“This Is Our Revolution Too”: LGBTQ Rights Activism and the National Question in Northern Ireland

Abstract

Existing research frames ethnonationalism as homophobic, in which the queer is positioned outside of the boundaries of the ethnic nation. Less well understood is how LGBTQ activism engages with ethnonationalism, particularly in relation to questions of national self-determination. The limited research on this issue frames LGBTQ activist movements as groups that reject divisive ethnonationalisms by forging alternative cosmopolitan and transnational expressions of sexual identity. By exploring a single case-study, Northern Ireland, this article draws attention to how LGBTQ movements can be sites of conflict over questions of national self-determination, particularly when sexual liberation is wedded to anti-imperialist struggles. The paper concludes by reaffirming Horowitz’s model of ethnic seepage, in which the dominant ethnonational cleavages infuse all issues in divided societies. The article uses a wide range of primary data, including interviews and archival documents, to analyze LGBTQ activism in Northern Ireland during the period of ethnonationalist conflict in the 1970s and 1980s.

Introduction

Scholars have long drawn attention to the overlap of ethnonationalism—the intertwining of ethnicity with nationalist self-determination movements—with sexuality. Ethnonationalism is framed as deeply interwoven with “ethnosexual” and masculinist identities that reproduce homophobia.¹ Ashe, for example, notes the “prevalence and pervasiveness of homophobia in ethnonationalist societies.”² While the focus of extant research is on the relationship between ethnonationalism and sexuality, less is offered regarding how LGBTQ activist groups engage with struggles for ethnonational self-determination. The limited attention to this issue has viewed LGBTQ movements as actors who emphasize the primacy of sexual identity over national belonging.³ These movements supposedly reject ethnonationalism by forging cosmopolitan and transnational expressions of sexual identity that lie outside of the bounds of the nation. LGBTQ activism avoids or defers taking a position on the national question, viewing it as antithetical to the primary goal of building movement unity. Rather than beyond or in opposition to ethnonationalism, this article argues that LGBTQ movements can be sites of contestation between activists who weld struggles for sexual rights with demands for national self-determination and activists who promote nonsectarian and cosmopolitan forms of group identity as an alternative to ethnonationalist politics.

The article turns to the case-study of LGBTQ rights activism in Northern Ireland during the period of ethnonationalist conflict known as “the Troubles” (1969–1998). Northern Ireland is commonly analyzed as a society violently divided by competing forms of ethnonationalism—Irish nationalists who desire Irish unity and unionists who wish that Northern Ireland’s constitutional position remains within the UK. An important body of scholarship indicates the impact of ethnonationalism on sexuality in Northern Ireland.⁴ Maginn and Ellison, for example, have coined the portmanteau term “sextarianism,” which captures how ethnonationalist movements in Northern Ireland, albeit to varying degrees, have taken complimentary stances on matters related to heteronormative sexuality.⁵ In this context, homosexuality in Northern Ireland was historically proscribed and criminalized, leading political parties opposed LGBTQ rights, and several LGBTQ people were targeted by ethnonational paramilitary groups. Yet, while the broader context of ethnonational conflict provided a hostile environment for sexual minorities, a significant LGBTQ rights movement emerged in the early 1970s to advocate for rights and law reform.

Through a detailed examination of a single case-study—Northern Ireland—this article seeks to deepen our understanding of ethnonationalism and sexuality. Existing research has viewed ethnonationalism as “heteronationalism,”⁶ in which the queer is positioned outside of the boundaries of the ethnic nation. More recently, the concept of “homonationalism” has been developed to argue that nationalist movements, in some limited contexts, can co-opt sexual rights.⁷ In this framework, nation-states, in particular, utilize homonational discourses to produce “queer populations as national loyal subjects.”⁸ Taking as a departure Slootmaeckers’s⁹ rallying call to overcome the duality between heteronationalism and homonationalism, this article argues that LGBTQ movements can be arenas of conflicts over national self-determination in divided societies.

Utilizing a detailed case-study approach, this article draws on a range of primary data sources. Thanks to the work of LGBTQ activists, Northern Ireland now has rich deposits of archival materials on rights activism in the 1970s and 1980s. These archival resources include newsletters, periodicals, reports, and magazines produced by activists, such as NIGRA News, CARA-Friend and the Northern Gay, which are publicly available at the Linenhall Library Belfast. In addition, activists have deposited personal letters, correspondence with authorities, committee meeting reports, and various documents of interest at the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI). One leading activist from the 1970s and 1980s has deposited hundreds of personal documents from his time within the movement. These archival sources are supplemented with published activist testimonies, such as autobiographies and memoirs. A small number of interviews (N:10) were conducted using a purposive sample of activists who were active in the 1970s and 1980s, including leading members of the then gay rights movement. Interviews were conducted either in person or via Skype. The use of diverse sources for this research echoes Halberstam’s call for a “queer methodology”: “a scavenger methodology that uses different methods to collect and produce information on subjects who have been deliberately or accidentally excluded from traditional studies of human behavior.”¹⁰ This use of multiple forms of data is particularly evident in LGBTQ memorywork as a significant arena of activism. This is called a queer ‘turn toward memory’ which forms an important plank in demands for human rights.¹¹ At a broader level, there has been an acceleration for LGBTQ movements internationally using memorywork to animate a desire to belong to history.¹² Activists challenge how the existence and indeed memory of queer lives have been “constrained by heteronormative forces and erased by historical arbiters.”¹³ In Northern Ireland, this attempt to recover history and memory is notably evident in the LGBTQIA+ Heritage Project which seeks to “create an oral history archive in the form of podcasts to uncover forgotten stories.”¹⁴ The purpose of interviews with activists for this paper is not intended as memorywork. In the interpretative tradition, interviews are used to understand activists’ experiences in the movement. Interviews were open-structured and free-flowing, which allowed interviewees space to identify and discuss their involvement in activism. Interviews were contextualized with archival data. Interviews were transcribed via an inductive thematic analysis approach using open coding. This article proceeds as follows. First, it reviews the literature on ethnonationalism and sexuality. It then provides a background of the Northern Ireland case-study. The third section presents empirical data on LGBTQ activism in Northern Ireland.

Ethnonationalism and sexuality: Beyond homophobia and homonationalism

Ethnonationalism, broadly speaking, foregrounds the idea that the boundaries of statehood are coterminous with the national community understood as a singular ethnic group bound by shared culture and ancestry.¹⁵ Yet, ethnonational boundaries also intersect with ethnosexual ones, thus shaping prescriptions about what is considered appropriate sexual citizenship for the nation. While it is important to note that homophobia is the cumulative effect of a range of social influences, a rich corpus of scholarship has argued that nationalism generates a “heteronormative, homophobic, and patriarchal framework.”¹⁶ Yet, explaining why ethnonationalism is anti-queer has drawn several interlinked theories.

First, as scholars argue, ethnonationalism is a form of fictive kinship, the belief that there is a common biological origin and descent of the people. The ethnic nation is thus symbolized in the form of the heteropatriarchal family, a biological self-perpetuating group. In this framework, ethnonationalists regulate the sexual practices and behavior of members along heteronormative lines. LGBTQ people are framed as failing in their duty to reproduce and ensure the “good health” of the nation and homophobia is an instrument to police the nation’s sexuality. Mole’s study of Latvia, for illustration, indicates how homosexuality is particularly reviled “because it has been constructed discursively as a threat to the continued existence of the nation in its desired ethnic form.”¹⁷ Thus, Peterson argues, ethnonationalism “demonizes and even criminalizes non-reproductive sex” with sexual dissidents framed as “a danger to the survival of the nation.”¹⁸

Second, scholars argue that ethnonationalism reproduces militaristic masculine virtues, such as honor and bravery, considered essential for the defence of the national family, motivating men to fight.¹⁹ Moreover, the terms “armed patriarchy” and “fratriachy”—a fusion of “patriarchy” and “fraternity”—describes fraternal and militaristic organizations that emerge especially during ethnonationalist violence which cultivate homosocial male bonding around militaristic masculine virtues which become considered essential for national defence.²⁰ Defending the ethnic nation, notes Lambveski, “means defending its masculinity, and the homosexual is a threat per definition,” with the capacity to “subvert the … nationalist, homophobic social order.”²¹ For this reason, several case studies have traced how sexual minorities are deliberately targeted by ethnonationalist movements for failing to conform to nationalist gender norms.²² For example, men labeled “kiki”—effeminate or soft—with not only a propensity for “unnatural” sex acts but as a “third sex” contravening the natural order of gender are singled out by militia groups in Iraq.

Third, ethnonationalism projects homophobia when it constructs non-heterosexuality as essentially a foreign vice that is incompatible with its national values. This framing is particularly acute in ethnonationalist movements that seek to gain independence from colonial regimes. Homosexuality is portrayed by ethnonationalist movements in this context as sexual imperialism, a sexual identity deliberated implanted by colonizers to degenerate the moral and biological fabric of the indigenous nation. Hansen, for illustration, highlights how anti-colonial Hindu nationalism sought to replace what it perceived to be the effeminization of Indian men during colonization with new forms of masculinity in opposition to homosexuality.²³ Similarly, in an exploration of Irish anti-colonial movements, Conrad notes how Irish nationalists promoted “hypermasculinity” and distanced “themselves from the homosexual as a particularly troubling figure,” a foreign pollutant summoned up during periods of crisis.²⁴

Finally, recent research indicates that the targeting of LGBTQ groups during the civil war is both the product of enduring and significant patterns of homophobia, patriarchy, and prejudice and of the specific dynamics that emerge during the conflict. In Colombia, paramilitary groups have carried out threats, torture, forced displacement, and assassination against sexual and gender minority civilians. During Iraq’s civil war, two militia groups, the Mahdi Army and the League of the Righteous carried out a far-reaching campaign of executions, kidnapings, and torture of men suspected of homosexual conduct, or of not conforming to masculine gender norms.²⁵

The literature on ethnonationalism and sexuality has thus traditionally positioned nationalism in opposition to non-heterosexuality. Yet, ethnonationalism, rather than a reified social order, is multiform and unstable. This means that ethnonationalism comes in a variety of forms and is not always uniformly set in opposition to homosexuality. Ethnonationalism can function as an incorporating regime, in which some privileged LGBTQ communities can gain “symbolic incorporation into a national community.”²⁶ In short, certain configurations of non-normative sexuality have the potential to be tentatively and contingently tolerated or cast outside the body politic of the ethnic nation. Toward this, Puar, notably, has developed the conceptual framework of “homonationalism,” the tendency of some contemporary nation-states to promote LGBTQ rights as part of attempts to portray the nation as liberal, democratic and inclusive rather than insular, xenophobic and socially conservative.²⁷ Homonationalism draws attention to how certain types of LGBTQ subjects are folded into the nation. This inclusion is conditional as it excludes “subjects racialized, classed and gendered in particular ways”²⁸ who are imagined as not contributing to the common good of the nation.

Research on ethnonationalism and sexuality has rarely examined how LGBTQ movements engage with ethnonationalist politics. On the one hand, what research has considered this question has tended to see activist groups as forging globalized forms of sexual identity and transnational identities that stand in opposition to nationalism. In this framework, LGBTQ activism represents “queer nationalism,” understood as a “globalizing … gay community and political identity struggling for equality” where “members of particular groups have more in common across national and continental boundaries.” On the other hand, using the homonationalist framework, scholars draw attention to activist networks that reproduce nationalist politics. Chamas, for example, argues that some LGBTQ rights actors in Lebanon seek to position “certain segments of the LGBT population as not only of the nation but beneficial to the security state.”²⁹

Both frameworks—activism as either transnational or homonationalist—have limited explanatory power when seeking to understand LGBTQ activism in divided societies during conflict. First, framing movements as merely expressions of cosmopolitanism and queer nationalism that stand in opposition to particularistic and exclusivist ethnonationalism elides the reality that activists often bring into the movement their ethnonational identities and politics. LGBTQ activists in divided societies do not simply lie outside of ethnonationalism; they are products of ethnonationalist communities and thus see their activism as simpatico with wider questions of national self-determination. Second, homonationalism assumes that the nation seeks to incorporate and co-opt LGBTQ rights and that activist networks are handmaidens of homonationalist politics.³⁰ Yet, in divided societies characterized by violent conflict, ethnonationalist movements are more likely to adopt hardline positions against homosexuality rather than co-opt sexual rights.

Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland provides an important case-study to examine the relationship between ethnonationalism and sexuality. Northern Ireland has a history of protracted intrastate conflict buttressed by a historical legacy of colonialism. The conflict in Northern Ireland has commonly been framed as ethnonational with Irish nationalists campaigning for Irish unity and Ulster Unionists seeking to maintain Northern Ireland’s position within the UK.³¹ Given that Irish nationalism has largely viewed British rule in Ireland as a colonial enterprise, demands for national self-determination are voiced as an anti-imperialist struggle.

While the conflict was fundamentally about issues related to national self-determination and inequality, conflict actors used sectarian violence as a tool to cleave society along communal lines in pursuit of strategic self-interest. Over 3,500 deaths were recorded during Northern Ireland’s conflict (1969–1998) and an estimated 100,000 serious injuries.³² As leading exponents of the ethnonationalist interpretation argue: “the conflict in Northern Ireland is ethnonational, a systematic quarrel between the political organizations of two communities who want their state to be ruled by their nation.”³³

A body of literature on Northern Ireland has explored the legacy of ethnonationalist conflict on sexuality. This scholarship frames ethnonationalism in Northern Ireland as reproducing a “sexually conservative, heterosexist and homophobic society.”³⁴ For Bennett, the dominance of competing forms of ethnonationalism in Northern Ireland “depend on the exclusion of the perverse queer subject to define and legitimize themselves, and that the conflict reinforced those norms.”³⁵ According to Kitchin and Lysaght, ethnonationalist discourses have promoted:

particular kinds of heterosexual femininity and masculinity and situate the notion of a heteropatriarchal family unit as the cornerstone of society, and how these ideas are reproduced in ongoing nationalist and unionist ideology that draws from religious discourse and dominates Northern Ireland politics.³⁶

It was notable during the conflict in Northern Ireland that both unionist and nationalist movements largely opposed homosexuality. While homosexuality had been decriminalized in England and Wales in 1967 it remained a criminal act in Northern Ireland and gay men continued to be imprisoned in the north. A large network of religious and political figures from across the ethnonationalist spectrum bitterly opposed law repeal.³⁷ In 1977, when asked to support law reform, all Northern Ireland’s 12 elected representatives in the Westminster Parliament openly opposed it. On one occasion, a major political party, the Democratic Unionist Party, led a cavalcade of over 60 cars to the government building in Belfast in protest against law reform.³⁸ Notably, the Protestant and Catholic churches in the north have had a strong influence on politics and have used their power to demonize non-normative sexuality.

Research indicates that LGBTQ people were deliberately targeted during the conflict in Northern Ireland. State and non-state actors—unionist and nationalist—are accused of fostering “homophobic, hyper-masculinity” public cultures.³⁹ These groups—including the security forces—are alleged to have engendered “anti-gay” positions and former paramilitaries have spoken of “total intolerance of homosexuals and homosexuality”⁴⁰ within paramilitary organizations, including dispensing extra-judicial punishments for homosexual behavior, such as assassinations and targeting gay venues.⁴¹ Paramilitary organizations during the conflict often assumed de facto policing of their districts enshrined in the “ideal of men as defenders of the community.”⁴² The policing of “sexual dissidence” by paramilitary groups formed part of the technologies of control for legitimating the actions of those who were self-imposed community regulators.⁴³ LGBTQ individuals were cast as anti-social elements. As Kitchin notes, “those who have been rumored, or proven to be gay … have come under pressure to leave tightly knit, local communities.”⁴⁴ LGBTQ people were viewed as objects of suspicion since they were suspected of being vulnerable to blackmail by the security forces to inform on paramilitary activities in their communities.

A few concrete examples illustrate the impact of the conflict on the LGBTQ population in Northern Ireland. It is now recognized that five gay men were deliberately targeted and murdered by paramilitaries. Two of these murders—Rev David Templeton and Darren Bradshaw—occurred within the space of five months in 1997, less than a year before the signing of the Good Friday peace agreement.⁴⁵ Alongside murders, the LGBTQ community was targeted or unwittingly caught up in violence during the conflict. At least two bars in Belfast that were “gay friendly” were bombed.⁴⁶ As an activist wrote at the time, the paramilitaries who instigated one attack might well have said “This is for your queer bar.”⁴⁷ One activist remembers when paramilitaries “casually left a bomb at the stairs of a two-storey bar … perilously close to a massacre” or when they trashed a bar in a “deliberately anti-gay” attack. “In the middle of the war, with people being killed on all sides”, the activist remembers, “we were frightened.”⁴⁸

In addition to paramilitary attacks, the LGBTQ population was vulnerable to harassment by state forces. On one occasion, LGBTQ activists were confronted by an armed British soldier in Belfast city center, who pointed his rifle at them and shouted, “I’d like to shoot all fucking bastards like you.”⁴⁹ In particular, the local state police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), viewed LGBTQ activist groups as essentially an illegal anti-state organization representing an existential threat to Northern Ireland. In a series of notorious police raids in 1976, 28 gay men, all of whom were activists, were arrested by the police. ⁵⁰ During police questioning, activists recorded that “the police have used all threats possible,” including threatening to “out” the men to their “family, employers and friends,” threatening to carry out “medical examinations to obtain incriminating evidence, as well as confiscating a wide range of private materials, including diaries and letters.”⁵¹ Activists were also questioned about their political affiliations. One of the men arrested, Brian, came from a Catholic background. In the context of the Troubles, when many Catholics viewed the almost exclusively Protestant police as a sectarian bastion, Brian’s experience was doubly terrifying. The interrogating officer told Brian that the police “have a seamless way of disposing of people,” a statement clearly understood to represent a death threat.⁵² An activist newsletter concluded that the series of arrests of activists was primarily motivated with “breaking the gay political organizations in Belfast.” In response to police harassment, a letter by a senior gay rights activist to the then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland pointed out that the police were “not dealing with terrorists or criminals but individuals who have already experienced mental conflict and misery of an unusually severe nature in coming to terms with themselves and society in a hostile environment.”⁵³ Activism in response to police harassment focussed on providing help to individuals arrested and detained. An activist newsletter outlined included strategies of resistance that appeared to draw on those used by arrested paramilitary suspects in Northern Ireland, like silence and noncompliance: “repeat over and over again that you refuse to answer any questions about your personal life … Repeat your refusal to answer questions until it becomes a chant.”⁵⁴

“Your gayness is your nation”: Non-sectarian LGBTQ activism

While the conflict in Northern Ireland impacted on the region’s LGBTQ population, the period of conflict coincided with the emergence of a major LGBTQ activist movement founded to achieve law reform. The main instrument for law reform was the Northern Ireland Gay Rights Association (NIGRA), formed in 1975.⁵⁵ NIGRA consciously articulated itself as a nonsectarian movement, a group that brought together sexual minorities from both ethnonationalist communities and which also avoided taking a position on the constitutional question—whether it supported Irish unity or UK unionism as the main vehicle for gay rights. In this narrative, the movement engendered a community that superseded the boundaries of ethnonationalism NIGRA’s foundational constitution outlined that it was “non-authoritarian and non-directional; and is concerned neither with ideology nor morality.”⁵⁶ This position was further stressed in the constitution of the Irish Gay Rights Movement, which stated that the movement was a “nonparty-political, nonsectarian, homophile grouping.”⁵⁷

The movement’s nonsectarianism was the confluence of two factors. First, since criminalization was an issue that impacted on the north’s sexual minorities regardless of their ethnonational politics, NIGRA attracted a membership and activist cohort that brought together LGBTQ people from across ethnonationalist boundaries. The guiding principle of the movement was that the shared experience and common identity of being queer in a homophobic society took precedence over contested claims of national belonging. Mutual support, love and a demand for rights provided a framework for men and women to come together and forge activism and relationships. As one activist later wrote about the movement, “sexuality overrode your religion or political background,”⁵⁸ while another stated “We did not agree or comply with the limitations set by a divided society.”⁵⁹ In this narrative, the movement engendered a force that superseded polarizing ethnonationalist cleavages. A 1977 report by activists proudly proclaimed: “The gay scene has never been sectarian … The bond of a common sexuality is far stronger than adherence to sectarian differences.”⁶⁰ The credo of nonsectarianism is articulated in Threads, a collection of stories by lesbian women in Northern Ireland:

The wider context of the Troubles was an inescapable facet of everyday life for many … but by day the women may have been divided by their postcodes, political leanings or national sympathies but by night these topics were strictly out of bounds. Women who came together under a shared sexual identity did so through positivity, love and inclusion.⁶¹

Second, the movement’s elision of the constitutional question stemmed from the realization that both nationalism and unionism were largely opposed to gay rights. The fact that both jurisdictions—the north and south of Ireland criminalized homosexuality—meant that neither Irish unity nor UK unionism offered propitious environments for sexual politics. An official alliance of religious clerics across the Island and political figures fostered deeply conservative public cultures that were punitive in relation to sexuality across Ireland. Ireland, as one activist argued, was characterized by two “confessional theocratic statelets” bent on the “extreme oppression of lesbian and gay men.”⁶² A cartoon produced by activists depicted a Protestant leader and the Catholic Archbishop hand-in-hand above the caption: “A united Ireland at last.” In the 1970s, the main nationalist and unionist parties either refused to support or openly rejected law reform. Rights activists ran an ultimately unsuccessful petition to get law reform into the short-lived 1974 Northern Ireland Assembly, concluding that “apart from two Assembly persons every other body or individual approached has shirked the issue.”⁶³ A unionist politician wrote to LGBTQ activists that the law on homosexuality was the one issue he agreed with nationalists on.⁶⁴ A Sinn Féin spokesman, the political wing of the Irish republican movement, responded to activists, claiming that “There has never been a homosexual republican.”⁶⁵ A report into the first annual conference on gay rights in Northern Ireland in 1973 confirmed the unwillingness of gay rights activists to engage in ethnonationalist politics: “for Irish homosexuals the border question has little or no meaning—at least as far as their homosexuality is concerned.”⁶⁶

Rather than engage with ethnonationalism, the mainstream LGBTQ movement, as Madden argues, promoted sexual identity “over national or ethnic affiliation as the grounds of identity, citizenship, or belonging.”⁶⁷ Bennett further claims that the cross-community character of LGBTQ activism in Northern Ireland fostered “alternative political cultures outside of ethno-nationalism and heteronormativity.”⁶⁸ Such nonsectarian movements in Northern Ireland are described as disrupting the “grammars of nationality.”⁶⁹ In this way, the movement sought to avoid ethnonationalist politics and situated its identity in terms of broader cosmopolitan frameworks that transcend particularistic nationalist politics. In the context of places divided by ethnonational cleavages, cosmopolitanism, as Todd et al explain, is a mode of group identity oriented toward rendering “existing ethnic and cultural boundaries less, or not at all, salient by moving up toward the global-human level.”⁷⁰

Such cosmopolitanism embraces two elements. First, it refers to the building of cosmopolitan and global forms of group identity that stand in opposition to what is perceived as exclusivist nationalist politics. A leading rights activist argued, in relation to Northern Ireland, that “rampant nationalism is literally the death knell for gay liberation.”⁷¹ For this activist, “the dominant influences on the lives of emancipated gays cannot be their native communities, which do not recognize or consider their position.”⁷² Thus, in this analysis, a cosmopolitan gay culture and community were forming that more accurately accommodated the cultural sensibilities of LGBTQ people than their respective ethnonational communities. In an interview asking Northern Irish activists how they dealt with the “problem of living against the backdrop of divisions,” they responded, “Your gayness is your nation,”⁷³ suggesting that sexuality provided a shared sexual identity that transcended divisive ethnonational boundaries.

Second, cosmopolitanism also represents an everyday process that promotes openness and tolerance in ways that resist “closed, totalizing and exclusive ethno-national bloc boundaries.”⁷⁴ Cosmopolitanism, in this sense, embraces what Todd et al call “everyday universalism,” modes of belonging based on empathy and altruism that allow marginalized citizens to “find common human values across ethnic, racial and other boundaries.”⁷⁵ Such everyday universalism and cosmopolitanism entail individuals in mixed groups in divided societies reducing or ignoring the relevancy of ethnonational politics by instead foregrounding supposedly supranational identities, such as sexuality that bring people together across ethnic boundaries. In the Northern Irish LGBTQ movement, everyday universalism was enforced through the expectation– tacit or explicit—that members shed their ethnonationalist politics and identities when entering the movement. The premise underlying this tactic is that it stops the supposedly divisive force of ethnonationalism creating internal movement fracture. Movement members are thus meant to concentrate on LGBTQ rights and the constitutional question presents a distraction or a potential source of conflict among members.

Everyday universalism resonates with a broader pattern of social interaction across divisions. Mac Ginty notes the practice in divided societies of “avoidance of controversial and sensitive (e.g., political or religious) conversation topics when in mixed company.”⁷⁶ Avoidance, as a strategy of conflict management, involves hiding or sublimating one’s ethnonationalist politics and even signifiers of ethnonational identity. Avoidance strategies encourage individuals to replace their national identity with a more neutral stance temporarily or it involves the “practice of respecting differences largely by ignoring them.”⁷⁷

Eliding or suppressing ethnonationalism could be seen as a deliberate tactic to maintain movement unity and support in a hostile societal environment for gay and lesbian people. By not talking about sectarianism or addressing the specter of ethnonationalism, the movement tried to proof itself from internal fracture. The rationale underlying the act of leaving ethnonationalist politics at the door is that it permits activists to focus on the task of building a movement based on common values. The movement thus demonstrated “a welcoming acceptance for difference at a time when segregation and suspicion predominated.”⁷⁸ Turning to interview data with activists involved in the movement during the 1970s and 1980s illustrates how these members viewed the movement as a space that purposely avoided ethnonationalist politics. A former leading activist explained:

politics was really not allowed. It just wasn’t really permitted. It wasn’t relevant because we had so many issues … The movement really was non-sectarian. We were part of an oppressed group that was frightened of being outed or whatever. We were there to support each other, and this really came down to survival. We weren’t aligned to any particular parties. They weren’t on our side.⁷⁹

One activist explained that interaction among members of the movement ensured that the boundaries of tolerance were not transgressed. In this way, discussion of ethnonationalist politics was avoided at all costs to minimize the potential of conflict in a mixed group: “there was a ritualized way that cross-community groups would talk … it was a completely tribalized society. Groups tended to be mixed … they would talk about it, but in a very ritualized way that had firm limits.”⁸⁰

“Invisible comrades in the Irish struggle”: Lesbians and gays against imperialism

While the LGBTQ movement created an environment in which members were expected to leave their ethnonational identities at the door, for a cohort of activists this acted to effectively silence the linking of struggles for sexual rights with national self-determination. In particular, the neutral standpoint of the movement on the constitutional question was challenged by a section of Irish nationalist members who argued that sexual rights can only be secured through Irish unity. Thus, rather than outside or transcendent of the nation, sexual liberation needed to be inextricably wedded to anti-imperialist struggles for national self-determination.

This activism took inspiration from currents within international LGBTQ activism, particularly in North America and the UK, which drew on anti-colonial popular sovereignty movements that foregrounded the role of oppressed peoples in forging inclusive democratic projects. It was an activism that placed the gay liberation movement into the heart of revolutionary political struggle and vice versa. The manifesto of the London Gay Liberation Front, for example, pledged support for “the right to self-determination of all third world [peoples] and gay revolution.” GLF’s manifesto declared that gay rights formed a natural “part of the wider movement aiming to abolish all forms of social oppression,” among which included “peoples oppressed by imperialism, who lack the national, political and economic independence which is a precondition for all other social change.”⁸¹ A former leading member of GLF recalled that we “saw ourselves as part of the broad anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist movement, striving for the emancipation of all humankind.”⁸² Notably, the London-based GLF took a position of support for Irish unity, participating in marches demanding British troops out of Ireland.⁸³

This vision of gay rights as a radical project motivated by the struggle of the oppressed inspired gay and lesbian Irish nationalists to integrate the struggle for Irish self-determination with gay liberation. Closer to home, queer Irish nationalists had a model for such activism in the emergence of the feminist group, Women Against Imperialism (WAI), formed in Belfast in 1977. Women Against Imperialism argued that the struggle for Irish unity was a feminist issue. WAI articulated a twin-track strategy: to force the wider women’s movement to adopt an anti-imperialist stance as central to its work; and to integrate feminist politics into the heart of the struggle for Irish unity. In an article, WAI outlined its mission: “Women against Imperialism feel that Irish feminists cannot afford to ignore the National question as it affects every aspect of the fight … Without relating to problems that have arisen from British occupation, the women’s movement will not be able to reach working-class women on feminist issues.”⁸⁴ By taking a stance in support of Irish unity, WAI stood in contrast to the mainstream women’s movement, particularly the Northern Ireland Women’s Rights Movement (NIWRM), which refused to adopt a political position on Northern Ireland’s constitutional future.”⁸⁵

It was made clear that they were committed to “the building of an anti-sectarian, nonparty political women’s organization throughout Northern Ireland.”

Taking its cue from the international queer anti-imperialist movement and the local Women Against Imperialism, a group of activists across Ireland formed “Lesbians and Gays Against Imperialism” (LGAI) in 1982. LGAI was initiated by two gay rights activists in the Republic of Ireland in 1982 and quickly found support among a cohort of queer Irish nationalists in the north. Given that LGAI was a loose coalition of activists, rather than institutionalized as an NGO, it only had a small group of followers, both lesbian women and gay men, which overlapped with Women against Imperialism. Arguing that British rule in the north formed “the biggest stumbling block to civil rights in Ireland,”⁸⁶ LGAI weaved together Irish nationalism with gay rights and thus took a firm position on the national question. This activism involved bringing together two interrelated strands: to insert gay rights as a key credo of Irish nationalist movements and to place the agenda of Irish nationalism into mainstream gay rights activism in Ireland.

The first strand—placing gay rights into Irish nationalist politics—occurred as GAI saw an opportunity to link gay rights to Irish nationalist protests in Northern Ireland. At one protest march in 1983 opposing the H-Blocks, GAI marched with a banner featuring the pink triangle symbol—the motif used by the Nazis to brand homosexuals—alongside the slogan “Gays Against H-Block/Armagh—No More Belsens.”⁸⁷ As Casey explains, in this banner “GAI simultaneously drew equivalences between Britain’s presence in Northern Ireland and Nazi persecution while locating their sexual identity in the history of its repression.”⁸⁸

A prominent Belfast-based LGAI activist, Tarlach Mac Niallais, articulated a deeper analysis of the necessity for Irish nationalism to adopt gay rights within its broader struggle. In a 1984 interview on a New York City radio station, Mac Niallais called for “the anti-imperialist movement in Ireland” to “recognize the specific oppression that we face because of our sexuality and to defend our rights when we come under attack.”⁸⁹ For Mac Niallais, the anti-imperialist struggle against British rule in Ireland was indivisible with the demand for justice and rights for queer people. “This revolution is our revolution too,” claimed Mac Niallais. Gay rights, he argued, could not be obtained while partition endured. As gay people, he explained:

Our freedom to live productive lives free from oppression can only be guaranteed by organising as part of the anti-imperialist movement to bring forward the day when British rule in Ireland will be ended.⁹⁰

As part of its analysis, GAI argued that homophobia in Ireland was a construct of British colonial rule in Ireland, particularly given that the sexual offenses act in both the north and south of Ireland were initiated by the British.

Another activist—an Irish republican political prisoner—also called on the wider movement for Irish unity and anti-imperialism to embrace gay rights as a core dimension of its struggle. Writing in An Glór Gafa (The Captive Voice), a magazine distributed by Sinn Féin’s Prisoner of War Department, Brendi McClenaghan wrote that “Gay men and lesbian women have been involved in the struggle for national liberation and independence as long as any other section of our people.”⁹¹ For this reason, “national liberation by its very nature incorporates gay/lesbian liberation as an integral part” since the “key to gay/lesbian liberation lies in the success of the national liberation struggle.”⁹²

Both Mac Niallais and McClenaghan recognized that the nationalist anti-imperialist movement would ignore the oppression of gay men and women “unless we demand that it is put on the agenda.”⁹³ Mac Niallais, nevertheless, claimed that the intervention of Gays and Lesbians Against Imperialism had the desired effect of encouraging the nationalist movement to move from a position of ignoring and even opposing gay rights to embracing it. Mac Niallais noted that Sinn Féin “have supported pickets and demonstrations that we have organised.”⁹⁴ Cathal Kerrigan, a leading LGAI activist, stated that Sinn Féin’s policy was now to “support the struggles of all oppressed peoples, including gays”⁹⁵ and the party pledged to support law reform in the Irish republic following a resolution at its party conference.⁹⁶ This plea for the wider anti-imperialist and nationalist movement to embrace gay rights found a receptive audience in some quarters with Irish nationalism. A letter by a GAI activist to the newspaper An Phoblact, the main voice of the republican movement, elicited a response by the editor noting that the nationalist movement will “support the struggle for liberation of all oppressed peoples… including gays.”⁹⁷ LGAI claimed that as a result of their activism, “gay men in nationalist areas were able to turn to the IRA [Irish Republican Army] to demand support and protection … This meant that the IRA had to take on the view of those people who felt that gay men were not part of the community.”⁹⁸ In a further intervention, Mac Niallais declared that “since the republican movement has adopted a gay rights policy, gay people beaten up by so-called queer bashers can turn to the IRA [Irish Republican Army] to protect them.” Thus, rather than at risk of attack by paramilitaries as had been the case, “gay people can feel secure at being out of the closet because they know they can look to the republican movement for support if they are attacked because of their gayness.”⁹⁹

Mac Niallais’s optimism that gay rights had become deeply embedded into Irish nationalism, however, was not necessarily shared. As noted earlier, a 1991 article by Brendi McClenaghan, then a political prisoner, claimed that gays and lesbians were “invisible comrades in the Irish struggle.”¹⁰⁰ As “gays/lesbians,” McClenaghan argued, “are doubly oppressed for we had to endure further repression within our families, local communities and within the Republican Movement because of our sexuality.” For McClenaghan, “the most direct expressions of such homophobia are insults, derision and threatened or actual violence.” Rather than embrace gay rights, LGBTQ people were told that their activism “will harm the Movement/struggle,” a situation ensuring that “gays/lesbians are forced into invisibility within both the community and the Republican Movement, and consequently within the struggle.”¹⁰¹

The second strand of activism aimed to make anti-imperialist politics central to LGBTQ activism in Ireland. In 1982, an activist put forward a motion at the all-Ireland Conference of Gays and Lesbians to “recognize the primacy of the National Struggle in Ireland,” on the basis that “Gay Liberation and National Liberation are interrelated.”¹⁰² The motion argued that gay men and lesbians in Northern Ireland were doubly oppressed in terms of their sexuality and as colonial subjects in the North. Leading activists in Lesbians and Gays Against Imperialism stressed the necessity of the LGBTQ movement becoming involved “in the movement for national liberation … We have to be there in the struggle for a New Ireland.”¹⁰³ GLAI also sought to persuade NIGRA away from pursuing law reform through the levers of the British state, since this would essentially recognize “the right of their foreign government to rule over us.”¹⁰⁴ GLAI activists further presented themselves to the wider movement as willing to directly confront homophobic forces. In one incident in October 1983, GLAI confronted a protest against a gay rights conference at Queen’s University Belfast, forming a human shield to stop the protestors from breaking into the building. Responding to protest placards declaring “Sodomy is from Satan,” GLAI members wore t-shirts proclaiming to “Save Sodomy from Ulster.”¹⁰⁵

Yet NIGRA remained unreceptive to demands that the movement incorporate an anti-imperialist analysis and agenda. NIGRA, as noted earlier, articulated a nonsectarian position which meant maintaining a neutral position on the national question. Yet, for some gay and lesbian nationalists, the act of being asked to leave their political affiliations at the door was seen as effectively reproducing a movement that reflected the interests of gay unionist men. Returning to interview data, one activist noted, “the leadership [NIGRA] was so strongly unionist … that’s because men had more access to power than women, and unionist men had more access to power than anyone else.”¹⁰⁶ In a memoir, a lesbian and nationalist activist noted a similar experience: “As a lesbian I was tolerated there [in the movement], but God help me if I tried to be anything else,” a reference to what she perceived as the exclusion of Irish nationalist politics from the movement.¹⁰⁷ In this way, the mainstream LGBTQ rights movement in Northern Ireland warded off the attempt to wed its activism to the national question, particularly in terms of supporting the demand for Irish unity.

Discussion and conclusion

Research has traditionally framed ethnonationalism as deeply antithetical to sexual minorities. Ethnonationalist movements, in this literature, are viewed to be “intolerant of sexual diversity, especially homosexuality.”¹⁰⁸ More recently, scholars have sought to highlight an alternative relationship between nationalism and sexuality, most notably through the concept of homonationalism, which illuminates the cynical strategies deployed by states and nationalist projects to cynically co-opt gay rights as part of pinkwashing strategies. Absent from these debates is a focus on how LGBTQ movements in divided societies engage with struggles for ethnonational self-determination. This article makes a case to go beyond binary understandings of LGBTQ activism in divided societies, in which movements are either actors who articulate cosmopolitan and global identities that oppose ethnonationalism or as agents of homonationalism. In distinction, the article draws attention to the complex and multivalent positionings of LGBTQ activists in Northern Ireland. For some LGBTQ activists, the question of national independence is indivisible with demands for sexual rights. This is particularly the case when ethnonationalist movements position themselves as anti-imperialist. In this way, anti-imperialist struggles and the oppression of minorities provide a source of inspiration for LGBTQ rights activists to link and frame their activism. In contrast, for the mainstream movement, its position was to ignore or at most take a neutral position on the national question. For these activists, the movement represented an inclusive sphere for all members, regardless of identity, to come together to support each other as minorities and to demand rights.

This article has explored the case-study of LGBTQ activism during the conflict in Northern Ireland. While the ethnonationalist conflict provided a hostile environment for sexual minorities, a major LGBTQ rights movement emerged in the mid-1970s. While the movement ostensibly presented itself as nonsectarian in politics and cross-community and even cosmopolitan in terms of its identity, rather than bound by the constitutional question of Northern Ireland’s status, a group of activists mobilized to place the struggle for Irish unity at the heart of LGBTQ politics and LGBTQ rights as inseparable from the demand for national self-determination.

The examination of the Northern Irish case-study in this article is used to deepen and develop our understanding of ethnonationalism and sexuality in periods of conflict. Beyond this, it modestly seeks to contribute to research on divided societies. In particular, it generates insights into Horowitz’s model of ethnic seepage, which argues that in divided societies, “strong ethnic allegiances permeate organizations, activities, and roles to which they are formally unrelated.”¹⁰⁹ Issues that should cross-cut social and political cleavages—class, gender, sexuality, and even the environment—are circumscribed by the dominant ethnonational cleavage. In this framework, the structuring power of ethnonationalism—especially during violent conflict—infuses all politics, regardless of the issue. This ethnic seepage presents organizational dilemmas for groups that advance nonsectarian politics and identity. Should these groups demand that members leave their ethnonational identities at the door before entering the movement or should movements seek to recognize the ethnonational positionings of many activists?

While asking members to leave their ethnonationalist politics at the door appears a reasonable strategy to maintain movement unity, it may risk generating hierarchies and exclusivist dynamics. What alternative frameworks are there for nonsectarian movements? One notable strategy is proposed in “transversal dialogue and politics,” a term coined by Nira Yuval-Davis to describe movements in divided societies that craft dialogue and collaboration by recognizing that members have differences of “ethnonational identity, sexuality and other social positionings while developing political goals based on shared values.”¹¹⁰ In transversal movements, participants emphasize “common emancipatory values, democratic decision-making processes and a tolerance of difference”.¹¹¹ Although transversalism begins with accepting that participants are rooted in their particular identity groups, individuals are required to leave themselves “open to both the identity of others and to dialogue.”¹¹² As such, in transversal movements, members are expected to “acknowledge differences up front, rather than to ‘be polite’ and leave them outside the door.”¹¹³ Transversalism, notably, became a model of activism for the feminist movement in Northern Ireland. Yet, as Byrne argues, transversal politics may not be sufficient for some activists who prioritize the national struggle, leaving these cohorts to form their own “single identity” groupings exclusive to ethnonationalist politics.¹¹⁴

Recognizing the limits of methodological nationalism, the use of single case-studies that focus on a specific region to make overarching theories, the article for further research on the dynamics of LGBTQ activism in divided societies, particularly during waves of political violence. How do LGBTQ movements deal with the wider conflict of self-determination and what strategies do they deploy—accommodate or eschew—the ethnonational politics that some members bring with them into the movement? What are the sexual politics of ethnonationalist movements in terms of generating either a hostile or receptive context for LGBTQ activism? Addressing these questions provides the potential for a deeper understanding of how groups, such as feminists and LGBTQ movements, can achieve rights in deeply divided societies.

Finally, while the focus of this article is on LGBTQ movements engaging with ethnonationalism, a corollary is to pose questions regarding how divided ethnonationalist societies deal with issues of sexual orientation in the aftermath of conflict. In several divided societies, including Northern Ireland, consociational power-sharing is deployed as an institutional framework to accommodate diverse ethnonational identities and aspirations. Yet, while the main objective of power-sharing is to recognize ethnonational groupness, it is rare to find strong rights and protections in consociational formats for groups that cross-cut ethnic divisions, such as migrants, women, and LGBTQ+ populations.¹¹⁵ Where consociations omit rights and representation to women and LGBTQ+ groups, there is a risk that it will generate sexual and gender hierarchies. Northern Ireland’s power-sharing pact, while providing statutory protections for sexual orientation, has largely excluded the voice and representation of LGBTQ groupings, despite the legacy of the conflict continuing to have an impact on the LGBTQ population. While power-sharing should not be viewed as inherently harmful to the rights of LGBTQ populations, more work is required to ensure that the outworkings of consociational systems do not elide and ignore sexual diversity in divided societies.¹¹⁶

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Nagle

John Nagle is professor of sociology at Queen’s University. His research focusses on social movements, divided societies and power-sharing.

Notes

1 V. Spike Peterson, “Political Identities/Nationalism as Heterosexism,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 1, no. 1 (1999): 34–65; Richard Mole, “Nationality and Sexuality: Homophobic Discourse and the “National Threat” in Contemporary Latvia,” Nations and Nationalism 17, no. 3 (2011): 540–60.

2 Fidelma Ashe, “Sexuality and Gender Identity in Transitional Societies: Peacebuilding and Counterhegemonic Politics,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 13, no. 3 (2019): 437.

3 Peter M. Nardi, ‘P. M. (1998).“The Globalization of the Gay & Lesbian Socio-Political Movement: Some Observations about Europe with a Focus on Italy,” Sociological Perspectives 41, no. 3 (1998):. 567–86; Dennis Altman, Global Sex (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, (2001),. 86–7.

4 Marian Duggan, Queering Conflict: Examining Lesbian and Gay Experiences of Homophobia in Northern Ireland (London: Ashgate Publishing, 2012); Bernadette C. Hayes and John Nagle, “Ethnonationalism and Attitudes towards Gay and Lesbian Rights in Northern Ireland,” Nations and Nationalism 22, no. 1 (2016): .20–41; J. Nagle, Social Movements in Violently Divided Societies: Constructing Conflict and Peacebuilding (Abingdon: Routledge, (2016).

5 Paul J. Maginn and Graham Ellison, “Ulster Says No: Regulating the Consumption of Commercial Sex Spaces and Services in Northern Ireland,” Urban Studies 54, no. 3 (2017):. 806–21.

6 Koen Slootmaeckers, “Nationalism as Competing Masculinities: Homophobia as a Technology of Othering for Hetero-and Homonationalism,” Theory and Society 48, no. 2 (2019):. 239–65.

7 Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, (2018).

8 Sophie Chamas, “Lil Watan: Queer Patriotism in Chauvinistic Lebanon,” Sexualities 26, no. 1-2 (2023): 230.

9 Slootmaeckers, “Nationalism as Competing Masculinities.”

10 Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).

11 Thomas R. Dunn, Queerly Remembered: Rhetorics for Representing the GLBTQ Past (Hampton, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2016).

12 Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now? (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 179.

13 Thomas R. Dunn, “Remembering “a Great Fag”: Visualizing Public Memory and the Construction of Queer Space,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, n. 4 (2011): 437.

14 LGBTQIA+ Heritage Project, “LGBTQIA+ Heritage Project” (2024). https://hereni.org/lgbtqia-heritage-project/.

15 Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 43.

16 Slootmaeckers, “Nationalism as Competing Masculinities.”

17 Mole, “Nationality and Sexuality.”

18 Peterson, “Political Identities/Nationalism as Heterosexism,” 55, 47.

19 Joane Nagel, “Ethnicity and Sexuality,” Annual Review of Sociology 26, no. 1 (2000): 107–33.

20 Henri Myrttinen, “Stabilizing or Challenging Patriarchy? Sketches of Selected “New” Political Masculinities,” Men and Masculinities 22, no. 3 (2019): 563–81.

21 Sasho A. Lambevski, “Suck My Nation-Masculinity, Ethnicity and the Politics of (Homo) Sex,” Sexualities 2, no. 4 (1999): 412.

22 William J. Payne, “Death-Squads Contemplating Queers as Citizens: What Colombian Paramilitaries Are Saying,” Gender, Place & Culture 23, no. 3 (2016): 328–44.

23 Thomas Blom Hansen, “Recuperating Masculinity: Hindu Nationalism, Violence and the Exorcism of the Muslim “Other”,” Critique of Anthropology 16, no. 2 (1996): 137–72.

24 Kathryn Conrad, “Queer Treasons: Homosexuality and Irish National Identity,” Cultural Studies 15, no. 1 (2001): 125.

25 Human Rights Watch, ‘They Want Us Exterminated’: Murder, Torture, Sexual Orientation and Gender in Iraq (London: Human Rights Watch, 2019).

26 Diane Richardson, “Locating Sexualities: From Here to Normality,” Sexualités 7, no. 4 (2004): 391–411.

27 Puar, Terrorist Assemblages.

28 Chamas, “Lil Watan,” 230.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid.

31 A note on terminology. This article used the terms “Irish nationalist/republican” and “unionist/loyalist interchangeably,” while also recognising political differences between them. While the terms “nationalist” and “unionist” are broadly used to describe overarching ethnonationalist politics, “republican” and “loyalist” refers to the largely militant wings of unionism and nationalism.

32 Mike Morrissey and Marie Breen Smyth, Northern Ireland after the Good Friday Agreement: Victims, Grievance, and Blame (London: Pluto Press, 2002).

33 John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary, Explaining Northern Ireland: Broken Images (Oxford: Wiley, 1995), 354.

34 Rob Kitchin and Karen Lysaght, “Queering Belfast: Some Thoughts on the Sexing of Space,” (NIRSA) Working Paper Series. No. 19 (2002), 11.

35 Aine Bennett, “Queer Lives during Conflict in Northern Ireland: Deconstructing the “Two Communities” Model,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 26, no. 2 (2024): 334.

36 Rob Kitchin and Karen Lysaght, “Sexual Citizenship in Belfast, Northern Ireland,” Gender Place & Culture 11, no. 1 (2004): 85.

37 Duggan, Queering Conflict.

38 In response to a 1978 paper for law reform drafted by the UK government, a movement led by Ian Paisley, a unionist politician, proclaiming to “Save Ulster from Sodomy” collected more than 70,000 signatures from citizens opposing law reform. In a rare demonstration of ecumenism, the Roman Catholic Bishops agreed with Paisley that decriminalizing homosexuality would radically change Northern Ireland’s moral code. While Paisley’s petition included signatures from only 5 per cent of the north’s population, the protests nevertheless had the effect of sufficiently alarming the UK government to shelve proposals for law reform, The UK government’s failure to enact law reform strengthened the movement in its determination to pursue a case against the UK government in the European Human Rights Commission. Following a hearing of the case, held in April 1981, the court finally passed its judgement that the UK was in breach of Article 8, that “Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.” Since, at that point, the European Court was charged with enforcing decisions in its 21 signatories, the UK government was obliged to effect legislative change in relation to homosexuality in parliament.

39 Rob Kitchin, “Sexing the City: The Sexual Production of Non-Heterosexual Space in Belfast, Manchester and San Francisco,” City 6, no. 2 (2002): 215.

40 Newsletter, “SF’s Gay Marriage Backing in Contrast to Past Intolerance of Homosexuality,” Newsletter, www.newsletter.co.uk/news/people/sfs-gay-marriage-backing-contrast-past-intolerance-homosexuality-1390504 (accessed 26 February 2024).

41 Rachel Monaghan, “An Imperfect Peace: Paramilitary Punishments in Northern Ireland,” Terrorism and Political Violence 16, no. 3 (2004): 439–61.

42 Fidelma Ashe and Ken Harland, “Troubling Masculinities: Changing Patterns of Violent Masculinities in a Society Emerging from Political Conflict,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 37, no. 9 (2014): 752.

43 Duggan, Queering Conflict.

44 Kitchin, “Sexing the City,” 215.

45 Darren Bradshaw, an off-duty policeman, was shot dead by republican paramilitaries as he socialized in a busy gay bar in Belfast. David Templeton, a minister in the Presbyterian Church, died as a consequence of a so-called “punishment beating” by loyalist paramilitaries who attacked him with spiked baseball bats in his home. Templeton had been arrested after police seized adult gay material from him at Belfast airport. In the following weeks, the local media carried out an orchestrated campaign of spreading lurid rumours against Templeton, designed to frame gay men as pedophiles and thus dangers to the community. Three other confirmed murders of gay men at the hands of paramilitaries occurred in the 1970s: Frederick Davis in 1973, Thomas McKenzie in 1976, and Anthony McCleave in 1979. All three men were murdered after leaving gay bars in Belfast city centre late at night.

46 It is not believed that the bars were targeted because they were LGBTQ venues. One incident of an IRA firebombing of a club in Belfast city, which injured six people in 1976, was carried out because it reputedly served police officers. However, in a report in the Gay News, activists dismissed this as “total nonsense,” given the “recent and serious harassment of Belfast gays by the police.” See: The Gay News (1976) “Bomb Blasts City Centre Bar,” Gay News, 105.

47 Women’s News, “This Is Called Fear … This Is Called Pride,” Women’s News, 1992, Issue 60.

48 Personal interview with former NIGRA activist, Belfast, January 2022.

49 NIGRA News, “United We Stand … Divided,” September/October 1976, 7.

50 NIGRA, “Police Questioning” (Belfast: NIGRA, 1976).

51 Ibid.

52 Personal interview with NIGRA activist, March 2024.

53 Richard Kennedy, “Letter to Chief Constable Sir Kenneth Newman, 4 May, PRONI, NIO/25/1/12A (1976). See: Bridget Keown, ““Locally, Too, the Atmosphere Brightened”: Kinship among Gay Rights Activists during the Troubles,” Writing the Troubles, 2019, https://writingthetroublesweb.wordpress.com/2019/09/16/gay-rights-activists/.

54 Gay Star, “After the Kincora Boys Home Scandal: Police Pounce!,” Gay Star, June 1980.

55 The acronym NIGRA clearly NICRA, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), which campaigned against discrimination, largely against the Catholic population, especially in terms of voting rights, public housing and employment, in the north. Just as the Northern Ireland civil rights movement demanded “British rights for British citizens,” NIGRA demanded that British laws on homosexuality were applied to Northern Ireland.

56 NIGRA, “NIGRA News” (Belfast: Queen’s University Belfast, 1975).

57 The Irish Gay Rights Movement was the sister organization of NIGRA. Formed in Dublin, the Irish Gay Rights Movement primarily campaigned to decriminalize homosexuality in the Republic of Ireland. Analogous to Northern Ireland. The Irish Gay Rights movement, however, contained members from across the island of Ireland and held an annual all-Ireland conference. See: Patrick McDonagh, “Homosexuality Is Not a Problem–It Doesn’t Do You Any Harm and Can Be Lots of Fun: Students and Gay Rights Activism in Irish Universities, 1970s–1980s,” Irish Economic and Social History 46, no. 1 (2019): 111–41.

58 Northern Visions, “The Secret’s Out,” Northern Visions, 2022, http://ourgeneration.northernvisions.org/our-generation/features/the-secrets-out/ (accessed 19 February 2024).

59 Moya Morris, Threads: Stories of Lesbian Life in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s (No publisher, 2013), iii.

60 Morris, Threads, iii.

61 Marian Duggan, “Foreword,” in Threads: Stories of Lesbian Life in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s (No publisher, 2013). np.

62 Homosexuality was decriminalized in the Irish Republic in 1993, fourteen years after Northern Ireland.

63 Belfast Gay Liberation Society, “Reform in Law in Northern Ireland Relating to Homosexuality,” Belfast Gay Liberation Society, 23 March 1974.

64 Ibid.

65 Diarmaid Ferriter, “Diarmaid Ferriter on Thursday,” Irish Examiner, 2 August 2007.

66 Gay News, “Irish Gay Beginnings,” Gay News, 38 (1974), 5.

67 Ed Madden, “Transnationalism, Sexuality, and Irish Gay Poetry: Frank McGuinness, Cathal Ó Searcaigh, Padraig Rooney,” in Where Motley Is Worn: Transnational Irish Literatures, edited by A. Tucker, A., &and M. Casey, M.(Cork University Press, 2014), 90.

68 Bennett, “Queer Lives,” 345.

69 Jennifer Todd, “Partitioned Identities? Everyday National Distinctions in Northern Ireland and the Irish State,” Nations and Nationalism 21, no. 1 (2015): 21–42.

70 Jennifer Todd, Sarah Curristan, and Stephanie Dornschneider-Elkink, “How Moderates Make Boundaries after Protracted Conflict. Everyday Universalists, Agonists, Transformists and Cosmopolitans in Contemporary Northern Ireland,” The British Journal of Sociology 73, no. 4 (2022): 887.

71 Jeffrey Dudgeon, “Gays and the Phoney War in Northern Ireland,” Gay Left, 1978, 30.

72 Ibid.

73 Graeme Woolaston, “A Belfast Diary,” Gay Times, 1989.

74 Todd et al., “How Moderates Make Boundaries after Protracted Conflict,” 890.

75 Ibid., 897.

76 Roger Mac Ginty, “Everyday Peace: Bottom-Up and Local Agency in Conflict-Affected Societies,” Security Dialogue 45, no. 6 (2014): 555.

77 Lisa Smyth and Martina McKnight, “Maternal Situations: Sectarianism and Civility in a Divided City,” The Sociological Review 61, no. 2 (2013): 304–22.

78 M. Duggan, “Foreword,” np.

79 Personal interview with activist, Belfast, March 2024.

80 Personal interview with activist, Belfast, May 2022.

81 James Greig and Omar Shweiki, “Coming Out Against Imperialism,” Tribune, 2021, https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/06/how-the-gay-liberation-movement-fought-colonialism-and-imperialism.

82 Ibid.

83 Peter Tatchell, “The Gay Liberation Front’s Social Revolution,” The Guardian, 2010. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/oct/12/gay-liberation-front-social-revolution.

84 Women’s Liberation Movement, Scarlet Women, June 1980, 5.

85 Carmel Roulston, “Women on the Margin: The Women’s Movement in Northern Ireland, 1973-1988,” Science & Society 53, no. 2 (1989): 225.

86 Maurice J. Casey, “Radical Politics and Gay Activism in the Republic of Ireland, 1974–1990,” Irish Studies Review 26, no. 2 (2018): 236.

87 The H-Blocks/Armagh were prisons used to house loyalist and republican prisoners during the conflict. The prisons became a site for protests by Irish republican prisoners to attain political status. In 1981, ten Irish republican prisoners died in a hunger strike.

88 Casey, “Radical Politics and Gay Activism,” 227.

89 Tarlach Mac Niallais, “Lesbians & Gays Against Imperialism,” OTP’20 New York & OTP Boston, 9 October 1984, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HY99Ho2QzM&t=3s.

90 Ibid.

91 Brendi McClenaghan, “Invisible Comrades: Gays and Lesbians in the Irish Struggle,” An Glór Gafa (The Captive Voice), a magazine distributed by Sinn Féin’s Prisoner of War Department.

92 Ibid.

93 Mac Niallais, “Lesbians & Gays Against Imperialism.”

94 Ibid.

95 Gary Kinsman, “Ireland: Gay Liberation and National Liberation,” Rites (1984): 14–15.

96 Mitchel Mc Laughlin, “Respecting All Sexual Identities,” An Phoblacht, 13 January 2000. However, same-sex relations were only legalised in the Irish Republic in 1993.

97 Cathal Kerrigan, “Letter to the Editor,” An Phoblacht, 3 October 1981.

98 Kinsman, “Ireland: Gay Liberation and National Liberation.”

99 Mac Niallais, “Lesbians & Gays against Imperialism.”

100 McClenaghan, “Invisible Comrades.”

101 An important question is the longer-term influence of LGAI on the republican movement, particularly Sinn Féin, in support of LGBTQ rights. While LGAI encouraged Sinn Féin to support law reform in the Republic of Ireland in 1984, it wasn’t until 1996 that Sinn Féin established a policy on LGBTQ rights with the document, Moving On: Moving On: A Policy for Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Treatment. It is striking that the language used in Moving On resonates with the arguments put forward by LGAI that sexuality was indivisible from the national question. A section in Moving On states: “Republicans are only too well aware of what it means to be treated as second-class citizens. Our politics are the result of decades of resistance to marginalisation and discrimination. Self-determination is our core demand, not only as a nation, but also as diverse communities within that nation.” At the same time, while Moving On supported efforts to improve rights for LGBTQ people in the north, it maintained the position thar “Sinn Fein does not recognise the legitimacy of the British statelet.” See Sinn Féin, “Moving on: A Policy for Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Equality,” Sinn Féin Ard Fheis, (1996),. http://www.sinnfein.org/ardfheis/96ardfheis/gayeng.html.

102 Irish Communist, “Gay Noise,” Irish Communist, December 1983.

103 Kinsman, “Ireland: Gay Liberation and National Liberation.”

104 Gay Star, “Do the Gay Activist Alliance Support Ian Paisley???,” Gay Star, July/August 1980.

105 Declan Fitzsimons, “Gays and DUP in Protest Clash,” Belfast Newsletter, 23 October 1983.

106 Niall Herron, “Queer Experiences During the Troubles: The Everyday and the Erased”, MA Dissertation (Queen’s University Belfast, 2022).

107 Marie Mulholland, “Ghetto-Blasting,” in Lesbian and Gay Vision of Ireland, edited by I. O’Carroll and E. Collins (London: Cassell, 1995), 133.

108 Joane Nagel, Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 160.

109 Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (University of California Press, 2000), 7–8.

110 Nira Yuval-Davis, “Human/Women’s Rights and Feminist Transversal Politics,” inA. M. Global Feminism: Transnational Women’s Activism, Organizing, and Human Rights, edited by M. M. Ferree and A. M. Tripp (2006), 284.

111 Siobhan Byrne, “Troubled Engagement in Ethnicized Conflict: Negotiating Difference among Feminist Activists in Israel/Palestine and Northern Ireland,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 16, no. 1 (2014): 111.

112 Avila Kilmurray and Monica McWilliams, “Struggling for Peace: How Women in Northern Ireland Challenged the Status Quo,” Solutions Journal 2, no. 2 (2011).

113 Kate Fearon, Women’s Work: The Story of the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition (Dufour Editions, 1999), 79.

114 Byrne, “Troubled Engagement.”

115 John Nagle, Social Movements in Violently Divided Societies: Constructing Conflict and Peacebuilding (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016); Timofy Agarin, Allison McCulloch, and Cera Murtagh, “Others in Deeply Divided Societies: A Research Agenda,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 24, no. 3 (2018): 299–310; John Nagle, “Beyond Ethnic Entrenchment and Amelioration: An Analysis of Non-Sectarian Social Movements and Lebanon’s Consociationalism,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 41, no. 7 (2018): 1370–89; Joanne McEvoy, Jennifer Todd, and Dawn Walsh, “Participatory Constitutionalism and the Agenda for Change: Socio-Economic Issues in Irish Constitutional Debates,” Irish Studies in International Affairs 33, no. 2 (2022): 140–71.

116 See John Nagle, “Crafting Radical Opposition or Reproducing Homonormativity? Consociationalism and LGBT Rights Activism in Lebanon,” Journal of Human Rights 17, no. 1 (2018): 75–88.