Love in the Lav: A Social Biography of Same-Sex Desire in Ireland, 1922-1972, by Averill Earls Temple University Press, 273 pp, £26.99, ISBN: ‎978-1439924167

What can be learned of the lives of queer men who lived, worked and sought companionship in Dublin between the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922 and the dawn of gay liberation in the Irish Republic in the early 1970s? In this scrupulously researched social biography, Averill Earls goes in search of a marginalised people who, for the most part, left few records. Earls is an American scholar who began her research in 2013, excavating criminal files from prosecutions for homosexual offences which have been preserved in the National Archives of Ireland. Her scholarly efforts, chiefly this new book, are part of what can be termed the ‘new Irish queer history’. Broadly, this can be understood as an academic movement that seeks to build upon foundational texts by pioneering scholars, such as Brian Lacey, to illuminate topics including minority lives, sexual behaviour and identities, the governance of sex and the trajectories of activism. When considering sexualities in the past, the question of language and terminology can be fraught, with Earls preferring to use the terms ‘same-sex desire’ and ‘queer’ to speak about lives before modern gay identities and whose self-definitions are usually unknown. Her intent, in this rewarding study, is to reconstruct a social history of men who had sex with men and the gardaí who pursued them.

The laws under which male same-sex desire was criminalised in Ireland were inherited from Britain. Following independence, they were applied with a new, if inconsistent, fervour. Earls shows how, between 1899 and 1909, only ten men in Dublin had been arrested for homosexual offences, using laws that did not differentiate between adults and children. Seven of these were cases of men who had assaulted male children under the age of fourteen. Yet between 1924 and 1934, 135 men were charged, out of whom twenty-nine involved children, and fifteen involved youths aged between fifteen and twenty-one. The remaining ninety-one cases, Earls writes, were men arrested for having sexual encounters with other adult men. This demonstrates that under the Free State there had been an ‘astounding’ increase in policing male same-sex desire, with an emphasis flipped from protecting children to targeting adults. Rather than consistency, crackdowns came in waves, between 1930 and 1932, during the Second World War, and in 1950.

Love in the Lav is as much a history of the police as of their quarry. The Irish struggle for independence incorporated a rhetoric of moral superiority over Britain, and England in particular, which asserted, contrary to much evidence, that ‘vice’ was a foreign import. Coupled with an aggressive Catholic nationalism, this fuelled a preoccupation with policing sex. Leading the charge in the early 1920s was police commissioner Eoin O’Duffy, a religious fanatic who embodied military masculinity and who sought to shape the new police force in his desired image. O’Duffy, who later became a notably unsuccessful fascist leader, insisted on qualities in recruits that he himself did not meet. He appears to have been a member of the species he persecuted, secretly attending parties thrown by camp actor and impresario Micheál Mac Liammóir. Under O’Duffy’s leadership, the gardaí pursued aggressive tactics against those who cruised streets, parks and public toilets. This included entrapment. In 1927 Henry Coghlan, a detective, cruised O’Connell Street, encountering a middle-aged man called John Bodkin, luring him into a public toilet by suggesting a sexual encounter before arresting him. These entrapments could involve a policeman almost taking part in a sexual encounter, producing evidence that lacked supporting witnesses, and which had the contradictory potential of implicating police officers. Earls finds that these cases resulted in a 50 per cent rate of conviction and that the tactic was abandoned after 1936.

Earls describes how the policing of same-sex desire was shaped by both social class and urban space. The police directed their efforts at men who had sexual encounters in public, who ‘disrupted the facade of the Free State’s moral purity’. This preoccupation with policing public space created a class-based inequality among those arrested. Lacking privacy in their homes, the less well-off were obliged to resort to the city’s public toilets and its darkened parks. However, doctors, businessmen, solicitors and even the occasional Anglican priest were also apprehended in public spaces. This suggests, as Earls says, that rather than a pressing need, many men saw the public spaces of the city as theirs in which to seek anonymous sex. Revealingly, no mention is made of any Catholic clergyman being arrested for homosexual offences, a phenomenon that surely reflects a tacit policy by the authorities rather than a complete absence of such proclivities among members of the priesthood. Some of the few queer men in public life whose biographies are examined in this book, actors Mac Liammóir and his partner, Hilton Edwards, and writer John Broderick, seem to have been protected by their social status. Mac Liammóir and Edwards lived together for decades and were sheltered, it would seem, by their social connections, respectability and membership of an ‘artistic’ milieu. While coy in public about his sexuality, Broderick wrote a succession of novels with gay themes from the early 1960s onwards. His writing infuriated the censors, but his personal life seems not to have been interfered with by the police. Similarly, my own research discovered the story of Patrick Barbour, a wealthy dilettante and scion of a family of Ulster linen barons who, in the 1960s, lived in Co Louth and owned a country house in Co Cork. Barbour, who appears to have been particularly accident-prone, became involved in a legal dispute with a ‘secretary companion’ that made the local papers, yet the authorities seem to have not followed up on the obvious implications of this relationship. For those with the means, the privacy that accompanied relative economic security, abetted by a culture of social deference, protected their intimate lives from scrutiny and police intrusion.

Two of Love in the Lav’s most rewarding case study chapters focus on men who were unfortunate enough to have been apprehended in less than usual circumstances. Again, they demonstrate how inconsistent policing could be. In 1941 Ronald Brown, aged forty-one, was the state solicitor for Co Kildare. He befriended and began an affair with Leslie Price, a seventeen-year-old deserter from the British army. Their relationship would probably have remained undiscovered if Price had not been arrested for having sex with another man. The attorney general appears to have gone to great lengths to successfully ensure that a jury would find Brown innocent. The stakes for the legal profession, and the Irish state, were too high for him to have been convicted. Brown’s career was ruined, however, and he lived out his days in exile in England, eventually dying decades later, an inhabitant of a Buddhist retreat. Nearer to the other end of the social scale was cab driver James Hand who, in the early 1930s, plied his trade in Dublin. What Earls discerns about Hand’s life from surviving files reveal plenty about the city’s queer demi-monde. He was a sociable, garrulous person, lived in a small, rented house in Stoneybatter and surrounded himself with other queer men he found in pubs and on the streets, and in coded adverts in the pages of newspapers. Like some of the men who had been implicated in the Dublin Castle scandal in the late nineteenth century, Hand possessed a camp name, Mary. He told a friend he ‘wouldn’t get married, wouldn’t touch a woman, would rather have men and had been carrying it on all his life’. Because he was fortunate to have a house where he lived on his own, Hand was happy to organise hook-ups there between his friends and rent boys, performing introductions and then retreating to enjoy a bottle of porter. It seems likely that he would never have come to the attention of the authorities had a disgruntled former friend not informed on him. Believing they had stumbled upon a serious threat to society, the gardaí spent an entire year watching his house, following him and gathering evidence. This was during one of the most concerted campaigns against male ‘vice’. Eventually, he was apprehended in an intimate embrace with another man in the Phoenix Park. He was sentenced to two years in prison with hard labour, and another year for running a ‘male brothel’.

This is a brave and comprehensive book, and its author is to be commended for her persistence and tenacity in revealing these stories of queer Dubliners long departed. At times she has had to negotiate a complex and murky terrain of moral ambiguity that would discourage less hardy historians. As well as decoding and unpacking its meanings, she is particularly good at writing about embodied sexual behaviour in the past. Love in the Lav is, inevitably, not a cheerful read. The material available to study queer lives ‘before liberation’ is partial and fragmented, and the product of forces determined to destroy same-sex desire in pursuit of a hypocritical vision of a morally immaculate nation. And how much love can be discerned in these archival traces of the dead, often denied their own voices by the system that processed them as criminals? Apart from Mac Liammóir and Edwards, whose decade-long romance was tacitly accepted by elite society and ignored by the police, and perhaps the unfortunate solicitor, Brown, whose affection for a destitute younger man cost him his career, there seems little surviving evidence of loving relationships. It seems likely that many were simply more fortunate to escape notice and to have had their secrets undisturbed. When addressing silences in Irish history about same-sex desire, the paradox remains that silence often permitted queer lives to be lived.