European nations who fought Louis XIV.



http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/william_III.html

There is another article here about the restoration court

http://www.glbtq.com/literature/eng_lit4_restoration_18c.html

ZombieBride

This has been a very interesting thread to read and could make one heck of a book.

CDfm

ZombieBride wrote: »

This has been a very interesting thread to read and could make one heck of a book.

Thanks - the thread was inspired by a clown (not a H & H poster) who pm'd me just on the line of being abusive.

I am glad you like it because I wanted to avoid stereotypes and, the material itself is interesting and it was fun to do. It would be great to see it expanded on.