KILMAINHAM GAOL WILL highlight its “queer history” today, in a move welcomed as giving the public a more complete sense of Irish history.
The former prison, where the leaders of the 1916 Rising were imprisoned and executed, will host a sold out “queer history tour…focusing on the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender prisoners”.
It has hosted similar tours since 2018 to coincide with the annual Pride celebration in June. However this year, the tour’s announcement on Twitter was met with a homophobic backlash. Many social media users also expressed support for the tour and abhorrence of the negative reaction.
The event has also been promoted by the National Museum on its social media. The museum also highlighted an online talk about Roger Casement, the diplomat executed for his role in the 1916 Rising. Casement was gay.
Dr Mary McAuliffe, director of gender studies at University College Dublin, said the queer history of the revolutionary period should be highlighted.
She noted there were several queer participants in the Irish revolution, including Margaret Skinnider, who was a sniper in the Easter Rising. Queer inmates in Kilmainham Gaol included Skinnider’s partner Nora O’Keeffe, as well as Kathleen Lynn, chief medical officer of James Connolly’s Irish Citizen Army (ICA), and her partner Madeleine ffrench-Mullen, also a member of the ICA.
McAuliffe said: “What if we just knew the history of men, which is basically what history was for a long, long time? They were incomplete histories.”
She added that as well as revolutionaries, many ordinary queer people passed through the prison and not enough is known about their history.
“Ordinary criminals were held there, and soldiers lived there, and wardens lived there. They weren’t all straight. They were queer as well,” she said.
McAuliffe, who is writing a book about Kathleen Lynn, said the rhetoric she had seen on social media attacking the tour had taken her by surprise.
“I thought we moved on from that sort of vicious, awful, homophobic, hatred that was in those comments,” she said.
She added that the tone of the negative comments was a symptom of the rise of the anti-trans movement in Ireland, as well as the rise of the far-right and their “awful campaigns against not just queer people, but against migrants and asylum seekers”.
“A lot of that is mostly on social media, but it is spilling over into real life,” she said.
The Office of Public Works, the government department which operates Kilmainham Gaol, declined to comment on the negative responses to its announcement on social media.
Additional reporting by Muiris O’Cearbhaill
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