Does it really matter if some of our patriots were gay?

In Boston in 2016, I unintentionally made an elderly woman cry. During a conference talk on the legacy of 1916 I referred to the ambiguities within Patrick Pearse’s writing on young male bodies. When the session was opened to questions from the floor, she was the first on her feet.

“Do you mean to tell me you are suggesting Pearse was a homosexual?” she said in a tone both patrician and urgent. I heard the emotion seep into the cracks in her voice and tried to be gentle in response. It is difficult of course, I said, to know another person’s sexual identity, but nevertheless, based on his writing, plays and fiction, it is possible to trace a strong homo-erotic theme and tone throughout Pearse’s work.

Her face crumpled. “But my father idolised Pearse,” she protested, as if this fact alone would negate my position, “and that means everything he believed in is gone”. In that brief statement lay a compressed world of childhood adulation and historical certainties. At that point I realised while in Ireland there have been significant recalibrations in our relationship to the past, perhaps the same could not be said about the Irish-American mode of thinking.

When I first began to write and speak about Pearse some years ago, Irish audiences always asked about his sexuality, yet in more recent times this line of questioning has all but disappeared. This shift away from preoccupations with moral codes has been confirmed at home by the seismic events of the marriage equality referendum and the repeal of the Eighth Amendment. Meanwhile, in the United States, we may trace the high number of Irish surnames of white conservatives wielding power in the White House.

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When the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar acknowledged that some of our patriots were gay, my thoughts turned to Pearse, although for most people, it was probably Roger Casement or even Dr Kathleen Lynn who came to mind. As a cultural historian I cannot, and do not, “claim” Pearse was a gay man – for how can I definitively know this? There are limits to empirical research after all.

Trial and conviction

Indeed, a man as sheltered and as devout as Pearse may not even have been aware of the existence of homosexuality, despite the trial and conviction of Oscar Wilde during his lifetime. My analysis is informed by the rich mixture of martyrdom, heroism and admiration of male beauty that suffuses Pearse's work, and is especially evident in his 1909 poem Little Lad of the Tricks. However, the admiration of male beauty and power was a common theme at this time, as Paul Fussell's work on the first World War shows, and we must be careful to read material within its own context.

Although Pearse’s work suggests a heightened interest in male bodies, there is nonetheless a difference between impulse and action, and there is nothing to suggest that as a headmaster, he was ever inappropriate with his pupils. Perhaps it was the sublimation of these feelings that produced such a remarkable interweaving in his writing on aesthetics, martyrdom, masculinity and nationhood. The male body was an inspirational figure in Pearse’s work and many of his poems and plays feature a beautiful young man who motivates others to act.

After the Rising, Pearse was easy to reify: his unworldly, virginal, and earnest persona (despite being a practical person who ran a school, a newspaper, and a military organisation) sat easily within the language of martyrdom and a particular brand of priestly masculinity. Further, he left behind no dissenting relations to disrupt the emerging narrative of his life (a drowned girlfriend and a broken heart).

Implication

The same cannot be said for Casement although his sexual encounters recorded in the Black Diaries were initially denounced as fake. Of course the implication of being named as homosexual was not only to "smear" the reputation of our martyred dead, but to marked as criminally deviant. For the Taoiseach to draw attention to the complexities of the past, to acknowledge the role of gay men and women, and to apologise on behalf of the State for their treatment in the past, is another step in the maturing of our relationship to the past.

However, before we become too self-congratulatory on how far we have come, bear in mind the INTO’s comments this week on the fears of LGBT teachers coming out in the classroom and the staffroom. If LGBT teachers are struggling with visibility in their jobs, how can they, in turn support LGBTQI+ students? It is alarming how much prurient interest there is in other people’s sexual orientations, as if to “know” their sexuality is to know the “truth” about them. The sexual behaviours and identities of Patrick Pearse, Roger Casement, Dr Lynn and many unacknowledged others should never be an issue in determining their contributions to the life and history of the State. We should celebrate and acknowledge their achievements as citizens without denying the complexities of their lives. When we get to the point that a person’s sexuality is the least interesting thing about them, we might be getting somewhere.

Dr Elaine Sisson is a cultural historian at the IADT and author of "Pearse's Patriots" (Cork University Press, 2005)