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

Abstract

This thesis explores the experiences of queer men who moved through the Irish diaspora from the 1880s through to the 1960s. Over the last decade, the historiography of queer Ireland has been growing steadily. However, there have been no significant attempts to ‘queer’ the history of the Irish diaspora alongside its homeland, particularly before the advent of an international gay rights movement in the late 1960s. I seek to redress this lack of emphasis by examining how mass migration shaped the experiences and subjectivities of queer Irish men. Using a hybrid methodology, I employ criminal sources alongside genealogical records, newspapers, and literary texts to not only contextualise expressions of same-sex desire and gender dissent within wider lives and social worlds, but to also demonstrate how transnational influences, such as mass migration and British colonialism, textured queer life in Ireland. 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.

Date of Award	Jul 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Queen's University Belfast
Sponsors	AHRC Northern Bridge Doctoral Training Partnership
Supervisor	Tom Hulme (Supervisor) & Keira Williams (Supervisor)