New book documents queer lives in newly independent Ireland

James Hand seemed to have figured it out. He owned his horse and carriage, and was able to support himself on the money he earned as a cabbie in Dublin city centre.

He even managed to rent a place to himself at 12 Thor Place in Stoneybatter. Not an easy feat in the 1920s and ’30s, a time of high unemployment and crowded tenements. 

He and his three sisters were the only children out of 14 to make it to adulthood. 

He had strong roots in north Dublin, and was well-liked in his social circles, despite his penchant for gossip. 

His friends called him “Mary”, a good-natured nickname with queer connotations. He surrounded himself with men who were just like him, those who desired other men. 

He found them through pubs, coded communications in newspapers, or on the city streets. He then helped them find each other, as a sort of matchmaker. 

Hand helped them find love, support and companionship in a time of prejudice. In a way, he created a nascent queer community.

In 1931, at the age of 41, he was arrested in Phoenix Park, having been caught in a tryst with another man. 

He was evicted from his home and imprisoned for three years: two years’ hard labour for “gross indecency” and 12 months for being “party to the commission of” gross indecency – for he had used his home to set male sex workers up with clients. 

Although Hand’s friends never abandoned him, his family did not show up to support him at trial.

James Hand’s is one of the many “reconstructed lives” documented by historian Averill Earls in the new book Love in the Lav: A Social Biography of Same-Sex Desire in Ireland, 1922-1972.

Reconstructed lives

Love in the Lav is an illuminating work, which Earls says took 10 years to research and write. 

She says she sees power in studying, researching, and teaching history “as an extension of social justice work”. This book is informed by that ethos. 

What makes it a work of great humanity, as well as a powerful historical record, is its storytelling. 

Earls uses court records to sketch an understanding of queer life in Dublin between 1922 and 1972. However, Earls notes that there are challenges in this approach in the introduction to the text. 

Court records are “as much records of violence inflicted on these men as they are of same-sex desire”, writes Earls. 

These are records of a state immersed in stringent Catholic morality, and are, as such, shaped by the legal and cultural conditions of their time – an unfortunate situation that results in the oppressors of queer lives dictating the narrative. 

However, few queer people left their own records in Ireland before the 1970s.

As such, Earls deftly uses the methodology of “social biography” – the inference of individual narratives within the historical context that shapes them – in order to retrieve these men from court records, and restore them to the realm of humanity. 

“James Hand [is] by far my favourite discovery in the archive”, she says, by email. 

“I also hope his great nephews or nieces read this book … and write to me to tell me what they remember about him, what happened to him after his prison sentence – all those bits I was never able to find,” she says.

“I hope he was as snarky and sassy and savvy as I imagine him,” she says.

Earls decided while writing Love in the Lav to use the real names of those affected by

Ireland’s anti-gay laws, because “to hide behind or fictionalise with pseudonyms feels like agreeing that what these men did was wrong and they should feel ashamed”, she writes. 

Earls also documents the lives of boys who sold sex in the Irish Free State, many of them working-class. In a city marked by poverty, the selling of sex became a viable means to make money.

She notes that, unlike other European cities where rent boys were considered predatory dangers, boys aged 15–21 were sent to borstals with the aim of reformation in the manner of Catholic teaching. 

Although they had erred in the eyes of the state, there was still a chance they could “change their ways” and become honourable Catholic men.

This is because, Earls notes, the hopes of the nascent Irish state were pinned on young male bodies, while its anxieties were pinned on women’s. 

Charity was funnelled into young men, while girls were imprisoned in mother and baby homes or Magdalene laundries. 

This is not to suggest borstal schools, with their military-like discipline,  were havens for young men, but rather to say boys were granted a leeway never afforded to girls.

If young men did not “grow out” of same-sex desire, the punishments would become harsher. Many men over the age of 21 found guilty of gross indecency or sodomy could expect up to two years’ (or more, in some cases) hard labour in Ireland’s prisons. 

They would be named and shamed in the press, shunned by their communities and abandoned by their families. Some lost their jobs. Others moved abroad. 

Morality and state-building

In her book, Earls argues that “the persecution of same-sex desiring men” like Hand  and these young sex workers “was central to Irish postcolonial state-building”.

The Irish Free State’s sense of superiority to Britain and the rest of Europe rested on a shaky foundation of sexual purity, the ridiculous assumption that Irish citizens – true Irish citizens – would never do that.

Queer intimacy was framed as an English import that blighted Ireland, a strange notion that was challenged when Irish citizens integral to state-building were arrested and charged with gross indecency or sodomy. 

As in the case of Ronald Brown, a 41-year-old state solicitor whose arrest for gross indecency was deeply embarrassing for the Irish government. 

Earls’s research shows that post-independence, arrests of adult men having consensual same-sex sex in the Irish Free State increased. 

Earls writes that, in Dublin over the 10 years from 1899 to 1909, only 10 men were arrested for gross indecency or sodomy. 

Of those, 70 percent involved the assault of a child under 14. The other 30 percent involved adult men seeking adult men.

In the Irish Free State, Earls writes, in the 10 years between 1924 and 1934, 135 men were charged under the gross indecency law. 

Of those, 29 cases involved the abuse of a child under 14, 15 involved boys or men between the ages 15 and 21, and 91 involved men seeking or partaking in sexual intercourse with other men.

Writes Earls: “The motivation for policing same-sex sex flipped from mostly protecting children, under British rule … to mostly targeting men who desired consensual sex with other men”. This is a baseline, Earls writes, that would continue into the 1970s.

Dublin’s former status as the colonial centre for British administration made it a contentious site for politicians, writes Earls. 

It was the centre of vice scares, and was often positioned in opposition to the imagined agrarian utopia promoted by the Free State. 

“For those concerned with Ireland’s moral health, men like Éamon de Valera … and [Archbishop John Charles] McQuaid … Dublin was as far from an ‘authentically’ Irish place as London,” Earls writes.

Only one in 12 people lived alone in Ireland in 1926, a year in which the census reported 11.9 percent unemployment, she writes. 

This created an environment in which same-sex desiring men, unable to bring potential lovers home, met elsewhere. 

They found solace in the city’s modest gay pub scene, and the parks, lanes and lavatories that operated as cruising sites. 

Between 1922 and 1972, Earls writes, at least 400 men were arrested in Dublin under anti-gay laws. 

The lovers

In 1928, two English men, Micheál Mac Liammóir (adopting an Irish name) and Robert Hilton Edwards, co-founded the Gate Theatre Company in Dublin. 

They had met in their twenties and became life-long lovers, living together with two Siamese cats on Harcourt Terrace in south Dublin. They were celebrities in their time.

Earls documents how Mac Liammóir appeared on The Late Late Show in 1969 and spoke very briefly about their domesticity. 

Their class position, as part of Dublin’s artistic elite, allowed them to move more freely than men like James Hand.

In documenting their lifelong partnership, Earls shows us that despite the state taking great pains to police same-sex desire, queer people still found ways to live and love in Ireland. Another path was possible.

In Love in the Lav, Earls quotes from letters between Mac Liammóir, Edwards and their inner circle. After a fight, Mac Liammóir left Edwards a note: “Try to keep calm, my dearest, my only, true love. Don’t let the tiny flies & fleas of life obscure the sum for you. I love you so much.”

Their letters are among the most moving parts of the book. 

“I sat in the reading room and cried reading those”, says Earls, by email. “I thought I'd never find love in the work on this book, and here they were all along - waiting for me to find them in the final research trip of a 10 year adventure.”

Policing

In the new state, An Garda Síochána was assigned responsibility to stamp out “immorality”.

Earls argues that the force was instrumental in defining Irishness. Composed almost exclusively of Catholic men, recruits were expected to embody a “muscular Catholicism”, and a “priestlike chastity” in service to the state, she writes.

The methods the guards used to police same-sex desire were manifold. 

Earls discovered at least 10 recorded cases between 1924 and 1936, in which plain clothes gardaí used their own bodies as bait. Some said they were doing so under “special instructions” from their superiors.

Also, between June and September 1950, seven Dublin gardaí participated in stakeouts of public toilets at Beresford Place and St Stephen’s Green. Spying, to try to catch men having sex there. 

This resulted in the arrest of 50 men, 47 of whom were found guilty in court, Earls writes.

Most of the vice squad involved in the arrests of 1950 earned monetary awards for their years of service and an “exemplary service” notation on their records, Earls writes. 

Shining a light

In Love in the Lav, through an intensive dive into Ireland’s court records, and with the skilled hand of a historian, Earls pulls the men left humiliated, hurt and broken by Ireland’s homophobic anti-gay laws and restores them to humanity, depicting each with an empathy denied to them in life. 

“I really hope that people who read this book will feel some empathy for all the people involved in Dublin's queer subculture”, says Earls, by email.

“But more than that, I hope this book moves people to help me and future researchers dig deeper into the past, to shed light on queer Irish history beyond the criminal record,” she says. 

“I encourage folks to participate in an LGBTQ+ oral history … or donate physical artifacts of queer love to a collection like the National Library's Irish Queer Archive and/or the Lavender+Green project,” she says.

Love in the Lav: A Social Biography of Same-Sex Desire in Ireland, 1922-1972 is available from 20th June 2025, from Temple University Press