Quare fellows abroad: male homosexuality and Irish immigration, 1880s-1960s

Specifically, I explore how a hegemonic nationalist discourse of same-sex desire as ‘foreign’ – already noted in the historiography – actually affected the lives of queer Irish men. I question the extent to which this rhetoric could compel queer Irish men to emigrate in search of sexual opportunities and spaces where they could more easily express their same-sex desires, arguing instead that there was a strong sense of working-class conditional tolerance towards same-sex desire in Ireland, and rather emigration was simply woven into the fabric of Irish society in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

By exploring the lives of queer men both in Ireland and within Irish migrant communities, I thus expose a disconnect between a hegemonic sexual ideal in Ireland that posed Irish men as invariably chaste, masculine, and heterosexual, as compared with a stereotypical depiction of Irish migrants in twentieth-century New York and London as simultaneously sexually adventurous, promiscuous, and dangerous.