Who owns Casement?

Roger Casement was gay. He loved men. Alone at night somewhere in Brazil or the Congo after a tough day spent tracking down evidence of human rights abuses, he'd read his private records of real or imagined sexual encounters. He was a solitary man, unusually brave - and unusually lonely. The diaries probably comforted him. They destroyed him too. When circulated to an establishment bent on punishing him for a relatively minor and certainly ineffective role in the 1916 Rebellion, the so-called Black Diaries sealed his fate. Casement was denuded - literally and metaphorically. Stripped of his knighthood, subjected to a rectal probe designed to confirm his deviant sexual practices, executed as a traitor.

Some said the Black Diaries were fakes. Once they were published in 1959 by Maurice Girodias, the man who first brought Nabokov's Lolita, as well as Beckett's Watt and Molloy, to the English-speaking world, the rows started in earnest. Were they forged? If so, why? If not, why not accept them at face value? No one now doubts that the diaries were used to discredit Casement and so deny him a reprieve, but the issue of forgery is once again contested with the publication of alternate arguments by Dr Roger Sawyer, Casement's biographer, and Angus Mitchell, Sawyer's former collaborator.

"I do not dislike homosexuals, but I detest buggery," says Sawyer. "That goes for heterosexual buggery too - the good Lord didn't provide for the consummation of that lust." Sawyer, an antislavery activist, is also a devout High Anglican. With such beliefs, he looks quite likely to accept the forgery theory, but that's not the case. Sawyer rejects it on both scientific and historical grounds, arguing that Casement was a practising homosexual, but intent on seeing his sexuality as a minor detail in the bigger picture of his courageous human rights crusades.

Casement's achievements in exposing human rights atrocities across the colonised territories are extraordinary in any age, but staggering in the context of his own time, that teetering period between Empire and World War which saw imperial nations grow rich on the back of unimaginable human exploitation. He was the first to name the lie of imperial domination for what it was - an exercise in piracy which stole wealth from the poor so that the rich might become ever more wealthy.

AS Britain readied itself to make war on behalf of the rights of small nations in Europe, Casement's reports on the actions of British business - and those of other imperial powers - against small nations outside Europe made for increasingly uncomfortable comparisons. That he was gay had been known, but once evidence of his sexual activities appeared, the establishment found a perfect opportunity to shaft him.

Yet Casement's real crime was not to bugger, but to be buggered. In the sexual hierarchy of Edwardian Britain, Casement broke the last taboo. Two weeks before his execution, Sir Erney Blackwell's Cabinet memorandum explained that "he seems to have completed the full cycle of sexual degeneracy and from a pervert has become an invert - a woman or pathic who derives his sexual satisfaction from attracting men and inducing them to use him".

The pleasurable forgoing of power implied by the act of being penetrated cracked open a fault-line which reached from British manhood to the global power-mongering of colonialism. The very idea of penetration came straight from spy thrillers. As Britain engaged in world war, Casement's penetration by a series of dark-skinned "enemies" could not be tolerated.

There were, of course, other buggers in the British establishment, but while the Empire was founded on the notion of using others, it could not endure the prospect of being used by them. Moreover, it couldn't endure the apparent feminisation of its former hero, along with all the passive powerlessness that implied. That feminisation was equally offensive to Irish nationalists.

Lord Birkenhead, formerly F.E. Smith and Casement's prosecutor, showed the Black Diaries to Michael Collins and Eamon Duggan during the Treaty negotiations. Collins's ready acceptance of the diaries may have had more to do with the beliefs of his friend, the journalist Robert Lynd, than with some extra-forensic power. Lynd had fought hard for Casement's reprieve, but never doubted that the evidence was in question.

Years later, Duggan noted that Collins had confirmed the handwriting, but couldn't bring himself to use the word "penis" in revealing what he had read. Casement was a very dark scar on the sacred blotter of Irish nationalism. Ideas about Irish nationalism simply couldn't accommodate gayness, and Casement's death-bed conversion to Catholicism made the prospect even more offensive. To this day, images of faeces-smeared walls and blood sacrifices offer a more acceptable image of nationalism than do the private sexual practices of its men - and women - leaders.

Roger Casement is a potential mascot to many, radically different, causes. Depending on where you're coming from, he may be a gay icon, an Irish patriot, a champion of the dispossessed, one of the first Europeans to identify the greed which would devastate the ecology and society of many South American communities. Far from being an erotic odyssey, the 1910 Black Diaries are pornographically pedestrian, innocent enough by contemporary standards, relatively modest in the number and range of actual sexual encounters they record.

So vested are the various stakeholders for competing versions of the Casement myth that the man himself becomes less visible. In death, as in life, Casement's role as a pathfinder for contests about power and authority looks set to continue. Who owns Casement? Who owns history?

Roger Casement's Diaries 1910: The Black And The White edited by Roger Sawyer has just been published by Pimlico. Price £10.