‘I knew that homosexuality was a sin — I didn’t want to be homosexual. I went to my local G.P. and I said to her that I had read Freud’s book on dreams and that I suffered from homosexuality – and that I would like to change.’Footnote 1 ‘Séan’ grew up in a small town in rural Northern Ireland in the 1960s. By teenagehood, he was disturbed by his burgeoning feelings of same-sex attraction and sought information in the pages of books available to him in a local library. What he read there, in a work about psychoanalysis, prompted him to identify with a case study of a homosexual man who had lived in the nineteenth century. This led him to conclude that he was suffering from a mental illness, while he was also aware that some men went to prison and that their condition was understood by churches as being sinful. Séan’s early and entirely negative experience of accessing knowledge about his sexuality can be regarded as typical of his times. His memories show the overlapping and conflicted discourses that surrounded male homosexuality, with sin and sickness jostling to create distress and bewilderment in the mind of the individual, but also in the responses of people and institutions who were obliged to engage with male homosexuality.
The lived experiences of men like Séan have often been neglected in narratives of queer history in Northern Ireland, in a literature dominated by accounts of activism and homophobia against the backdrop of the sociopolitical conflict of the Troubles in the 1970s and 1980s. This history has emerged comparatively recently, partly perhaps due to conservatism within the Irish academy, but also because of a long-standing prioritising of narratives of political conflict at the expense of social histories.Footnote 2 However, this has begun to change. Rachel Wallace has recently deployed oral history interviews with men and women who found community, companionship and love despite the adverse conditions that surrounded them during the Troubles.Footnote 3 Through her focus on joy, Wallace’s work builds upon, yet contests, earlier sociological studies that located queer lives in terms of trauma and conflict.Footnote 4 Sean Brady has examined masculinities, demonstrating in the process how the workings of regionally-specific circumstances, religious conservatism, social antagonism and a prevalence of male-dominated violence and patriarchy created and fuelled a hostile environment for gay men in the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote 5 Explorations of the early twentieth century have thus far been more adept at digging down into everyday experience, in the process illuminating not only sexual encounters, but biographies, kinship networks and the ways that queer experience was shaped by class, religion and culture.Footnote 6 These endeavours have complemented a considerably richer and more varied historiography on queer men in the Republic of Ireland during the twentieth century, which has encompassed the policing of sexualities, representations and political organising, and have in turn built upon pioneering surveys that established the contours of the history of sexualities in Ireland.Footnote 7 Investigations of male homosexuality and religion in late-twentieth-century Northern Ireland have focused on the effect on the individual of conservative discourse, particularly emanating from Catholicism and fundamentalist Protestantism.Footnote 8 There has been little examination of approaches to same-sex desire by the mainstream Protestant churches and their members.Footnote 9 Meanwhile, there has been no scholarly account of the history of the medicalisation of homosexuality in Northern Ireland. Much unexplored territory thus remains concerning the contemporary history of LGBTQ+ lives in the region and the structures of meaning and social conditions that helped shape them.
In 1977, a journalist observed that: ‘Homosexuality in Ulster remained a precarious pursuit, clandestine through circumstances rather than choice.’ Delineating the oppressive conditions under which many laboured, he painted a picture of vulnerability, isolation, loneliness, secrecy and discrimination.Footnote 10 While a largely urban minority were able to ‘come out’ and publicly adopt an affirming identity, an unknowable number remained in the shadows.Footnote 11 Until 1982, the homophobia of Northern Irish society was reinforced by the criminalisation of all homosexual acts under nineteenth-century legislation — namely, the Offences Against the Person Act, 1861 and the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885. The Sexual Offences Act, 1967 partially decriminalised sexual acts between men in England and Wales — Marion Duggan has attributed the original failure to extend the 1967 act to Northern Ireland to religious opposition but does not specify the nature of this opposition.Footnote 12 The Northern Ireland Gay Rights Association (N.I.G.R.A.) campaigned from its formation in 1975 for law reform and to improve the lot of the homosexual, but its efforts made few inroads into mainstream political culture.Footnote 13 When attempts to persuade the British government to change the law foundered in 1979, Jeffrey Dudgeon, a leading member of N.I.G.R.A., lodged an application with the European Court of Human Rights that resulted, in 1981, in a judgement to the effect that the British government was breaching the European Convention on Human Rights. The change in the law did not immediately lead to a thaw in social attitudes.Footnote 14 When extended to Northern Ireland, the 1967 act maintained an unequal age of consent at 21 and only applied to adult couples whose sex lives were confined behind closed doors.
The moral climate in both Ireland and Britain darkened in the 1980s with the advent of the AIDS crisis and a backlash against gay rights amid economic recession.Footnote 15 A lack of widespread social acceptance of same-sex relationships and the predominance of a culture of near-mandatory heterosexual marriage created a subterranean world of ‘lavender seekers’ — closeted men who took part in homosexual behaviour but offset their desires with heterosexual public presentation.Footnote 16 Outbreaks of intensified police persecution of men who cruised liminal public spaces were a feature of this period, arguably driven by tabloid outrage. For example, in March 1990, the Sunday Life reported that a ‘homosexual vice ring had been smashed’ with the conviction of twelve men aged between 24 and 65 years for ‘acts of gross indecency’ in various locations, including the grounds of Antrim Castle.Footnote 17 Public approval of sexual diversity was hesitant at best. The first official pride parade in Belfast would not be held until 1991.Footnote 18 It included a bus with a ‘very nervous’ driver, and although reportedly ‘hassle free’, was relatively sparsely attended by around 100 people.Footnote 19 The tenth anniversary of decriminalisation was ignored by most of the province’s media, with an exception being the dissident Catholic priest, Pat Buckley, who, according to Gay Star, a newspaper produced by members of N.I.G.R.A., gave the topic the entirety of his column in the Belfast tabloid, the Sunday News.Footnote 20 The choice of periodisation adopted by this article reflects a continuity in majority conservative moral culture.
This article examines two negative models of understanding male homosexuality in Northern Ireland between 1960 and 1990: ‘sickness’ and ‘sin’. It seeks to interrogate the complex and sometimes contradictory discourses that emanated from religion and medicine, showing how social conditions influenced the responses of two major churches in the late 1970s, and how high levels of conservative religiosity first impeded, then prolonged, the idea that same-sex desire was the result of mental illness. Most religious responses to male same-sex desire in Ireland in the mid and late twentieth century were framed by Christian distaste, or, at best, ambivalence. In the early 1980s, the gay rights campaigner and academic, David Norris, believed that, in the shape of the gay liberation movement, there now existed in Ireland ‘for the first time in history an organised opposition to accepted notions of the Judeo-Christian system rather than a series of isolated and easily broken individuals ashamed of their stigmatised role as sinners, perverts or criminals’.Footnote 21 From the mid 1970s onwards, activists in Belfast began to challenge and contest negativity at the same time as agitating for the law to be reformed. Their campaign resulted in an increase in discourse around male homosexuality that was then almost entirely novel in the province. Discussion here is focused on two major Protestant churches: the Church of Ireland (C.O.I.) and the Presbyterian Church in Ireland (P.C.I.), which were prodded into action by the prospect of legislative change. The bishops of the Church of Ireland resolved to follow an earlier route trodden by their kinsmen in the Church of England and lend their support to calls to change the law, in the process working to separate ideas of sin from crime.Footnote 22 The Presbyterian Church investigated the issue and produced a report, ‘The Church and the Homosexual’, which advocated compassion but equivocated over decriminalisation and maintained that inclusion within the church was dependent upon mandatory sexual abstinence. Yet, a small group of radical Christians attempted to go much further. The Northern Ireland Council on Religion and Homosexuality (N.I.C.R.H.) denied that same-sex desire was sinful. They campaigned for the acceptance of gay men within churches and, in the process, strove to engineer a discursive shift from sin to love and compassion. Unfortunately, their courageous efforts were destined to have a limited impact upon the bulk of religious opinion in the province, which remained profoundly conservative, and they were effectively swamped when evangelicals mobilised an infamous campaign in the late 1970s — Save Ulster from Sodomy (S.U.F.S.).
By comparison with ‘sin’, the idea of same-sex desire as a pathology was relatively new. It had first been mooted by continental sexologists in the late nineteenth century and was adopted with enthusiasm by some psychiatrists in England during the 1950s.Footnote 23 This article demonstrates that the medical model was adopted and promulgated in Northern Ireland by psychiatrists who examined and attempted to treat men in the 1960s and 1970s, with a hangover into the 1980s. Extraordinarily, at the turn of the 1990s, two leading physicians in the field in Northern Ireland continued to maintain — contrary to medical orthodoxy — that same-sex desire was a sickness that might be cured. The medical model conflicted with that of religious fault, yet simultaneously was sustained by it. That homosexuality might be an illness was never wholly accepted, not because of any known challenge from within the medical profession, but because a vocal body of religious opinion held that only spirituality could offer the prosect of a cure. Yet, the conservative religiosity of Northern Irish society prolonged medicalisation in comparison to its brief heyday in England. Conservatism obstructed and delayed social acceptance of the liberation model, fostered adverse social attitudes which limited the social acceptance of gay men, castigated them as deviants and sinners and subjected them to hostility, exclusion and violence. Paradoxically, religion created demand for medicalisation.
I
Northern Ireland was a pious province. Religious life was dominated by four major all-Ireland institutions: the Roman Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, and Methodist churches. There were also a plethora of minor Protestant churches, including Baptists, Pentecostals and Free Presbyterians.Footnote 24 Rates of church attendance were high. One survey produced the prodigious statistic of 87 per cent of the total population reporting having attended church at least monthly in 1981, although other surveys indicated a rather lower percentage, with 55 per cent of the total population attending church on a weekly basis in 1978.Footnote 25 The Roman Catholic Church could boast of particularly strong rates, with around 90 per cent of its members attending church weekly in the late 1970s.Footnote 26 Rates of adherence, understood in terms of belonging stated on census returns, remained high between the 1960s and the 1980s, particularly for Catholics; the three main Protestant churches experienced a slight decline as a resurgence of evangelicalism resulted in the expansion of smaller denominations in the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote 27 In 1981, 96.6 per cent of the population stated that they believed in God.Footnote 28 The 1960s have been interpreted as a time of crisis in British religion, where an ‘abrupt cultural revolution’ undermined the discursive power of Christianity.Footnote 29 This can hardly be said to have been the case in Northern Ireland, where religion consequently retained its public salience in comparison to other parts of the United Kingdom.Footnote 30 In 1990, the social scientist John Whyte opined that the churches were so influential in Northern Ireland that it was ‘difficult to disentangle their role from that of other social institutions’.Footnote 31 The outlook of the churches and their members was predominantly conservative. In 1982, the church scholars Eric Gallagher and Stanley Worrall observed ‘there was on both sides of the religious divide in Ireland a theological conservatism and a puritanism of outlook that [was] out of fashion in the English and European churches’. This book, the first scholarly account taking note of church demographics, attitudes and political activities in the region, made no reference at all to the issue of homosexuality, suggesting that the authors believed that it was an issue of little import.Footnote 32 Steve Bruce has asserted that conflict between Catholics and Protestants functioned to restrict social mixing, which in other settings caused dogmatic and doctrinaire religion to be gradually displaced by liberal and tolerant versions.Footnote 33 Moral conservatism that derived from religiosity had, as Lindsey Earner-Byrne has argued, been key to the formation of the identities of the two states following partition in 1922.Footnote 34 The prominence of religion in Northern Irish society meant that the views of churches on issues of sexual morality mattered. Their conservatism was a major obstacle to the efforts of gay rights campaigners to improve the treatment of homosexuals and to secure support for law reform. But, the campaign to secure the partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality in the late 1970s forced the main Protestant churches to confront the issue for the first time and resulted in a novel increase in discourse.
The Church of Ireland was the only major religious body in Northern Ireland that explicitly supported partial decriminalisation. In response to overtures by the Irish Gay Rights Movement (I.G.R.M.), the Church of Ireland’s leadership engaged with activists in Dublin in the mid 1970s, working together to organise an influential seminar. At the 1976 General Synod, the archbishop of Dublin, Alan Buchanan, made an intervention, which has been described as ‘momentous’, by stating that he and his colleagues felt themselves ‘uneasy’ with the existing laws and that reform was desirable.Footnote 35 In December 1977, a standing committee to the General Synod (which had been hastily convened due to a belief that the law might imminently be changed through an order in council) dispatched an open letter to the secretary of state for Northern Ireland that stated that, while not giving approval to homosexual acts, the committee ‘accepts that the proposed law reform on homosexual acts in private between consenting adults over 21 should be removed from the realm of criminal offence’.Footnote 36 This was emphasised by supporters of decriminalisation within the Church of Ireland. Rev. Michael Kennedy, a clergyman from Armagh, commented that it was ‘[i]mportant to distinguish between a sin and a crime. It is one thing to say that certain forms of behaviour are not acceptable to Christians, and another to say that such behaviour should be treated as a criminal offence.’Footnote 37 The Church of Ireland’s approach to law reform finally reflected and followed mainstream Anglican thinking, which since the mid 1950s had advocated separating the law from religious moral codes.Footnote 38
If the Church of Ireland’s official position supported legalisation, in practice its teachings preserved an emphasis upon moral fault.Footnote 39 The standing committee’s letter to the secretary of state emphasised that, while homosexuality should be removed from the ‘area of criminality’, it was not an ‘acceptable norm’.Footnote 40 That said, a discourse of compassion was promoted by some theological liberals. William Odling-Smee for example, a deacon from South Belfast who combined his church activities with his career as a surgeon, wrote to the Church of Ireland Gazette in 1977, arguing that: ‘We must know that the Church exists not to condemn such people but to extend to them the compassion of Christ.’Footnote 41 The project to separate crime from sin did not meet with universal approval, however. Rev B. T. Blacoe, of the rural parish of Tullyhogue, Cookstown, County Tyrone, wrote to the Gazette in the same year and reported that he and his parishioners believed that that the bible ‘condemns the practice’ and that it was the duty of the church to ‘oppose, not support, any move to legalise homosexuality in any form’.Footnote 42 Other comments reveal how attempts to shift emphasis from outright condemnation were unpopular at the grassroots and indicated tension between mainstream Anglican theology and social attitudes in Northern Ireland. In a speech to the Armagh Diocesan Synod, one clergyman reportedly ‘inveighed against homosexuality, abortion, drunkenness and the relationship between drinking and driving and road deaths’.Footnote 43 Even parish newsletters plumbed the depths of homophobia. Patrick Synott, a priest in east Belfast, bemoaned in 1978 that ‘noisy minorities [were] now yelling for the legalisation of sexual aberrations’ and complained that those who held ‘old fashioned views’ were being ‘sneered at’.Footnote 44 Crafting a more liberal religious response struggled within this deeply puritanical moral culture.
The Presbyterian Church in Ireland’s General Assembly announced ‘qualified acceptance’ of law reform in December 1977 (a detail curiously absent from an existing overview of this debate), although at the same time the church’s Board of Social Witness said that they were opposed.Footnote 45 The variation in opinions within this church, which included divergent views in local presbyteries, reflected its structure and the importance given within Presbyterianism to individual informed conscience. The P.C.I.’s Board of Social Witness articulated a demand that claims for regional moral exceptionalism should be recognised by legislators, taking account of Northern Ireland’s ‘significant differences [from England] in social and religious standards.’Footnote 46 These mirrored a tendency within unionist political thought which advocated a resumption of administrative autonomy for the province to prevent the movement of social liberalism across the Irish Sea.Footnote 47 More generally, the churches in Northern Ireland were, as one journalist put it, anxious to avoid ‘opening the door to the permissive storm’.Footnote 48 Meanwhile, the P.C.I’s General Assembly commissioned a committee to carry out an in-depth investigation of legal, social and theological aspects of homosexuality, which resulted in a report to the 1979 General Assembly. Succinctly titled ‘The Church and the Homosexual’, it was couched as a ‘sober attempt to understand the whole situation’. Due to divisions amongst the committee, the report stopped short of explicitly advocating decriminalisation. However, its authors were hardly enthusiastic about the wisdom of civil law enforcing religious moral codes, citing the example of adultery as a sin that was not illegal. Their discussion of blackmail concluded with the unambiguous statement that: ‘Homosexuals should be protected from persecution whether in public or private.’Footnote 49
‘The Church and the Homosexual’ was — at the time — a cautiously liberal theological document. The more liberal strands within the report were similar to a tendency seen across the Irish Sea within the Church of Scotland, which, as Jeffrey Meek has shown, developed a more conciliatory stance towards homosexual law reform during the 1970s.Footnote 50 However, it was far from affirming in its tone and content. Its authors sought to mitigate homophobia — a word which, they noted, had recently been imported from America — by reminding readers that the church believed that that all non-marital sex consisted of a ‘shortcoming and abuse’. Rather than advocating an acceptance of same-sex relationships, the report emphasised equivalence with heterosexual transgressions. It agonised over the differences between ‘practising’ and ‘non practising’ homosexuals, and emphasised the need for self-denial, advocating pastoral care in support of the ‘burdens and yoke’ of the celibate. One of the report’s more peculiar opinions was to wonder whether the emergence of gay liberation, which ‘propagated and flaunted homosexual behaviour’, had been partly caused by church hostility, implying that greater efforts should instead have been made to encourage restrained lives of forbearance. N.I.G.R.A.’s reviewer wryly observed that the ‘pressure to regard one’s own sexual nature as sinful’ was preserved intact by the report, ‘albeit applied in a more loving manner’.Footnote 51 Within the P.C.I., the report was well-received. Its General Assembly ordered that it be printed for mass distribution as a pamphlet, while its reception the following year by presbyteries was broadly positive. Their feedback revealed that some of these local church bodies were explicitly in favour of decriminalisation and critical of the committee’s equivocation, demonstrating the presence and depth of moderate opinion then existing in parts of this church. In response, the authors admitted that their committee had failed to reach consensus. It was unfortunate, they continued, that there were ‘still those who are included to regard homosexuals as aliens rather than as fellow members of the human race’.Footnote 52
The letters pages of the Presbyterian Herald, the P.C.I.’s magazine, also featured a debate on homosexuality in 1977. It contained the voices of several correspondents who advocated considerably more liberal theological positions than that which would be taken by the authors of ‘The Church and the Homosexual’. Conor Fegan has shown how, by the 2000s, a tacit policy of ‘Don’t Ask – Don’t Tell’ resulted in silence within Presbyterianism on the topic of LGBT+ sexualities.Footnote 53 By contrast, the decriminalisation debate in the late 1970s provoked a brief upsurge in discourse, exposing seemingly unbridgeable divides in opinion. Several of the letter writers took exception to an editorial which had characterised gay sex as unnatural, compared acceptance of same sex desire to toleration of criminality and vice, and strongly implied that recourse to greater religiosity could deliver a ‘cure’.Footnote 54 Some supported these claims and even chastised the editor for insufficiently emphasising the ‘sinful character of homosexuality’, including one who asserted that the law functioned to ‘protect these people from their sinful ways – even though they strangely wanted to stay in the devil’s web’.Footnote 55 The contributions of liberals were more novel. Two of them identified themselves as gay men. One was William Wilson, who used his letter to ‘come out’, almost certainly the first time this had happened in the pages of a church publication in the province. Although not identified as such by his letter, Wilson, who described himself as a ‘Christian homosexual within the Presbyterian family’, was a leading activist in N.I.C.R.H., which was formed in early 1976 as an ecumenical study group and which was, in fact, the official, ‘closeted’ name for the Gay Christian Fellowship.Footnote 56 Wilson claimed that he had spent the previous three decades living in a state of celibacy in accordance with church teaching, but wondered: ‘How can the true homosexual be fully Christian if they cannot fully be themselves?’ Arguing that a more positive and inclusive attitude was essential, Wilson concluded that: ‘Homosexuals, like myself, do not want sympathy or compassion, but want to be treated as we deserve as normal human beings.’Footnote 57
The debate was unusual in that it featured a contribution from a woman. Although the P.C.I. had some female ministers, the C.O.I. and P.C.I.’s officialdom was overwhelmingly masculine in composition and the outlook of these churches patriarchal. The focus upon homosexuality as male in public discourse in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s reflected the lack of legislation around lesbianism, but also told of cultural factors, in particular a female reticence in speaking about sexualities within a male-dominated public sphere. Sylvia Sands was an Anglican youth worker, lay preacher, peace activist and religious writer who had moved to Belfast from London in 1971.Footnote 58 Her contribution to the Presbyterian Herald debate contained a series of arguments against criminalisation and stigmatisation and deployed a discourse of love and compassion in place of sin. ‘Homosexuals are fellow human beings who have the same rights as heterosexuals,’ she wrote. ‘The right to be themselves, and the right to love and be loved. As a Christian, I believe that God is Love, and that all love is from Him.’Footnote 59 Sands’s campaign against church homophobia made her unpopular, and she was excluded from various church premises. Exclusion extended to N.I.C.R.H., to which she had been elected chair, and which was thus denied the use of any church buildings in Belfast. Sands later remembered how hers was a ‘lonely position’ but that she had felt the gay community ‘close ranks around her like a family’ and ‘shield her from the blows that came from mainly Christian quarters’.Footnote 60
In late 1977, in response to this debate about legal and social change, a militant campaign was launched by the Democratic Unionist Party (D.U.P.). ‘Save Ulster from Sodomy’ explicitly rejected separating the law from theology and in the process, as Tom Hulme has suggested, harked back to late nineteenth-century discourses by depicting homosexuality as a foreign sin that directly attacked the family.Footnote 61 The D.U.P. had been formed in 1971 as a hardline unionist party that had a close relationship — not least in a shared leader in the shape of Rev. Ian Paisley — with the Free Presbyterian Church. A self-described fundamentalist, Paisley had founded this church in 1951 following a schism with the P.C.I., and by 1980 it had over 10,000 members in some fifty congregations.Footnote 62 Free Presbyterianism has been characterised as ‘severely puritan, stressing the importance of fundamentalist doctrinal inspiration, sanctification through moral purity and extreme interpretation of protest’, while the involvement of members of other evangelical churches in the D.U.P. was sustained by a ‘uniformity of fundamentalist attitudes’.Footnote 63 Richard O’Leary has noted that Paisley was a master of inflammatory language and publicity stunts.Footnote 64 Save Ulster from Sodomy’s launching press release claimed that the ‘moral fabric’ of the province was being undermined, that legalisation of homosexuality would ‘bring God’s curse down upon our people’ and that ‘sodomy [was] a sin and should be repented of and not legislated for’.Footnote 65 It was, according to Sean Brady, a ‘concerted and persistent campaign, advertised in newspapers, demonstrations and pamphleteering on street corners, and which promoted itself as a religious crusade’.Footnote 66 Paisley’s close associate, Peter Robinson, used lurid language during the campaign that reduced male homosexuality to physical sexual acts, emphasised scriptural condemnation and fancifully imagined that the ‘sin of homosexuality’ would ‘destroy society itself’.Footnote 67 The initial campaign culminated in a mass demonstration in November 1977 in which a cavalcade of more than sixty cars which were driven to Stormont, the sometime seat of the Northern Ireland parliament. Two clerics, Rev. William Beattie and Rev. William McCrea, handed a petition to the U.K. government that was claimed to have been signed by 70,000 people.Footnote 68 Even if true, this number represented only five per cent of the province’s total population, implying that active commitment to the campaign was low.Footnote 69
Remarkably, given the usual sectarian antagonisms, ‘Save Ulster from Sodomy’ received tacit support from the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in Northern Ireland.Footnote 70 In response to a perception that the Catholic Church was united in homophobia with the Free Presbyterians, posters created by gay rights activists appeared around Belfast city centre that compared both Paisley and Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich, Catholic archbishop of Armagh, to the Ayatollah Khomeini, implying a similarity in theocratic excess.Footnote 71 The infamy of Save Ulster from Sodomy has come to colour the ‘atmosphere’ surrounding the contemporary history of same-sex desire in Northern Ireland, while Paisley has cast an oversized shadow upon the history of Presbyterianism in the province.Footnote 72 The prominence of the campaign’s message was aided by the fact that leaders of mainstream Protestant churches did not issue any condemnation of it, meaning that it could easily be assumed by observers that the campaign represented their opinions as well. One of the few contemporary religious voices raised in public objection was that of Sylvia Sands, who protested that the campaign was an incitement to hatred against a minority, lambasted it as ‘cruel and contemptuous’ and driven by fear, and expressed a desire for a more humane and enlightened society. But, compared to Ian Paisley and his supporters, her protest was, she wrote, ‘a squeak rather than a huge roar’.Footnote 73
The decriminalisation debate in the late 1970s prompted some relatively sophisticated, if fraught, discussions within the Church of Ireland and the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. Yet, in terms of engineering more emollient attitudes amongst the faithful, it was hardly a success. The C.O.I. followed mainstream Anglican theology by separating crime from sin and in the process became the only church in Northern Ireland that explicitly resolved to support decriminalisation. But, some of the responses from the grassroots told of the distance between liberal Anglican theology and prevalent social attitudes. The P.C.I. issued mixed messages. Its General Assembly agreed not to oppose reform, but a church committee objected. Their ‘Church and the Homosexual’ report advocated tolerance and compassion but implicitly rejected any possibility of an affirming gay identity and advocated compulsory celibacy. Efforts within these mainstream churches to develop less punitive responses were tempered by internal opposition and a widely held fear on the part of church leaders that any concession to change might risk importing the ‘permissive society’ into Northern Ireland. The rejection of sinfulness advocated by N.I.C.R.H. relied on a liberal reading of theology which was entirely at odds with the conservative mood of the churches, while gay Christians and their allies were small in number, characterised by a participant as having been an underground movement.Footnote 74
Public memory of homosexuality and religion in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s has been coloured by the strident discourse of ‘Save Ulster from Sodomy’, eclipsing the more liberal equivocations of the mainstream Protestant churches. Although it was a fringe campaign, ‘Save Ulster from Sodomy’ reflected an influential body of social attitudes which abhorred same-sex desire and anticipated that the law would enforce religious opinion. The broader influence of conservative religious opposition to the social acceptance of same-sex desire was illustrated by a survey at Queen’s University, Belfast. In 1987 and 1988, two psychologists, Ian Sneddon and John Kremer, carried out two investigations of the sexual attitudes and behaviours of undergraduate students. Their report, which was situated as a response to the AIDS pandemic, showed that there had been no shift in religious attitudes since the early 1980s. They reported widespread moral conservatism, including a strong correlation between negative attitudes to homosexuality and regular churchgoing. Devout students referred to the pronouncements of ‘several well-known church leaders’ to the effect that AIDS was ‘God’s retribution for a sinful way of life’.Footnote 75 The prevalence of these views were doubtless related to the illiberal moral backlash discerned in Britain and the Republic of Ireland during the 1980s.Footnote 76 But, between 1960 and 1990, ‘sin’ existed in uncomfortable tension, and sometimes outright opposition, with the idea of same-sex desire as a sickness. Strikingly, a central element in the discourse that emanated from ‘Save Ulster from Sodomy’ was an explicit refutation of the idea of any medical rationalisation of homosexuality. Alan Kane, a D.U.P. councillor from Cookstown, County Tyrone, who spoke on behalf of the campaign, insisted that ‘homosexuality shouldn’t be regarded as a disease, but a sin which debases society, and which is condemned by the Bible in the strongest possible terms’.Footnote 77 However, in contrast to the longevity of ‘sin’, the idea of an illness which might be treated by psychiatrists enjoyed a comparatively brief heyday in England in the 1950s and 1960s. Remarkably, it lingered on in Northern Ireland into the late 1980s.
II
The idea that homosexuality was a pathology dated from the late nineteenth century and was derived from the work of early sexologists.Footnote 78 It spread fastest in continental Europe and, to a lesser degree, the U.S.A. It was not until the 1950s in Britain, as Chris Waters has shown, that same-sex desire was being widely explained as ‘treatable’ due to the earlier spread of psychological understandings of ‘sexual aberrations’ between the wars.Footnote 79 Tommy Dickinson has similarly located the ascendancy of medicalisation in Britain in the 1950s, when enthusiastic doctors began to promote the theory of a treatable illness resulting from an ingrained condition, rather than a crime. The high point of this belief was in the early 1960s, with the declassification of homosexuality as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association Manual — which was widely used in Britain — providing an end point in 1974.Footnote 80 Yet, scholars have shown how rival discourses of male homosexuality competed in England in the 1960s, creating considerable confusion amongst gay men and the wider public while medical opinion was divided as to the status of homosexuality as an illness and the possible efficacy of purported treatments.Footnote 81 The history of medical conversion practices in Ireland has remained largely unknown, although the ubiquitous nature of references to homosexuality as a pathology in public discourse in the 1970s have been noted.Footnote 82 Importantly, secular attempts to change sexual orientation through medical intervention existed alongside religious conversion practices. Conversion therapy has been defined in contemporary religious contexts in Ireland as consisting of religious or professional attempts to change or modify sexual orientation or gender identity, and has been subdivided into religious/spiritual, psychoanalytic and cognitive/behavioural models.Footnote 83 In her study of homophobia and conflict in Northern Ireland, Marion Duggan highlighted the less formal nature of many religious conversion practices, emphasising that not all conversion ideologies were rooted in psychological practice but might simply consist of pressure to conform to heteronormative masculinity applied within a church context.Footnote 84
Following the creation of the National Health Service in 1948, mental health services in Northern Ireland were transformed. Previously, provision had been poorly funded and piecemeal, but now mental hospitals were integrated into the general hospital structure. After fifty years of stagnation, there followed two decades of unprecedented expansion.Footnote 85 An increase in source material referencing the medical model of homosexuality parallels the rejuvenation of psychiatric medicine in the province. One of the first known mentions of the medical model in reference to criminalisation in Northern Ireland was in 1951. Charles McCarte, a 51-year-old shop assistant from Belfast, was arrested while attempting to pick up visiting sailors in Bangor, County Down, then a port of call for the British navy. Upon arrest, McCarte reportedly informed police that he had been ‘[a]fflicted with it [homosexuality] for a lifetime and [was] prepared to undergo any treatment which would affect a cure’. McCarte pleaded guilty and was dispatched by the court to undergo unspecified treatment at the county’s mental institute, the Downshire Hospital in Downpatrick.Footnote 86 By the early 1960s, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (R.U.C.) increasingly turned to the insights of psychiatrists when preparing evidence against men accused of homosexual offences. This seems to have been especially the case in County Down, an area which included a more populous and semi-urban district adjacent to Belfast. The police in this area, north Down, appear to have been particularly active in their pursuit of homosexual men. Medical reports which were attached to criminal files from County Down preserved in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (P.R.O.N.I.) give insight into therapeutic thinking. They show how psychiatrists believed that in these cases, same-sex desire was an aberrant behaviour, perhaps the result of a personality disorder, into which their patients had unfortunately lapsed, and from which they might be rescued by treatment. ‘John’, a working-class man, had been charged in 1967 with two counts of gross indecency with a sixteen-year-old youth which had taken place while cruising in a public toilet.Footnote 87 In this case, the psychiatrist regarded homosexuality as an ‘abnormal sexual deviation’, cryptically adding that ‘in his previous personality’, John appeared to be a ‘very ordinary but gullible individual’. An episode of mental illness provided the doctor with a ready explanation for why an otherwise apparently blameless middle-aged man whose main interest other than work was singing in a church choir would be implicated in sexual misconduct. He concluded that John ‘appeared to be of an immature personality which [was] extremely suggestible’, that the ‘prognosis was good’ and that the patient was expected to ‘adjust quickly provided he receives support and a certain amount of direction’.Footnote 88
Two reports suggested that psychiatrists were contending with gender nonconformity as well as same-sex attraction. In 1967, ‘Robert’, a working-class man, was arrested and charged with gross indecency resulting from a sexual encounter which had taken place when he was extremely drunk. Robert, whose activities included cross-dressing ‘in women’s nylons’ when under the influence of alcohol, was supported at his trial by a letter from a clinical psychiatrist from the Downshire Hospital. He opined that Robert was ‘primarily heterosexual with some homosexual tendencies which become prominent when he was intoxicated’ and that the co-operation of his wife in ‘keeping him from this kind of behaviour’ would allow ‘these positive aspects of his personality [to] be accentuated with a view to more control over his perverse instincts’.Footnote 89 Another psychiatrist provided a second opinion, considering that because a previous stint in jail for similar reasons had not prevented a recurrence, ‘he needs treatment rather than punishment’, and recommended a course of psychotherapy. ‘Paul’ was a seventeen-year-old youth, classed by the police as a ‘juvenile’, who was also arrested and tried in 1967.Footnote 90 A psychiatrist’s report attached to his file stated that the patient was ‘frank and honest about his homosexual behaviour’, while a social worker commented that assisting him in obtaining a job was very difficult because of his ‘attitudes and reputation’, as well as a tendency to appear at interview wearing lipstick — a line in the report which was highlighted by the pen of an unknown reader. The report concluded that Paul was unsuitable for either aversion therapy or the ‘insight method’ because he was ‘clearly a homosexual’ — suggesting that the doctor regarded some patients as beyond treatment.Footnote 91
The pathologising of homosexuality was being questioned within the medical profession in England and being opposed by the emerging Gay Liberation movement at the same time as medicalisation was being entrenched in Northern Ireland. Around 1970, a new ‘Clinic for Sexual Disorders’ within Belfast City Hospital, connected to Queen’s University, Belfast, was set up (the biographical details of one of the psychiatrists working on ‘sexual disorders’ in Belfast, P. Joan Graham in a 1971 paper, say that in 1969, she was senior psychiatric social worker at Windsor House, the Department of Mental Health, Queen’s University, Belfast, suggesting that the clinic was not formally established until at least 1970).Footnote 92 In its early years, the clinic was headed by James Quinn, a psychiatrist with a particular interest in behaviouralism. Notably, Quinn was keen to present his research on medical conversion practices on the international stage, resulting in him being challenged in the early 1970s at a conference in New York. Lillian Faderman records that ‘a few minutes into his talk Gay activists alliance members who were scattered around the room shoved their chairs back loudly and jumped up to announce that Quinn had talked enough’.Footnote 93 His clinic seems to have striven to avoid publicity, making its activities rather obscure. However, its staff wrote a number of academic articles describing their work. In a 1973 article in the Ulster Medical Journal, they regarded homosexuality (imprecisely defined but including women as well as men) as a ‘sexual problem’ comparable to ‘frigidity’, impotence and the proclivities of exhibitionists, and reported that in the previous year they had ‘treated’ twenty homosexual patients. The same paper listed the ‘treatments’ administered to try and combat same-sex attraction. These included desensitisation (which aimed to reduce anxiety based on the belief that homosexuals feared heterosexual relationships), techniques for conditioning sexual arousal which were claimed to permit ‘exclusive homosexuals to develop heterosexual interests’ and aversion therapy.Footnote 94
Attempted treatments for same-sex desire were apparently used throughout the United Kingdom with no general protocol or ethical guidelines.Footnote 95 Aversion therapy was easily the most notorious. It was based upon behaviouralism, the idea that behaviour could be modified, progressing to the notion that sexual ‘deviation’ could be modified by recourse to conditioning.Footnote 96 Observing that there has been an astonishing lack of scholarship into the history of aversion therapy, Kate Davison has divided its history into three phases, the last of which she locates in the ‘British world’ between the late 1950s and the mid 1970s.Footnote 97 The Belfast psychiatrists defined aversion therapy as ‘a technique which sets out to form an association between homosexual arousal and noxious stimulants such as electric shock’.Footnote 98 In 1973, they claimed that they rarely used ‘electrical aversion therapy’ and that the other methods available were better for ‘producing heterosexual interest in exclusive homosexuals’. Quinn and his staff claimed in print that they adopted a stance of moral neutrality and had no interest in coercing patients to change their sexual orientation.Footnote 99
This abdication of responsibility is challenged by patient testimony. Three first-hand accounts of ‘treatment’ in the Clinic for Sexual Disorders were collected as part of a wider oral history project that explored gay men’s experiences of living in Northern Ireland in the mid and late twentieth century. They provided a view from the perspective of patients and, through doing so, implicitly challenge the authority of narratives created by conversion therapy practitioners. ‘Jim’, a young working-class man who had been referred to the clinic after suffering a nervous breakdown caused by difficulties with his sexuality within a marriage, remembered being confronted by a psychiatrist who demanded that:
‘You have to accept that you are ill. If you don’t do that, then there is nothing we can do for you.’ And I remember going ‘he told me “Yeah, okay”’. What else could you say? It was the only chance that a gay man had of, maybe – I would have been led to believe – in the sense of living a normal kind of life.Footnote 100
These three former patients had all been young men aged between eighteen and twenty-one and voluntary patients, meaning that they had either asked for or accepted a referral to the clinic. They received aversion therapy, which was administered on a weekly basis and delivered by more junior staff members. Interviewees remembered being introduced to a range of pornographic photographic slides of men and women which were projected onto a wall in a darkened room.Footnote 101 ‘Stephen’, a student, recalled his sense of surprise when first seeing the slides, as he had never before exposed to this kind of material. He was informed that the photographs had been obtained from customs officials who had confiscated them at Northern Ireland’s border with the Republic, although Jim characterised the slides he saw as ‘bad and pathetic and nothing pornographic — just awful’.Footnote 102 All three men recalled how electrodes were fitted to their feet and/or wrists which were able to administer electric shocks, while a plethysmograph measured sexual arousal. Séan described the drawn-out and elaborate nature of the procedure, with repeat sessions over the course of a number of weeks. While the shocks were supposed to decline sexual interest in men, positive reinforcement was used in an attempt to stimulate interest in women. Having made the patient thirsty with salt tablets, encouraging responses to slides of women were rewarded by drinks of orange juice.Footnote 103
Both Stephen and Jim emphasised the pain of the procedure and the feelings of absurdity, futility and humiliation that it inspired. Stephen told of how:
Afterwards, I said to them: ‘I just can’t bear these — there’s no way I’ll get aroused lookin’ at these photographs, because I’m just waiting to get an electric shock — it’s ridiculous.’ ‘Nonetheless’, he [the clinician] said, ‘you are having a traumatic experience — this is what it’s all about.’Footnote 104
Jim remembered feeling so ill as a result of consuming the salt tablets that he informed the psychiatrists that he was unable to think about having sex at all, but they insisted upon continuing. Eventually, he told me, Jim started telling the doctors what he felt they wanted to hear. ‘In the end, they said I was cured’, he recalled. ‘And I really lied, because I wanted the fuck out of the place.’Footnote 105 Similarly, testimonies of former patients collected by Tommy Dickinson for England showed that men were known to play along in the hope that the unpleasant procedures would stop.Footnote 106 A reliance on self-reported outcomes helped facilitate spurious claims for the efficacy of medical conversion practices to be conveyed in print, notably in a 1973 article in the Ulster Medical Journal.Footnote 107 While Jim allowed clinicians to believe that he was cured, Séan simply stopped showing up as he began a relationship with a new boyfriend instead and soon afterwards discovered gay liberation. Stephen told of a final session of psychoanalysis with James Quinn, during which both doctor and patient admitted failure and the ‘treatment’ was abandoned. Finally resolving to try and live with his sexuality, Stephen then asked if there were places where he could go to meet other gay men. Quinn cautiously ventured that there might be such a place in Dublin — a bar called Bartley Dunnes. Bartley Dunne’s was a lounge bar in Dublin city centre which, by the early 1970s, had acquired a reputation as a ‘gay friendly’ venue. Euphemisms deployed by the bar’s management to advertise this included ‘continental’, ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘unusual’.Footnote 108
By the late 1970s and early 1980s, discourses of sickness and sin conflicted in public discourse. As already noted, some evangelical Christian commentators attacked the possibility that homosexuality was a sexual pathology. Instead, they insisted that it was a moral aberration that required religious solutions. Through doing so, they challenged a perceived intrusion of medicine into the realm of sexual morality. This was apparent in some of the more elaborate statements made by spokesmen from ‘Save Ulster from Sodomy’, but also by letter writers, including ‘Family Doctor’, who wrote in the Presbyterian Herald debate that he was unsurprised that a liberal contributor reported that attempted medical treatment of his sexuality had been ‘disastrous’ as ‘according to Scripture, the homosexual tendency within some people is not a disease but a variation of sin and the answer to it must therefore be spiritual’.Footnote 109 The precise nature of religious conversion therapy practices were often obscured, but Stanley Baird, warden of the Church of Ireland’s ‘Ministry of Healing’ in Dublin, believed in 1978 that ‘the homosexual can in fact be healed by the Living Jesus’ and suggested that those afflicted apply to ‘Counselling and Healing Centres’ in Dublin, Belfast and Derry.Footnote 110
However, at the same time, evangelical rhetoric invoked the idea of same-sex desire as a contagious disease which might somehow spread and corrupt the entire population. In early 1982, Rev. Martin Smyth, a Presbyterian minister who was Grand Master of the Orange Order, and a parliamentary candidate for the Ulster Unionist Party, stated his opposition to a change in the law following the E.C.H.R. ruling, arguing that he had ‘never been convinced that diseases are cured by spreading them’.Footnote 111 A correspondent to the Belfast Newsletter compared homosexuality to an outbreak of foot and mouth disease amongst livestock, while Ernest Harper, a former D.U.P. councillor from East Belfast, likened gay men to lepers and asserted that legislation which ‘allowed people who were sick coming into contact with people who were not sick should be resisted’.Footnote 112 Ultimately, evangelical discourses were incoherent.
By the late 1970s, the medical model was being contested in Northern Ireland. In 1978, Richard Kennedy, a leading member of N.I.G.R.A., reminded readers of the Belfast Telegraph that the American Psychiatric Association had removed homosexuality from its list of illnesses four years previously, ‘thus instantly curing up to 10 percent of that country’s citizens’.Footnote 113 The following year, another letter writer from N.I.G.R.A. identified the conflicted and contradictory nature of these negative discourses, observing that it was believed that ‘homosexuals were somehow sick, or that homosexuality was a vice or a sin’.Footnote 114 In 1977, Peter Brooke, also from N.I.G.R.A., believed that the ‘sickness’ model had eclipsed ‘sin’, claiming that ‘the argument that it [homosexuality] is an illness [as opposed to a sin] is nowadays more common. Instead of indulging in their malady, the argument goes, homosexuals should seek treatment. But the advocates of this view are usually charier about saying what this treatment might be.’Footnote 115 Yet strikingly, psychiatrists associated with the Clinic for Sexual Disorders continued to interpret homosexuality as a ‘dysfunction’ for nearly two decades after it had been declassified by the American Psychiatric Association. In the mid 1970s, Ethna O’Gorman, a psychiatrist, also emerged as one of the province’s leading — and perhaps only — sexologists. O’Gorman appears to have taken over the leadership of the clinic, rebranded it the Psychosexual Clinic, and published a series of academic journal articles describing her work between the 1970s and the 1980s. In 1990, the same year the World Health Organisation ceased classifying homosexuality as a mental illness, an article by O’Gorman and Diana Patterson, consultant psychiatrist at Tyrone and Fermanagh Hospital in Omagh, advocated the use of medical conversion practices.Footnote 116 They claimed that homosexuality could be ‘successfully treated’ by measures including ‘aversion procedures’ — although I could find no primary material which could confirm or deny that aversion therapy was being carried out in Belfast in the 1980s. Patterson’s later involvement in the ‘Christian ethos’ Irish Temperence League may indicate something of her religious standpoint.Footnote 117 Yet, at the same time, O’Gorman was not unaware of changing attitudes amongst some gay men and perceived that these were causing the medical model to decline. In 1985, she described the changing demographics of patients at her clinic. O’Gorman noted that while the overall number of patients referred to the clinic had increased since its establishment, the number of homosexuals who sought intervention had become fewer, from 22 per cent of total admissions in 1974 to 5.7 per cent in 1982. She attributed this decrease to changing attitudes on the part of gay men, believing that the establishment of Cara-Friend (an advocacy and support organisation that operated a helpline and befriending service for LGBTQ+ people from 1974 onwards) had played a part in reducing the number of patients.Footnote 118 O’Gorman and Patterson’s 1990 article recognised that there was a difference between patients who desired ‘treatment’ at their clinic and gay and bisexual men who were ‘established in the gay community who had no wish to change their orientation’.Footnote 119 But, for nearly two decades after it is thought to have declined in England, social conservatism and hostility permitted the pathologisation of same-sex desire to continue in Northern Ireland.
III
Negative models and discourses of male homosexuality conflicted in Northern Ireland in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, resulting in confusion, not least on the part of the individual. The notion of sinfulness was one that more liberal Christians within the mainstream churches attempted to re-negotiate, either by separating crime and sin, or, in the case of a daring minority, to deny the sinfulness of homosexuality and in the process shift discourse to love and compassion. Their efforts, and the nuances of responses by the Church of Ireland and the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, have been obscured by the notoriety of a fundamentalist campaign. By comparison to the longevity and persistence of the idea of a transgression of religious morality, the notion of a sickness quite rapidly appeared, gained traction in the 1950s and waned in the 1980s. Northern Ireland’s character as a ‘place apart’ from much of the rest of the United Kingdom restricted the progress of social change. This shaped how sexualities were understood. The province’s intense religiosity and lack of secularisation ensured that the ‘sin’ model of understanding continued to be influential, while the life of the ‘sickness’ model was prolonged. The history of these two models of comprehension — their effect upon the individual, their reception and negotiation by church members, doctors and gay rights activists — can demonstrate how and when Northern Ireland diverged from England, a country which, due to the structure of the United Kingdom, has often been conflated with ‘Britain’ in the literature. Jeffrey Weeks, in his pioneering accounts of the history of same-sex desire, traced the emergence of the medicalisation of homosexuality in England to the efforts of early sexologists in the late nineteenth century. This represented, he argued, a vitally significant transition from notions of sin to concepts of sickness or mental illness.Footnote 120 More recently, however, scholars of male same-sex desire and religion have emphasised the continued importance of churches, theology and religious opinion in debates over sex and morality.Footnote 121 The extent and complexity of theological manoeuvring has been demonstrated and the continued salience of religious ideas about same-sex desire into the mid twentieth century implicitly shown.Footnote 122 Yet, the landscape then changed from the late 1960s, as secularisation began to undermine the discursive power of Christian ideas about sex.Footnote 123 While Callum Brown has cautioned that any connection between secularisation and the emergence of gay liberation remains little researched, the emergence of a new and novel model of comprehension at a time of international religious crisis is unlikely to have been co-incidental.Footnote 124
Similarly, narratives of medicalisation in England have seen the mid 1970s as a turning point.Footnote 125 The situation in Scotland appears somewhat more complex. Roger Davidson has shown how a handbook widely used by family doctors included homosexuality as a ‘behavioural disorder’ as late as 1975.Footnote 126 At the same time, Davidson observed little evidence for the practice of aversion therapy in Scotland after the early 1970s.Footnote 127 In terms of religion, Northern Ireland was similar to the Irish Republic. Here, high levels of religiosity in the mid twentieth century have been attested to, with the Roman Catholic Church possessing a ‘moral monopoly’, while no ‘secularisation crisis’ comparable to England took place in the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote 128 The influence of a puritanical moral code upon the state ensured that male homosexuality was a ‘criminalised sin’ until the early 1990s, reflecting the continuation of a religious-legal model inherited from British rule in the nineteenth century.Footnote 129
The history of pathologisation in the Republic has remained rather mysterious due, as Brendan Kelly has highlighted, to a paucity of primary evidence about the nature of medical conversion practices used. However, a memoir has recently emerged which suggests at least one Dublin physician was advocating the use of hormone therapy for homosexual men in the late 1960s.Footnote 130 Paul Ryan has commented that the belief in a sexual pathology was virtually unquestioned by members of the Dáil in the 1970s and that psychologists were regarded by an influential newspaper ‘agony aunt’ as ‘the profession best qualified to guide men out of homosexuality’.Footnote 131 When leading gay rights activist, David Norris, appeared on Irish television to present the ‘nation’s first glimpse of a real live homosexual’, the first question he was asked was whether gay men were sick people.Footnote 132 Kelly has shown how an association between same-sex desire and psychiatry continued through the 1980s, although less punitive attitudes and approaches were now beginning to gain traction and a level of acceptance.Footnote 133 Although Northern Ireland resembled the Republic in the manner in which religion impacted upon and shaped understandings of same-sex desire, its denominational divergence has meant that it has often been excluded from scholarly discussions of sexualities in late-twentieth-century Ireland. These have focused upon the Catholic moral regime, its discontents and eventual overthrow.Footnote 134 Consequently, examining the fortunes of negative models of sexuality in post-war Northern Ireland can complicate historical narratives in both Ireland and the United Kingdom. From the mid 1970s onwards, a minority of men helped create and shape a movement for gay rights movement in Northern Ireland. Through doing so, they were able to access and key into a new, international mode of understanding based upon the revolutionary concept of gay liberation. This model would gather strength and, as sickness and sin eventually diminished, would provide a widely accepted model for social inclusion, affirmation and emancipation.
Data access statement
Due to the sensitive nature of the research, interviewees did not consent to the public depositing or sharing of their data to other researchers.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Tom Hulme and Leanne McCormick for their support and guidance during the production of this article, Callum Brown for scholarship inspiring it, the two anonymous reviewers who offered constructive advice, my oral history respondents who gave freely of their time and memories, Paul Wilson and Richard O’Leary who located rare materials in their private collections, the staff and members of Cara-Friend, Timothy O’Connell and my partner, Calum Jamieson, who was there when writing was tough.
Funding statement
This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council under AH/V008404/1.
Open access
