If a key task of the historian is to illuminate dark corners, Tom Hulme has done that in a literal sense, and with aplomb. This history of male same-sex desire in Belfast from the 1880s to the 1940s uncovers an impressive range of archival material. It includes many interrupted clandestine encounters, but if much of it deals with humiliation, entrapment and the weight of criminal prosecution, there are also degrees of defiance and tenderness.
Hulme lays bare a multitude of voices; he draws heavily, for example, on the revealing diaries of David Harbison Strain, born in 1896, who grew up in the Belfast middle-class suburb of Galwally Park and was part of a family that owned a linen merchant business. After his death in 1969, his papers were deposited in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, with the inclusion of 43 diaries, “unrivalled in their richness”. The detailed daily entries amount to “a remarkably probing description of contemporary queerness” and the constant quest for partners and sexual encounters.
Hulme also excavates the court records of the period; such a criminal archive reveals much about socio-moral attitudes, but it also requires the researcher to read between lines. The focus on individual stories is the great strength of the book, as Hulme details, where possible, both the back stories and the afterlives of those on trial and the personal consequences of exposure: “My God, what will the wife say?” was the response of one man arrested in the 1890s.
Hulme is interested in “the individual character of each queer man and the interpersonal and intimate dynamics of urban life”. There was much “cruising” for sex in the dockland area of the city, and sailors feature prominently: “I am a naval man, what can you expect!” was the response of a former sailor apprehended for trying to entice a 16-year-old into a park urinal in 1924. There were almost 700 news-boys aged 16 or younger working in Belfast in 1902, and casual prostitution was common. It is also striking how layered the geography of queer Belfast was in the late 19th and early 20th centuries – a network of pubs, cafes, cinemas, parks, public toilets and shops. Woolworths department store was “the queer hotspot of the 1930s”.
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Overall, arrests for “gross indecency” or buggery remained low until the late 1950s. There were “whisper networks”, hotels where blind eyes were turned and sometimes class and religious boundaries were traversed: “In August 1925, a middle-class Presbyterian in his mid forties was discovered having sex with a Catholic labourer of a similar age”.
It is notable that ‘the policing of male sexuality in Belfast was so slack that most queer men were unlikely ever to encounter the legal system in the first half of the twentieth century’
Hulme is also attuned to broader contexts; the evolution of sexology (it was 1948 before a medical profile was used in a queer trial in Belfast), the contemporary vagueness or imprecision over sexuality, and classified newspaper advertisements from many men looking for “chums”. The circle around Strain suggested great enthusiasm about queer romance and a “cross-class queer culture”.
But it could also be a dangerous and violent underworld featuring moral vigilantes, peeping constables and the prospect of publication of court proceedings. The balance between public shaming and reticence about highlighting “homegrown immorality” was to shift in favour of the commercial advantage of sensational reporting. Yet the expansion of arrests of gay men witnessed in Dublin in the 1930s was not mirrored in Belfast, partly because the same pressure did not exist to forge a new identity given the continuity of the connection with Britain after the creation of Northern Ireland, while “anxious Protestant elites could tactfully ignore the existence of queerness”.
It is notable that “the policing of male sexuality in Belfast was so slack that most queer men were unlikely ever to encounter the legal system in the first half of the twentieth century”. From the 1890s to the 1950s, just over half the men who pled not guilty to same-sex crimes were vindicated after trial or had their charges dismissed.
For those who could invoke authority, standing or respectability, such a mix could work in their favour, while some were indulged when it came to diminished responsibility due to alcohol. Richard Lutton, a middle-aged private secretary to former Belfast lord mayor Daniel Dixon, was discovered having sex with a working-class male teenager in 1904. He escaped prosecution when the judge decided alcohol had made him capable of buggery, but not culpable for it.
Lutton’s contribution to civic and business life gave him protection and he was able to continue as honorary secretary of a unionist club. Neither was it inevitable that a man convicted of homosexual offences would be shunned ever after; sometimes “earning and supporting the wider family could be more important” than the shame of an ex-convict, allowing some to resume their previous roles.
Hulme, writing fluently, has stylishly documented the combination of fear, longing, class, religion, moralism, pragmatism and politics at the heart of Belfast’s history of same-sex desire.
Diarmaid Ferriter is Professor of Modern Irish History at UCD. His latest book is The Revelation of Ireland, 1995-2025 (Profile Books)
