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Averill Earls, "Love in the Lav: A Social Biography of Same-Sex Desire in Ireland, 1922-1972" (Temple UP, 2025)
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- [00:00]
Narrator
Deborah had to have surgery.
- [00:02]
Deborah / Averill Earls
I had hip surgery in November of 2024.
- [00:05]
Narrator
Her United Healthcare nurse Crystal checked on her.
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Deborah / Averill Earls
We do a routine call after surgery and I could tell that she was struggling.
- [00:11]
Narrator
Debra needed help.
- [00:12]
Deborah / Averill Earls
My infection markers were through the roof.
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Narrator
And Crystal knew what to do.
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Deborah / Averill Earls
I called the hospital and said she's.
- [00:18]
Narrator
Coming in and got Debra the help she needed.
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Deborah / Averill Earls
Crystal and United Healthcare saved my life.
- [00:24]
Narrator
Hear more stories like Deborah's@uhc.com benefits, features and or devices vary by plan, area limitation and exclusion.
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Aidan Beatty
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Aidan Beatty
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Deborah / Averill Earls
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:35]
Aidan Beatty
Hello and welcome to New Books in Irish Studies, a podcast channel in the New Books Network. My name is Aidan Beatty and today I'm talking to Averill Earls, an associate professor at St Olaf's College in Minnesota. She's also one of the co founders of Digg, a history podcast, as well as being a regular interviewer here on this channel. Today we're going to talk about her new book, Love in the LAV, a social biography of same sex desire in Ireland, 1922-1972, out now at Temple University Press. Avril, thanks for joining us.
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Deborah / Averill Earls
Thanks for having me, Aidan.
- [02:05]
Aidan Beatty
So as I was reading your book, I was thinking about, I think you and I have only met each other in person once and it was at a conference at the University of Chicago, I think 10 years ago.
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Deborah / Averill Earls
Yeah, to the day probably pretty much.
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Aidan Beatty
And I have this very specific memory of you presenting what actually I think obviously was some of the research that now is out in this book. And it was at a conference about masculinity in the British world, essentially. And I remember there being almost like a sense of shock at the presentation you gave because you had these photographs of toilets of like public toilets in Dublin. And I think people were sort of shocked at the way you were presenting it, partly because it's just rare to have something so intimate. I mean, particularly like toilets as just an incredibly intimate space.
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Deborah / Averill Earls
Yes.
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Aidan Beatty
But also it really challenges a lot of. I mean, what you were talking about really challenges a lot of what we think we know about Ireland in the 1940s or the 1950s. Right. So you were talking in this presentation and obviously in your book also now about essentially men hooking up with other men in public toilets in Dublin in the 1950s, which for a lot of people that didn't happen. There's no way that could have happened. Right. There's a famous quote from an Irish bishop who said once there was no sex in Ireland until TV was invented. And obviously they're all wrong. You're right. So what do we think we know about queer lives in mid 20th century Ireland? And what does your research do to correct that and challenge that?
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Deborah / Averill Earls
Yeah, I think. I mean, you are capturing it. Exactly. And then this is the. I don't know, some people say this jokingly, some people I think are pretty serious. When I started this project, I would say, oh, I'm looking for evidence of some same sex as iron men in Ireland in the 20th century. And they'd say, oh, there are no gay people in Ireland. Or, or where would you find those people? Right. Like they're echoing the same kind of sentiments that 19th century British news or Irish newspaper nationalist newspaper editors were. Were saying on the pages during the Home Rule movement, Right. That that same sex acts would be the last crime of which an Irishman would be. Would be convicted, even though they're saying that as an Irishman is being convicted actively of gross indecency or sodomy. So it's just. Yeah, it's. That is the public perception that has persisted in no small part because of that public Persona of Ireland that the state, I think, was trying to facilitate and enact in. In the way that the world perceived Ireland, but also in the way that Irish people perceived Ireland for a really long time. And that's something that I have had to sort of work against in the project, even, even in 2013 when I was in the National Archives. And I'm pulling all these gross indecency court records and the people who are the wonderful people at the National Archives. Right. They've changed so much and there's been a lot of turnover in their staffing. But in 2013, there was a fellow who, who finally asked me, what are you looking for in these court records? He's not opening up, he's not flipping through what I'm, what I'm looking at. I said, I'm looking for men who had sex with men. And he just sort of gave me the biggest eyes I'd ever seen. And then he backed away slowly and then we didn't chat much for the rest of that research trip. So I think that's. And he was from court or he was from Galway, you know, could hear it in his accent. And I think that he, like a 50 year old, 55 year old man, represented a lot of that, that public self perception that Irish people have had. And that's obviously changed a lot in 10 years. And thank goodness for it. For between marriage equality and, and so of the opening of Ireland in a way that, you know, we talk about maybe the 1990s was this opening, but I think really 2015, 2018, that this has been a much more recent process and there's a lot, there's a lot of really positive reception now for my work and that's really exciting.
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Aidan Beatty
Sure. So as you mentioned, like there's these court records that you're drawing on quite a bit. And a lot of the book is about is using those kind of like Stace documents and documents produced by the police, by the Gaudi, by the Irish police, who are involved in a lot of surveillance of queer men. So what do these sources that they produced, what can they tell us? What can they not tell us about what it meant to be a same sex desiring man in say the 1930s or up until the 1950s or 60s?
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Deborah / Averill Earls
Yeah. I mean, they can only really tell us what they tell us, which is that there were men having sex with men in public spaces in particular in Ireland. That doesn't tell us much about the private experiences of men who had the means and the facilities to have intimate relationships with other men or women with other women. Right. That those are not captured in these court records by any stretch of the imagination. So it really is just evidence that the intimacy is there. What I think I have tried to do in reading between the lines of the court records, in sort of teasing out those snippets of what seemed like real emotion in testimonies and depositions from particularly the men who've been arrested and charged and put on trial, is the sense of senses of self sense of seeking connection and not wanting to be punished for it. And in many cases, some, you know, some men didn't really see what they were doing as a problem. Right. They weren't hurting anyone. So why would what they're doing in these spaces be problematic? On the other hand, there are men who obviously knew that what they were doing was illegal because they say, I'll lose my job if anyone finds out about this. My family will be so angry. That is also captured in those records. And that's the heartbreaking stuff, which is this book is, in many ways, I've tried to tell a story of love in the lab, but there's a lot of really hard moments, I think, to reckon with for me as a historian, obviously, much more so for those individuals who were affected by the laws and the policing and the sort of. I don't know how to say this, the. It's not a true belief system. Right. Like what we're seeing is the sporadic attempted eradication of public, of the visibility of queer men. It's so disingenuous, I think, from the state that they're pretending that Ireland is this pure Catholic, sexless nation. And they're trying to enforce that again sporadically through policing spikes. But they don't actually believe that, obviously, or they would have tried a lot harder, and they could have tried a lot harder.
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Aidan Beatty
And I think there are. I mean, it's quite clear reading the book, that you have a very strong sense of ambiguity about these files, because on the one hand, they do, you know, they are produced for very nasty reasons and coercive and repressive reasons, and yet they are one of the few avenues we have into actually uncovering the lives of these men. And yet there's also this curious thing that you expose and talk about quite a bit, that the surveillance itself waxes and wanes. And could you tell us a little, why do you think that is? Why is it that at some moments the state is really invested in sort of capturing these men and other times it seems not to care at all?
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Deborah / Averill Earls
Yeah, I think it really comes down to shifts in the political landscape of Ireland and, you know, the shift from into Fianna falls power in the 30s, and the sort of way that Eamon de Valera comes in with an intention to remold Ireland, Ireland into this really sort of repressed moral, quote, unquote society, and that that trickles down through the individuals who he appoints into the Guardi. And also then in the 1950s, you know, I think that there's A sense perhaps within the police force and less so even from the government itself to respond to critiques of the Guardi and the Guarda for their, you know, seeming. I mean, they're obviously overstretched, they're underpaid, they're understaffed, they're expected to do ridiculous things like collect the census data and check on new welfare checks and, and also patrol and prevent crime and investigate crime. Right. All of these things. And so I feel like the 1950 stakeout in at Beresford Lab was an opportunity for them to say, you know, if we had money and if we had, if we had resources, look at how we could be really actually eradicating same sex acts if that's what you really wanted, right? And here's the evidence of it. Here's 50 men that we arrested in three months at this one spot in Dublin. Imagine what the rest of what's going on in the rest of the city, right? So I think that there, there are these tense moments between the Guardi and the state and between the state and it's people that come through in these spiked moments of policing and how, and if that's the extent of it or if there just aren't, if some of the records or a lot of the records are just missing, right. There's also the distinct possibility that there are more records that just didn't get preserved in the National Archives. So I can't answer those questions because I just don't have access to them.
- [12:05]
Aidan Beatty
So I might come back to some of these questions you're talking about about surveillance and the legal system and things like that. But just to talk a little bit more about the actual files themselves and the archival sources you're using, if there was this assumption that none of this could have ever happened, how did you actually find these files? Or did you go in thinking, well, there must be some place where what we today would call homosexuality is being discussed in some way, or we can find evidence of it.
- [12:32]
Deborah / Averill Earls
Yeah, I mean, I started with Occasions of Sin. Dermot Ferriter's book obviously is the sort of sweeping history of sex in 20th century Ireland. And he references and uses what are now outdated reference files for court records existing in the National Archives. So I went there, I tried to track down a lot of his leads where he mentions homosexuality and same sex desire in his book. Some of them turned up nothing, right. Like either he, he, he, his citations are being, have been changed and they don't exist anymore under those catalog numbers or, or they never, you know, maybe he has them in a personal collection that no one else has access to, which. Good for him. But at least for the court records, that was sort of. I knew they existed even if they. If I couldn't pull them under the call numbers that he provided. So I went to the National Archives and I searched through the prison rolls and then through the. The. They preserved the prison calendars and I looked for every instance of gross indecency and sodomy and indecent assault. A lot of those were obviously not men having sex with adult men or 15 and up men, which is what I ended up focusing on in the book. There were, you know, rapes and, and assaults of children. And so I weeded those out. I collected them, but weeded them out in the end of the data collection process. And. Yeah, and they. Some of them are just like two pages of a Garda statement and the prison, like who's sitting on the jury at the time. And that's it. And others are pages and pages and pages of witness testimonies, investigative guardi work, and some testimonies from. Or statements from the accused themselves. So those tended to form the basis of the richer case studies that ended up in the book. Although even there, not all, you know, there are more of those richer files than could make it into the book, unsurprisingly. So it's. Yeah, it's been. It was not a fruitless effort. Right. I imagine that many people go to the archive hoping to find something and then finding nothing. I was fortunate that there were at least leads and someone else had written that these existed. I just needed to go track them back down and dig a little deeper.
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- [16:28]
Aidan Beatty
Sure. So you have this, like, relatively developed surveillance culture. It comes in and goes out at certain times. How did men themselves, same sex, desiring men, actually navigate this? What ways did they find to evade it? How do you deal with this if you are a queer man in the 1940s or 1950s in Dublin?
- [16:49]
Deborah / Averill Earls
Yeah, I mean, I feel like the court records themselves suggest that lots of men just evaded. Right. Like there's clearly. If in one summer in 1950, in one laboratory, 50 men were caught from regular police surveillance, then that would mean that there should be thousands of case files if surveillance was as strict as it could have been. So instead, obviously, men are just going to these places, talking amongst each other. You know, there are examples of, in the early 1930s and late 1927 or 1920s, entrapment files of guard guards who would talk to the person that they were trying to, you know, get into a sting operation situation and essentially eliciting information about, oh, where do you meet people? Do you know where to go? Where are the places that you go? So there's that evidence there that this is a conversation that's happening between people who are, who are sort of using the right signs, wearing the right clothes, going to the right places, using the right language. And that that is a secret, hidden queer society in, particularly for men in Dublin. And there are folks who come in from the countryside and, you know, they say things like, oh, you all have it so good here in Dublin. We're always being watched in the country, which is probably true, right, because there's going to be stricter social networks are going to be watching you, your neighbors and your family and whoever's stationed at the local barracks. Whereas in the city there's just so much more, you know, the classic queer city anonymity. Even if you know your neighbors, they don't. They're not watching you as closely because there's less at stake, perhaps in the city and the tenement housing and all that kind of thing.
- [18:47]
Aidan Beatty
And in a lot of this work as well, you draw quite a bit on queer histories in other places, right. In America, Britain, Canada, and as you mentioned, like, Dublin actually can seem almost like a classic example of a city where you can go and Be anonymous and escape. So how does queer male history in Ireland compare and contrast to other places?
- [19:08]
Deborah / Averill Earls
I mean, obviously it's very similar in that at the same time in other places in the English speaking world in particular, same sex sex is being policed and surveilled, right? Like Anna Levosky's book on the vice patrol for the mid 20th century. It's very similar in terms of the surveillance and the way the guards are approaching the work. Matt Holbrook's work on queer lo shows that the entrapment tactics were tested out and abandoned similarly as in Ireland. But what I also find really interesting is sort of at the state level, right? Those countries in some ways started the practice of surveillance of same sex as ari men first, right? Like the laws are changing in Britain and then those get exported to Ireland, right? And the laws are focusing around censorship and then expanding to public spaces in the US and it's more diffuse and it's more state based, but it's still similar. What's interesting about Ireland is that in many ways this free state had choices to make when independence happens in 1922. And the choices that they made were not to abandon or excise the evidence of British law and British perceptions of things like same sex desire. It was to double down because instead they're importing or utilizing this Catholic identity and its sexlessness, allegedly. Although the confession itself is a very sexy place if you look a little closer to shape how Ireland is going to look for the next century or in their, you know, their intention, the next century. And in many ways that replicates not, not even Britain or the US or Canada, but a lot of other post colonial states who are also doubling down, who are saying, oh, homosexuality is an import from this colonizer. So now we have to excise that, not the laws that the colonizer brought in. So it's really interesting to see the difference because of course when Britain was governing Ireland, they didn't care about men having sex with men unless it was direct police reports about child abuse they cared about. They didn't care about whether men were having sex with men. That didn't matter to them unless it impacted their governing. For Ireland, we see that huge spike in comparison, the before and after that comes I think in large part because again, this like perception, what, what we're going to forge Ireland into as a state is going to be this sexless, chaste, clean cities despite the, you know, the, the decay of the tenements and, and the poverty and the suffering, although they do try to clean up some of that as well, in other ways, but nonetheless, yes.
- [22:07]
Aidan Beatty
So what I'm always kind of fascinated about this side of say the history of sexuality in Ireland, although maybe it's true of a lot of places, is that it's not really just about sex. It's about all these much larger questions about identity, about class, about religion. And you end your book with this very curious man called Michal Mackleomar, who is still a fairly well known person in Ireland. And he reveals a lot about this, about what you can get away with and can't get away with, about how sex actually works and what it's bound up with in 20th century Ireland. So can you tell us a little bit about him and about Hilton Edwards, his partner?
- [22:47]
Deborah / Averill Earls
Yes, his life partner of 50 something years. Yeah. So I think, and I chose to end the book with Mackley Moore in sort of contrast to Ronald Brown. Right. Because Ronald Brown is also a middle class man, a public figure, but ends up losing his job and fleeing the country. Effectively not because there's any evidence that he was forced out, but I think he was probably really embarrassed when he got caught involved with a 17 year old rent boy, basically Leslie Price. And so he's the example of when who and when the bounds of this sort of respectability politics could be stretched. And he obviously went a step too far by being connected to the wrong person and being a member of the government. Whereas Macklemore and Edwards were artists. Yes. And in many ways that allowed them to present a sort of chaste kind of queerness to the world. Right. They weren't kissing or holding hands in public, obviously. And they certainly weren't. There was, there's no evidence that they were hooking up with men in public laboratories like many of the working class fellas that are involved in the case studies that I found. But they're certainly quite clearly and known to all their friends and known even to members of the government as queer men, as men who have sex with men. They even have, you know, like one of their younger lovers living with them for a time in a little throuple in Dublin, in Harcourt Terrace. So there is this clear distinction for what it means to be queer and that's wrapped up in class and depending on your means and your ability to sort of walk that line of access to your desire and how it is then perceived by the public gave them a lot of protection. And I think it's not just because they were in theater, I think, although that is a common, a common way that Irish people sort of Talk it away. Like, oh, of course Macklemore and Edwards were gay, they were in the theater, so that's fine. But I've had a few conversations with men who were living together and, and, and, and lovers for 50 years as well. And they say, oh, well, we were part of the art scene too. I worked in marketing and I do portraits. And so that somehow they're like middle class identities, almost gave them expanded the boundaries of what artistic meant. Right. And that's, I think, more common. And those are the stories that really, in many ways I don't have access to yet. Right. Because I started with the court records and there's enough there for a book. But what I'm really hoping for out of this book is that the court record is not the end of this work and I don't even have to be the one to do it. It just needs to be the start, right, that this is going to open up conversations around Ireland to invite people to say yes, okay, now we can acknowledge that Uncle Leroy or whatever was gay. And yeah, we have this box of his stuff moldering. Let's give it to our local archive and let them know that we think that he was one of these and his story needs to be told too. That's the end goal really. And that's, I think in many ways Macklemore and Edwards. Theirs were the last records that I found in the research for this book. I found them in 20, 23, 10 years after I started the project. Their letters were just sitting in the National Library for decades and they're so full of love and sweetness and like the pitter patter of, of normal fights that couples have, that it was just, that was the breakthrough moment for me as like this project finally has some clear evidence of love that I don't have to comb through and read between the lines and try and pull something out that who knows if it's even there? That was, that's what, that's what they represent to me more than anything is the clear and present Love demonstrated between two people who share a life together for 50 years in a place that allegedly didn't welcome them.
- [27:32]
Aidan Beatty
So that question of what can you know and what can you not know and what kind of records can you actually get versus what will just always be unavailable to you for whatever reason. That sort of hangs over the book quite a bit. And you're quite, quite open about that and quite pragmatic about it. And you start by saying early in the book that this is solely going to focus on Dublin and solely focus on men for those pragmatic reasons that these are the people you can actually get some level of evidence about. And I'm kind of wondering if I could ask you a number of connected kind of speculative questions. Could you make a kind of an educated guess as to what would lesbian life have looked like, what would a rural queer life have looked like, or what would a trans life have looked like in, in the same period?
- [28:20]
Deborah / Averill Earls
Yeah. So let's start with women. Depends on again, class. Class status is what matters for women. I think it was probably not too hard for a lot of women to just live together because of course there's marriage crisis, there's housing crises. So I think that a lot of women at all classes were sharing lives together. But the expectation, particularly in Dublin for young working class women was you live with your family until you get married and then you move out of the house and you live with your husband. So there's a little bit less perhaps of working class women who are born in Dublin for them to perhaps engage in relationships like we would see, perhaps with upper class, elite women, middle class women who had more of those opportunities. And Mary Magaliffe is doing some really great work on those sort of middling and up women in Dublin and in the nearby towns and counties. In the rural, again, the class is going to be essential because the focus on brothers and sisters just living together and working in farms for their entire lives, whether or not that's what they wanted, whether or not they wanted to marry or not marry or if they could. And so there's those pressures, particularly in this impoverished, continuing to be agricultural society well into the 1960s Ireland, those expectations, those economic constraints were likely shaping a lot of queer life in both rural and urban Ireland. I think though, that likely a lot of lesbian women left because they could experience both social, familial and economic freedom in the, you know, the women's boarding houses in London, in New York City, in Boston, in Chicago. And I expect that future work in oral histories and digging into some of those, call them immigrant archives will turn some of that up for sure. And I'm hoping that will happen for, for trans people. I imagine that there is perhaps more flexibility depending on where you are and who knows you and what they're willing to accept. I think in the north, right, like Tom Humas found that in quite the opposite to what the Free State and the Republic experienced, families often overlooked queer indiscretions of their children, particularly the men, and just sort of folded them back in, despite other potential factors like sectarian violence and all of that. So there's potential there that it depends on who your family is and what part of Ireland you're living in and what the community is willing to accept. Although starting at least in the 1930s. You know, I'm. My next project is current project is I'm trying to investigate this, the role of psychiatry in Sexuality in 20th Century Ireland. And I found in Grange Gorman in a, you know, I've been looking at 1930 to 1950 in the mental hospital, this is the public hospital in Dublin and I found one person who was committed for sexual delinquency basically. But their, the evidence of their mental illness was that they had secondary sex characteristics, which reads to me as perhaps intersex or transing gender in some way. So there's, there's that possibility too, right, like that people are being committed to asylums if they're seen as problematic. Certainly women were being committed to asylums and also particularly Magdalene laundries if they were seen as being indiscreet by their families, by the guardian, by their priests. And that was all too common. And we may never know because we would need the Magdalene the Church to hand those records over to the public, which not in my lifetime probably.
- [32:56]
Aidan Beatty
So I'm not surprised at all to hear that you're continuing to work in this area. I think as you've alluded to yourself, your book as well as just being a quite solid coherent piece of work in and of itself, it opens up all these questions about what more can we find, what more can we know. It is a really great book and I strongly recommend people check it out. Love in the Social Biography of Same Sex Desire in Ireland is at Howard Temple University Press. Dr. Earls, thanks so much for talking to us.
- [33:24]
Deborah / Averill Earls
Thanks so much for having me.
- [33:38]
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- [33:51]
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