Love in the Lav A Social Biography of Same-Sex Desire in Ireland, 1922–1972 reviewed by Michael G. Cronin
Published in Journal of the History of Sexuality, 2026.
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Abstract

, Averill Earls’s pioneering study casts an illuminating light on queer men’s lives in mid-twentieth-century Ireland, successfully making one of the persistent silences in Irish queer history speak., For the decades before independence in 1922, we have some intriguing glimpses into queer male subcultures in late imperial Dublin. This is due to several scandals involving colonial officials, which, for obvious political reasons, anticolonial newspapers covered enthusiastically. Since 2012, the centenary commemorations of the revolutionary period from 1912 to 1923 stimulated insightful work on the queer lives of radical anticolonial activists such as Roger Casement and Dr. Kathleen Lynn. At the other end of the century, the emergence of an Irish lesbian and gay (latterly LGBTQ+) movement from the 1970s onward is richly documented in the Irish Queer Archive, now housed at the National Library of Ireland. In recent years, that history has been actively analyzed and disseminated through academic and popular books, film and television documentaries, and public history events., But what of queer life in Ireland during the intervening decades—from independence to the early 1970s? Since the 1990s, biographers of artists and writers active in those decades identified queer spaces and networks within bohemian artistic circles. But by definition, these coterie experiences were atypical. However, historians of sexuality in twentieth-century Ireland had paid some limited attention to one archival resource: judicial records of men convicted for the crime of “gross indecency” under a law that was first passed in Westminster in 1885 but that the conservative government of the postpartition Irish Free State chose to keep on its statute books (and it remained there until 1993)., On this unpromising material Earls alighted to do some remarkable work. In her thoughtful introduction, Earls notes that using this material as a primary source for reconstructing the lives of men who had sex with men is problematic. The men’s voices come to us mediated through homophobic, criminalizing, and pathologizing institutions. The variegated complexity of intimate lives is painfully diminished: The discursive violence of framing sexual relations as nothing more than criminality is a correlative to the actual state-sanctioned violence of arrest and imprisonment., Earls meets this challenge very effectively through her social biography methodology. Of the 350 men arrested for gross indecency in Dublin between 1922 and 1972, Earls selected an illustrative sample. For each of the men named in these cases, she orchestrates a complex symphony of archival and historiographic sources to reconstruct their lives and those of their families with textured complexity. Earls mined a variety of state archives, from death to dog-licensing records, along with newspapers and other ephemera. This personal and familial material is woven into material from political and social histories of twentieth-century Ireland, contextually embedding those lives in the histories of institutions, economic structures, social practices, and cultural norms. Within each chapter, the case study is employed to engage with some specific aspect of the larger history: policing, sex work, age, and class., Earls’s overarching thesis is that the criminal prosecution of sex between men intensified after independence as one component in a reactionary nation-building project. To mask the absence of any meaningful break from the economic and political structures of the colonial social order, those in power focused on projecting a distinctive Catholic nationalist identity for the new state. A central component was strict regulation of sexuality by that state, enforcing a politicized model of Catholic sexual morality. In this view, homosexuality was a foreign vice to be expunged. Men who had sex with men were one group punished by the state in pursuit of this objective; others included unmarried mothers imprisoned in Magdalene laundries and “illegitimate” children banished to abusive industrial schools. The records show that ordinary people rarely cooperated with the police in “gross indecency” cases, demonstrating that this Catholic nationalist project was driven from above. Outright dissent was rare, but so was active support., The book’s subject might more accurately be described as the policing of same-sex desire in Ireland. To mitigate this effect, Earls devotes one chapter to a very different archive: the personal correspondence of Hilton Edwards and Michael MacLíammóir. MacLíammóir was a...