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Páraic Kerrigan, "LGBTQ Visibility, Media and Sexuality in Ireland" (Routledge, 2020)
01:13:37
An interview with Páraic Kerrigan
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Commercial Narrator
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Para Kerrigan
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- [01:35]
Avril Earls
Hello friends and welcome to New Books in Irish Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Avril Earls and I'll be your host for this episode. Today we'll be talking to Para Kerrigan in his new book ish newish book LGBTQ Visibility, Media and Sexuality in Ireland. Parents Park Carrie, welcome to the show.
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Para Kerrigan
Thanks so much for having me. Avril. It's my pleasure.
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Avril Earls
I'm really excited to be able to chat with you after so many weeks of these sort of email correspondences. I wonder if you could begin by telling us a little bit about yourself.
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Para Kerrigan
Absolutely. So I am a assistant professor at University College Dublin where I research and lecture in the areas of digital media research, theory and practice, the digital self, about new and emerging technologies and data cultures, but also specialize in my own particular research interests which is sexuality studies in queer theory, particularly as that intersects or relates to queer Irish culture. So that's particularly where my my passion lies and what has driven this book especially. So that's kind of where I've come from and that's kind of what I do.
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Avril Earls
Wonderful. And I think we can just dive right in here. You propose a really interesting framework, I think, for examining queer visibility in media studies that diverges a little bit, I think, from the norms of the field. Would you just tell us a little bit about that?
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Para Kerrigan
Absolutely. So the norms of the field have tended to be in terms of looking at surveying media and looking and examining and scrutinizing the archive and reclaiming the archive to a degree, to find out where we were. And oftentimes theories, research, and the literature tends to focus on the representational dynamics. And that is a really crucial and important thing that we need to focus on. Because representation, as we know, even in our contemporary era, with streaming technologies and new and emerging ways in which we can consume media, representation has a particular power, particularly powerful role in how particularly minority groups can self identify and relate to each other. However, when we discuss representation, it is often without the broader context. And that's kind of where my framework with the book comes in, because I actually began this book in the realms of a positive versus negative visibility dynamic. And that kind of brought me down to a very limited rabbit hole where I couldn't really get out of. And from that, it was actually quite an interesting learning curve where the power of images, particularly with minority groups such as the Irish queer community, cannot easily be divided into positive versus negative. But that is a broader cultural trend and broader dynamics that are shaping those representations. So with that, then, I fostered a new and emerging field within media studies, and queer media studies itself referred to as queer production studies. So what queer production studies is, it's a derivative. Not even derivative. It's a subsection of production studies which seeks to use social science methods in the media industry to go beyond, I suppose, what appears on camera to look at the production dynamics, the decision making processes, the hiring practices, who is working behind the camera, how the media works, what is the political economy of what happens behind the camera to produce what appears on screen. So once I did that, that was kind of like opening up a white rabbit that I was chasing through Wonderland, as it were. So I was kind of through the looking glass with regards to my own particular project. And I'll speak to this in a number of examples as we go. But it enabled me to go beyond the textual analysis. I was enabled to interview, for example, producers, writers, LGBTQ activists that were involved on the ground with the movement to obtain really crucial images and really crucial moments of visibility on screen that changed a lot of people's lives. So it told a much more complex and nuanced story. And I suppose that's why in a very long winded way, I chose this framework of looking beyond representation and looking at the varying factors such as the legal context for queer people, the industrial context in terms of media for queer people, and the broader socio cultural context.
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Avril Earls
Yeah, I think as a historian myself, it really spoke to me in a way that's different than most media studies books that I've encountered. So I really, really appreciate the dynamic elements of this book and thinking about that sort of negative portrayal. You open the first chapter with the horrific murder of Declan Flynn, a queer bashing victim in Fairview Park, Dublin, which was perpetrated by five young men in 1982. So will you tell us a little bit about why you ch that story to begin with and how this intro chapter sort of frames the rest of the book?
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Para Kerrigan
Absolutely. So as a young gay man myself, and as I kind of, as I said to you just there, April, when I kind of found that white rabbit that I was kind of chasing through queer Irish history, just to kind of start at the, at the beginning perhaps when I was a PhD student, I kind of, as I was becoming more comfortable with my sexuality, I wanted to kind of look towards my queer lineage. Because as queer people, the history isn't embedded within our mainstream narratives. We have to go looking for it and we have to go foraging within the archives, within the cracks, to see where it was we have come from and who our elders are and what our community is and where they were. So when I began this project and when I began this whole genealogical impulse to see where our community came from, how do we get to where we are? And I began this project pre marriage equality. So like it was a very particular, turbulent time in 2013, 2014, when I started beginning this and pantygate in particular was just happening on the customer me starting that which we get into in a while, but I came across the murder of Declan Flynn and I kept coming back to it. And not that it's the first moment of a very public queer instance happening within the news reportage or even within the gay community itself, but it served as a moment that represented the ways in which Irish society vilified, abused any number of words I can come up with here completely the climate of criminality that was in place at the time for the community under the. The hangover of the Victorian morality legislation from the British colonial government that was still there. So the climate of criminality was still there. There was an endemic homophobia on the streets of Dublin and across Ireland at the time that manifested in these queer bashing incidents that led to the death of Declan Flynn. And the fact that these five young men who perpetrated this horrific, brutal crime were let off on suspended sentences, with the judge declaring this as not being considered as murder. That just represented the value that queer people had in Irish society at that time. And this served as an important cultural touchstone for. Which is why I begin the book with this moment. Because the murder of Declan Flynn, on the one hand, shows the brutality and the reality and the gritty reality of being queer in Ireland at this time, but it also shows the vivaciousness, the tenacity, the righteous anger and the rightly modulated anger of the community when they said, no more, enough is enough. And it has become known as Ireland Stonewall for varying different reasons. This was the tinderbox that erupted in fire. And this is why it chooses as the moment. Because for the first time, the community angrily begins to speak back to the state, saying, this is not acceptable. And not only are they speaking back to the state, they're speaking directly to the media. They're beginning to make networks with press. They're beginning to make networks or chorale, rte, the public service broadcaster, to give coverage to this event. And they want to generate this visibility to, on the one hand, show other queer people in Ireland that, yes, we exist, but also to say enough is enough, and we want to use media activism as one of an important arm of our liberation strategy for the emancipation of queer people in Ireland. So there's varying reasons as to why Declan Flynn is there, but also I think it's just really important that we commemorate Declan Flynn and that Declan Finn, whenever we have any discussion of queer Irish history, is mentioned. And he is such an important, crucial figure that still hangs over this and has empowered in his death, he has rested in power and has empowered generations beyond him. And I think it's really important that this book is an intergenerational piece as well. Okay. It's kind of looking at historical media, but it's also hoping to impart some knowledge to new generations as well as remind people who lived through these times, which I didn't live through. So I spoke to many people who didn't live through these times. So it's an intergenerational piece as well. So to remember the man that it was as he was.
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Avril Earls
Yeah, absolutely. And the obviously, the suffering that queer men in particular throughout the 20th century experienced under the criminal laws. And I think those same sex desiring men were put sort of through a ringer when their gross indecency trials were published in newspapers throughout the 20th century. You rightly pointed out that there were very. There's very little in the way of televised media coverage. So what were the most important media moments for queer Ireland before 1980? Because we see this big shift and we'll talk about the big shift in the 1980s. But what were those earlier moments and why were those moments important? Important.
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Para Kerrigan
So to begin, that kind of speaks to the first chapter of the book, which is titled Respectively Gay. And it's titled Respectively Gay for a very particular reason. And I'm sure we'll perhaps poke or poach at the dynamics of respectability as we go, but we begin pre 1980s with a very particular motivation. So as a result of a wave of new social movements sweeping across Europe, particularly Western Europe, and not to mention the Stonewall riots in the U.S. which occurred in 1969, and not to mention that Stonewall is be all and end all of queer liberation. We have to also remember in the ways in which we commemorate, there's the Compton Cafeteria riots, a series of riots across LA that had trans people front and center of this. And it's quite. We might get into a conversation later April in the ways in which, you know, these historical narratives become dominated by the G and the link of our community and our acronym, but rather at the very forefront of what actually purported and began the movements. It was our trans brothers and sisters that were really at the front and the center that engendered the angry activism that we became familiar with. But we. That's. Perhaps I digress and if I do digress, bring me back to the main point. But as a result of Stonewall being a touchstone. It was a touchstone so we can give it that. It engendered and became this symbolic synecdoche for the Irish community in which they said, so that's happening in the us There are some movements towards progress. The UK has the Gay Liberation Front and a few other movements beginning to happen. So with that, then Senator David Norris, Edmund Lynch, Bernard Keogh formed the Irish gay rights movement in 1974. This came off the back of the sexual liberation movement, which is part of a conference in Trinity College in 1973, the year prior. So with the founding of the Irish gay rights movement, deliberately at the very get go, the media was a deliberate target for how they would progress the agenda of gay rights. Because for one, they recognized that Ireland had a scarce media environment. So in the 70s and the 80s, even to the 90s, we are in what John Ellis refers to as the era of scarcity. And with the era of scarcity, it essentially means that the options that we have for consuming media are so few that we have no other choice but to watch one or two or three channels. So there was an opportunity here to reach huge swaths of people. And this is going like audiences are now so fragmented across, across channels, platforms, streaming platforms, YouTube, TikTok. That was not the case back here. We corralled around particular centralized mainstream media forums and television was one. And in Ireland, television was the biggest media form throughout the period of the book that I discussed, 1974 to 2008. So they deliberately wanted to target television and the press to engender and to change the stereotypes around gay men. David Norris and Edmund lynch have referred to the stereotypes being a trench coat wearing elderly man looking to purvey amongst younger boys and the pedophile trope that kind of has emerged weirdly in our antifa rhetoric and whatnot with the far right. But that's again a different story. The eternal recurrence of the stereotypes, as it were. But what happens then in the 70s is as a result of Edmund Lynch. Edmund lynch was very strategically placed within the Irish gay rights movement because he was a producer in rte, he was a sound man. So this was really important because this placed him really close to the gatekeepers and the editors that could give the green light to enabling queer people to appear on shows or to commission shows dedicated to queers. So with that, Edmund lynch and anyone who knows Edmund who listens, knows that he is a very consistently. What's the best word to describe him? He will not take no for an answer. He is tenacious in his approach to getting things done and generally will always get his own way in the end. So he consistently pestered his colleagues in rte until in 1975, a sympathetic member of the RTE staff who was sympathetic to the Irish gay rights movement and queer people more broadly, agreed to have Senator David Norris appear on Last House, which was a summer magazine program that was broadcasting at the time. So that became the first ever appearance of a gay person on Irish television. And of course, the very first question put to David Norris on that show by the presenter on are homosexuals sick people? So from that very first question posed to a gay person on Irish television, it became clear that sexuality and gay sexualities in particular were embroiled in pathological stereotypes. And Pathological rhetoric. And with that, then what emerges is the movement has to disassociate or devolve these associations with this pathological rhetoric. So on these early appearances, from that first appearance on Last House, the movement fosters a deliberate mainstreaming, respectable strategy. So why, why they chose this was because they wanted to show broader Irish audiences that gay people are just like you. And they wanted to foster this aura of homonormativity of its time to a degree where they would replicate the standards of heteronormativity. So gay people can form into familial units. We have, you know, couples who live in nice homes and kitchens, and we bake bread and we have cups of tea, which became the structuring force behind the second appearance of a queer couple in 1980. Whereas Arthur Leahy and Laurie Steele appeared, who lived in Cork, appeared in an RTE show week in to demonstrate what life was like to live in Ireland under the climate of criminality as an out gay couple. So respectability was an important governing force during this period. But not only that, the last point, I'll. I'll kind of say in this April, is much of this programming was confined to current affairs. So this meant that queer people were not allowed onto entertainment programming or. Or even the chat shows at some point. And interestingly, at the start of this period in the 1970s, David Norris approached RTE producers who were in charge of Glen Roll. So Glen Rowe was, I suppose, how do I make the comparison? The Dallas of Ireland, maybe at the time, it was a rural soap opera that broadcast every week on Sundays. And David Nora said, what better way to improve attitudes towards the queer community than to have one of the main cast come out or to write in a gay character. But when he proposed this to the colleagues in the writers room, he was laughed out of it. So this very much symbolized the fact that queer people were going to be confined to news and current affairs programming. And the reason for that was purely because it was made out to be a current affairs issue because of the climate of criminality and the laws that were in place at the time.
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Avril Earls
Yeah. And so since sex between men continued to be criminalized throughout the 1980s, and obviously with the oppressive Irish regime surrounding women, lesbians were also largely invisible in Ireland up to this point. So the. But we experienced this shift nonetheless in the 1980s. So in what ways did media coverage of LGBTQ people change in the 1980s?
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Para Kerrigan
So we see significant change very simply because we actually, for the first time, see lesbians emerge. God forbid, lesbians. But they were There from the start of the movement. And again, this comes down to one of the key arguments of the book, that when we talk about the story of queer visibility in Ireland, often by what we mean, true queer is gay. Because much of the book, the examples and the materials that I looked at is gay. And to a lesser extent, I do point out, lesbians do emerge in this narrative, but deliberately so, they're left out. This comes down to a number of reasons. For one, we've discussed already the climate of criminality. It criminalized gay men. This obfuscated women from the picture, despite the fact that that many lesbians were significant allies in that fight for the campaign for decriminalization and have since not necessarily gotten as much recognition as they have should, as they should have even for their fight for that alongside us. Not only that, it also shows that media institutions were misogynistically only interested in the male experience, as tends to be with media institutions. So with that we see lesbians once again being left out of the force. Then oftentimes misogyny within the community ensured, and I'm talking about the gay community here, ensured that lesbians were also left out of the picture consistently. But what we see to happen in the 1980s is that the diversity of visibility does begin to become more contoured with new faces, new people and new kinds of sexualities. So what we see in 1980 then is the shift happens when on the one hand, we see lesbians emerge. So in 1980, in the late Late show, we see Joni Crone appear, who is the first self declared Irish lesbian. And Joni Crone, if anyone has met her, is absolutely fabulous and a stalwart of queer activism in Ireland. But what happens on the Late Late show then is the treatment of women versus gay men on television is significantly different. Joni is subjected to misogynistic tropes consistently, and sensationalistic tropes to a great degree. And this happens with the lesbian nuns. Later in 1985, the chapter explores, but Joni is asked, is her sexuality a result of a unwanted sexual encounter with a man? So a sexual assault? Because all sexualities are a formation of sexual assault, as inferred by the presenter. Did she choose this lifestyle? Is she butch? Does she go around like a ravenous wolf? All of these misogynistic terms used to confer the sensationalistic framework on a woman. But also there's this compulsory heterosexuality as theorized by Adrienne Rich in in her book on heterosexuality. But what we see here is that the Terms in which a lesbian comes out on national television then becomes conferred in, well, what about children? Do you not grieve the fact that you will never be a mother? And what about, you know, family? And what about homemaking? And all of these issues become discursive sites by which the woman, and the lesbian woman in particular becomes shaped. So that's one of the shifts that we begin to see that the treatment of lesbian visibility is significantly different. But what we also begin to see then is on the one hand, in chapter two, with regards to the early appearances of gay men on current affairs television, this was for the liberatory, even potential of achieving more social recognition, proving that gay people exist and reaching out to other queers in the country to show that there are communities there for them if they so wish to choose to join them. Whereas the media cooperate on that front when they get to chapter three, particularly with the Late Late show, which at the time was Ireland's largest chat and entertainment show, it would regularly bring in over 1 million viewers a week on Saturday nights. What we see here is this really sensationalistic, televisual, sensationalistic framework being co opted. So they would deliberately co opt queer identities to boost the ratings, kind of similar to what happens in the US particularly with Ellen's first kiss during sweeps week and whatnot. They would often use sexuality for the monetary gain of getting more audiences so they can get more money and funding from advertisers during the ad breaks. And the production team, and my interviews with members of that production team said to me that if they were having a dry week on the Late Late show, in terms of filling the schedule as who would be the guests, who would be the entertainment? Many have said that if it was a dry week, they'd say, well, there's always good mileage and sex and sexuality, so let's maybe make that an issue. So what you often began to see then was on the Late Late show this televisual sensationalistic framework being used to co opt queer identities in a way that put them in these really problematic terms. So it completely went against what the movement was trying to do. So this gets to the core of my argument of the book in that queer visibility is a tug of war. Queer history, history in general is not a simple linear narrative from progress to liberation. But queer history in particular is certainly not that, and especially when we're talking about visibility. And it comes back to what I said at the start with you, April. In terms of positive versus negative, that's far too simplistic. It's too binarized, it's more complex, it's more nuanced. History is very much the same. So what we see constantly, consistently throughout queer media history in Ireland and its relationship with queer Irish culture is that it's a tug of war between media activists and the institutions. The institutions which have different vested interests, oftentimes they're economical, whereas with the community, it's trying to ascertain visibility for social justice, human rights and whatnot. So that's what the shift happens. In this chapter and in this part of the book, we begin to see how visibility becomes a tug of war because of the economic intentions or the economic currents that undergird and define media institutions in Ireland, but also the social justice agenda that many within the Irish gay civil rights movements had throughout this era.
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Commercial Narrator
This is a real good story about Bronx and his dad Ryan. Real United Airlines customers We were returning.
- [25:29]
Para Kerrigan
Home and one of the flight attendants asked Bronx if he wanted to see the flight deck and meet Kath and Andrew.
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Avril Earls
I got to sit in the driver's seat.
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Para Kerrigan
I grew up in an aviation family and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of of myself when I was that age.
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Commercial Narrator
That's Andrew, a real United pilot.
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Para Kerrigan
These small interactions can shape a kid's future.
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Avril Earls
It felt like I was the captain.
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Para Kerrigan
Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever. That's how good leads the way this.
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Para Kerrigan
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Avril Earls
Cmnobile.com you you also have pretty clever chapter titles here and I wanted to just draw attention to this one which was 50 Shades of Gay. So obviously that's a play on these sort of. Well, there's a lot of mass, well, misogyny in this chapter with with the letters that were written about the both Tony and or Joanie and the Lesbian Nuns. But tell me a little bit about how you came to that title and sort of what it's drawing on from this chapter.
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Para Kerrigan
So, yeah, that's a title I'm particularly proud of. So thanks for asking me about that. So, again, the answer is quite nuanced. So the actual presenter of the Late Rachel, his name was Gay Byrne and he was a very famous person in Ireland. And on the one hand, 50 Shades of Gay attest to the ways in which Gay Byrne approached sexuality on the show. So Gay Byrne wasn't just a presenter of this show, he was also the driving force as the producer for over 40 years. So he was really central to the dynamics, the structure, the production, the reception and the broadcasting of this enterprise, this huge cultural institution in Ireland. And he approached each different case differently and there was a different, to be literal, shade of him in every single interview. And I think that kind of attests to the fact that, you know, trying to fit into the whole 50 Shades of Gay argument. But also there was never, you know, a consistency with regards to the ways in which queerness was mediated on the Late Late show other than for the economic gains. But the tenet of the interview or the message of the interviews or the use of it was always very different. And there's a shift even within the 1980s with regards to community. The community becomes really aware of the structures of the Late Late Show. So the Irish gay civil rights movement, it's very well aware that this is the juggernaut of Irish media, that if we can get onto this show and get our message out, we will convince a lot of people to our cause. And this happens later in the book with the soapbox debate in 1988. So just to give some context to that soapbox debate from 1980, or that was in 1988. Yes, sorry, apologies. Just to give some context of the soapbox debate in 1988, the criminal laws to David Norris's campaign for homosexual law reform, which went through a series of Irish High Court and Supreme Court judgments, ended up in the European Court of human rights in 1988, of which European Court said that the laws in Ireland were unjust and Ireland needs to change the laws. So as a result, the Community in Ireland felt that while there was the legal process that found a just answer, the conversation never happened publicly. And that while legally things may have changed, we also need to bring people along with us with that change because we need the support of them and we need the backing of them. So they approached RTE and they originally wanted to go on to Today Tonight, which was a primetime current affairs show, they said no. But subsequently the Late show approached them. So by this stage, the Irish gay civil rights movement and Glenn, which was the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network and the movement at the time, the centralized activist body, they were well aware of the structure, of how the late Litzhow attempted to manipulate the agenda, how they would plant people in the audience to ask questions, and how they tended to set it up as a gladiatorial contest between an extreme position on the right wing versus the gays trying to defend their agenda and their existence. So they were well aware of this. So from that they cleverly sought media training from a PR company. They deliberately placed through their links in RTE sympathetic people in the movement, in the audience who could counteract anyone that comes in. And they essentially played the Late Late show production culture at its own game. So what we see happening here is that the community in this tug of war of visibility becomes aware of the terms of play, the power play that's at work here. And as a result they say, right, well we'll come to the masters table, will use his tools to destroy the table. So with that, they emerge as the victors in this argument, in this debate, because they have so strategically placed and even in this interview they have shifted Gabe Ernes opinion by the end of it. So what we're seeing is even 50 shades of gay in terms of how the community has transformed their politics and their media activism and how they approach a production culture. And production cultures are really important in this book. And that's just an example of how the community just really became media savvy and how they approached oftentimes a homophobic process of production.
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Avril Earls
That's really interesting. And I'm actually interviewing Sonia Tiernan about her marriage equality book later this summer. And I think this is true of the Irish gay rights book movement into the 21st century, right? With the marriage equality. They're very savvy with media. They turn to the social media, which you don't get into very much. You stop right before that, that boom. But you, you comment on it. I think that's very, a very astute observation.
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Para Kerrigan
And yeah, even with that, just on that point, you see these like, albeit social media, it's a different beast and it's got its own dynamic that's very specific infrastructures and it's a lot more complex networks and whatnot. We see similar narratives emerge in 1988's debate in the Late Late show and that social media campaign for, yes, equality in 2015, we see storytelling and people telling their own stories as being a really important discursive means of trying to change minds, change opinions, getting people to come out to family members. Because coming out, it's very hard to discriminate against somebody that you know. And also the use of the Irish mammy. So on that Late show debate, the Irish Mammy, as said by many of my participants, is a very powerful force in Ireland. And, you know, it kind of comes from mother era Yeats and whatnot. But culturally, the mother serves as a really important cultural role, and that's the same for queer cultures. You know, again, motherhood and queer culture is a whole different conversation and has so many variances within it. But in Irish culture in particular, the Irish mother and mother emerges as this really powerful force that shows the old symbolic order that was considered conservative, realigning with new liberal ideals. And that shift that they represent is really important for shifting the audience's minds at home, such as with Phil Moore, who appeared in that Late Late show appearance. She was the head of Parents Inquiry, which was an organization developed and founded to help parents of LGBT children in Ireland, which was inspired by Rose Robertson in the uk, who founded Parents Inquiry in general. But what I'm saying with that is, if you remember, yes, equality mothers coming out in support of their sons, like former President Mary McAleese, in support of her son Justin McAleese, who had just come out as gay. That is a really powerful thing that happens. And you can kind of see, albeit it's in very different media environments, similar strategies emerge and similar states of play emerge.
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Avril Earls
Yeah. And really successfully, too.
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Para Kerrigan
It works.
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Avril Earls
Yeah. Before we get too far from the Late Late show, because I know we'll shift gears to talk about the sort of internally generated media of the Irish gay rights movement, tell me, did you get to interview Gay Byrne? I know he passed away in 2019, but that would have been around the time you were finishing up.
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Para Kerrigan
This was not a major disappointment at the project, but I wrote to Gay Byrne and he, the gentleman that he was, did write back to me and said he was just very sick at the time and that in the meantime, I should contact Edmund Lynch. He had done an interview with Edwin lynch, and he gave me full permission to use that interview in my project. But if he gets better, and I set up that letter somewhere in my file somewhere, because I really treasure. He was so kind of it. But he said, if I get better, let me know. I don't think he came back to radio from that letter, but he at the very least knew about the project and he was interested if his health improved. But at the very least, his words are in the book, in that chapter from Edmund Lynch. And to be honest, in as much as he was playing the role of producer, and as much as he was quite problematic in how he approached this, in the end, he certainly was an ally for the community. As testament from his declaration during the yes Equality campaign.
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Avril Earls
Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. Well, that's. That's something special, certainly.
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Para Kerrigan
Definitely.
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Avril Earls
So, as you said, you. You make this really strong argument about the significance of media to the Irish gay rights movement, which took off in the mid-1980s, but this was also the same period as the global AIDS crisis, which also hit Ireland pretty hard. You know, we don't get a lot of press about it, and there's. There's very recent work being done on it. But in what ways did the AIDS crisis disrupt queer visibility? And then how did the gay rights movement groups face that challenge using media?
- [35:43]
Para Kerrigan
Right. Really interesting question. And just to kind of speak back ever so briefly to what we've just discussed, we've kind of mentioned the tug of war so far in the story of queer Irish visibility. But when we come to the AIDS crisis and the first diagnosis of AIDS In Ireland in 1983, we come to a disruption in that tug of war. And the dynamics of visibility are ever changed. The. The community energy needs to go elsewhere, so. And the community energies kind of split and splinter. So while many were behind the likes of the Hirschville center at the time, which was the community hub in Temple Bar in Dublin, and many were behind the campaign for homosexual law reform and in varying different civil rights movements such as the Dublin Lesbian and Gay Collective, and there was lots of stuff happening in corporate Galway and Limerick. AIDS demanded the community to stand to attention and to channel their energies into really creating resources for a public health need that was being ignored by the government. So it becomes this disruptive force that really demonstrates the power of the community, the energy of the community, the sheer determination and perseverance of the community. Because this is a time when, when AIDS hit Ireland, we see the government sit on its hand, sit on its wallets, refusing to do anything about this. And the community is like. Even though there's similarities between COVID 19 and the AIDS pandemic in that this was an ever evolving crisis and pandemic, that we didn't really understand what this was. The community didn't understand how this was transmitted. So they, as a result of not having any support from government, the Irish community, queer Community itself said, we have to take ownership for ourselves. We need to do something about this. So Gay Health Action was formed as a community group corralled from varying different civil rights groups and actors, and essentially sought to fight the AIDS crisis in Ireland through the dissemination of information, through the generation of links with international contexts, and through securing funding and distributing contraception. So just to get on the point of contraception, when AIDS was beginning to ravage Ireland, what we see is that condoms weren't even legal in the country at the time until 1985 as a result of the Family Law Amendment Act. 1985. We then get condoms being distributed in Ireland only if you were married and only if you had a prescription from your doctor. So with all of these legal frameworks in place to access these simple contracept contraceptives, the community is left very vulnerable. Not only by, you know, a Catholic dogmatic society with a moral habitus and ethos that is very destructive, but you have a government and a structure that isn't even incubating safe sexual. So the community becomes really active and they start generating their own media because they're seeing sensationalism in mainstream press, they're seeing sensationalism on television, aids, death, constantly being on a red top newspaper. They said we need to generate information on our own terms, suited to our needs. So the gay press becomes very much centered around the AIDS crisis and we see the likes of the gay press becoming much more centralized within the community. So we see out magazine emerge as a commercial gay magazine and the first commercial gay magazine of its kind in Ireland. And much of Out's reportage and coverage and journalism was dedicated to transmitting and disseminating AIDS information strategically. The Irish gay rights movement, not the Irish gay rights movement, the National Gay Federation, the Hirschfeld Centre and Gay Health Action. They made strategic links with the likes of the New York Native publication in New York, the Body politic in Canada, to get up to date articles simply on how to use a condom reprinted and reposted into out magazine to disseminate to Irish queers. So what we see is the generation of a queer press, because with a government that's doing nothing and with a press and a national media that's saying nothing, and if they're saying anything, they're saying sensationalistic, vilified things. The community is left to their own devices. So we see the emergence of a queer counterpublic, as that chapter argues in chapter four, where while AIDS has disrupted the standard, the standard of play, as it were, it enables the emergence of a queer counterpublic and a queer network and a media economy within the community itself. And that still transcends to this day. The energy from magazine kind of followed on with many of the people that were involved to the founding of GCN with Tony Walsh and Catherine Glendon in the early. In the, in the early 90s. So what you see then, and that still is Ireland's longest queer running publication and now queer paper of record. So many things came from that moment, but that's one of the things we see. We see queer media emerge as a really, really important infrastructure for the community in terms of maintaining public health standards. And what also happens is queer alliances begin to emerge in documentaries. So many in the community at the time were seeing a US UK centricity to broader representations of aids. There was nothing about Irish people with AIDS on television. So Alan Gilson, a director here in Ireland, he was approached by two friends, basically saying, listen, we are doing AIDS training with doctors, with communities, and there's actually nothing with an Irish voice. Would you produce something for us and get something together? So he started just doing this community project and that eventually began to gather legs. And through the community, it became this documentary that was broadcast on rte, Stories from the Silence. So through this pocket of community activism and through these alliances with queer communities, you see these documentaries beginning to emerge. So we have Stories from the Silence, but also Bill Hughes's Finton. This is a really interesting case because this documentary is centered around gay man Bill Hughes and his friend from his hometown in County Kildare, Thigh Finton Brennan. And Finton was aware of, you know, Bill's career as a, as a producer and whatnot, and said to him, before I die, I want you to record me as I was. I want you to just. And I want you to show that to my family. I want them, my family, to tell you what they thought of me. So Bill did this. And again, it started as just a personal commemorative project about Finton. And from that then Bill got the rushes together and he interviewed the family afterwards and said, there's actually something in this, and went to rte, the independent production unit in RTE at the time. And the independent production unit in RTE just, it was kind of outside of it, but under the structure of the organization. So they had some sort of dispensation and space to be that little bit more, more playful or creative without the structures of the organization saying, we can't do that. Because also during this time, RTE refused to broadcast AIDS adverts at the time. And actually our current President Michael D. Higgins, who was the Minister for Culture Communications and the Whale Talk at the time, said or he demanded that they would, or he would take some statutory action. So he forced him to do so. So fair pay to him. But I digress. So Bill Hughes approached the independent production unit at RTE and he showed it to a friend and colleague there and they said that this is a work of national importance. So all of a sudden then he got funding to turn this project into an hour long documentary for broadcast. So we see these queer alliances happening in the community in which all of a sudden this community activism actually enters mainstream production cultures and takes the shape of a mainstream documentary that really begins to shape. So AIDS becomes disruptive in varying different ways. It's disruptive in the ways in which we interact and the queer community interacted with production cultures, but also how they began to produce their own means of communication. Yeah.
- [43:48]
Avril Earls
So once we get to decriminalization in 1993, obviously there's another shift in terms of representation. But before we get there, obviously the AIDS crisis, this extends into the 90s for Ireland. So do you think that the challenges faced in this later 80s, into the early 90s period because of the AIDS crisis and the gay rights movement and the fight for decriminalization, do you think that impacted the ways that queer media visibility emerged in these sort of fictional televised productions?
- [44:23]
Para Kerrigan
So the ways in which AIDS effective on. Absolutely. We see in the US and the UK what's referred to in the literature and in popular presses as the gay 90s, whereas we see this eruption of paraphernalia broadcasting magazine covers of queer people all over it. Us Weekly. Us Weekly. And lots of magazines having, you know, Ellen's Kiss on front of. Was it People magazine or Us Weekly? Maybe, I'm not too sure. But we see a series of the Gay Kiss and Friends of the Gay Wedding and Friends, Will and Grace. There's this huge in in the UK we have the gay case in Brookside, we have a gay case in EastEnders, these really big soap operas that have millions of viewers, 20 millions of viewers a night. So in Ireland this lags significantly behind and you can actually count on like one hand the amount of appearances in entertainment programming in Irish television we have in the 1990s. I think that's one of the part of a few reasons. One is for sure the criminalization of homosexuality. It's not lifted until 1993 as a result of the FINA fall and labor coalition in the Irish Arachtus. So that's all well and good. So finally, once this happens, finally, once this happens, what we see is that cultural producers now kind of go, okay, now this is fair game to perhaps start incorporating queers into our productions. But also to come back to your original question, yes, AIDS was certainly a specter that haunted the edges of this entertainment programming as well, because it certainly contributed to a lot of shame and stigma. And even to this day, it still does shape much of the discourse that happens, particularly in regards to how we cover it. How prep is covered in Irish press today is very anachronistic. It's very retrograde. It's very much couched in problematic terms. The ways in which HIV rates rising day on day is framed is problematic and couched in problematic terms. Even recently a newspaper outlet in the last number of years suggested that one could transmit HIV through Schmidt. So there's still a lot of work to be done on this. But again, I kind of digress. But so, yes, in the 90s, we see another shift, and this shift sees finally the queers leave the realms of current affairs and they are let into the Emerald city of entertainment programming. So what we see is that pop culture in Ireland begins to materialize. Queers on the sitcom and the soap opera. Now, Ireland, of course, does things backwards. And what happens is, is that in our quest for modernity or a postmodern sexual identity, as it were, we have a. So we have a sitcom called Upwardly Mobile. And the writers of Upwardly Mobile were very conscious. And this is fully available on YouTube for any of the listeners to have a look at all series. I don't know if you've watched any of it, April, but it might be something for you to do after our chat. But fully available on YouTube and watch that sitcom attempted to do was the writers were fully aware that this was a post decriminalization moment. And this kind of chapter is about this post decriminalization moment because many of the actors, the writers, producers involved were aware of that. So that shaped how this was written. But on that, there's a character called Toby o', Driscoll, and Toby is a friend of the main cast who's in every episode. He has an invisible wife who's never seen. He's constantly at a sauna that's only male exclusive. And he's constantly in gile cycling his bike and making innuendos about riding his Brazilian friend Bruno waxing, and how he hates sex with his wife and wishes that she could have surgery to be a man. So lots of these problematic tropes emerge. So Toby never formally comes out of the closet. But Toby is called in his cross queer in the way in which what we see is that he's couching stereotypes such as John Inman's Mr. Humphries in are you being served? And it's very much speaks about his queer sexuality through innuendo and affected feminine gestures, such as a limp wrist or an intonated voice that's very feminine and shrinky. And that's what we get with Toby. And so when I was kind of examining this, I kind of went. And this is when I wasn't doing interviews and fostering these production studies or production methodology or production studies methodologies. So I kind of went. I feel like there's something to that that I'm not getting. There's a part of the puzzle here, but I'm not seeing. So from that, then I interviewed some of the writers who actually said, yes, Toby was gay. We recognize Toby as gay, but we actually had no experience of writing gay characters whatsoever. So we just leaned on what we knew from media and from previous broadcasts. So because they had no legitimacy or they had no literacy with how to write gay characters or gay sitcom characters, they fell on retrograde stereotypes. Similarly, the actor who played Toby, he kind of said, oh, I certainly read Toby is gay. I certainly knew that he was and such. And I was kind of disappointed that the. The character never got to develop fully and he was kind of never really written properly and fully. So that was concern. So what they kind of felt and the sense of that was, was that although we're in the post decriminalization moment, RTE was still too tentative to go all the way with the gay, and they were still too tentative to really demonstrably portray or have a coming out moment at all. So what we see is a very conservative approach to the Irish gay 90s, which is significantly different to what the US and the UK did now. Both the US and the UK are very conservative in how to do things. You know, I think of the gay wedding from Friends, for example, that, you know, while radical at the time, when you watch back and you're kind of going quite conservative and problematic in another respect. So in that sense, conservatism is undergirding this emergence into the entertainment pop culture sphere. But we do get a coming out moment on Cure City, the soap opera. And on verse 80, we see the character on emerge in 1995. He is a guest character on the show. He comes into it solely for the coming out moment and then leaves again, never to be seen, never to be heard of. And then all of a sudden, a number of years later, he comes back, and a number of months later, he comes back into the show as a fully fledged cast member and he is essentially brought in for the gay kiss storyline. So what we're seeing is that the reductive writing of characters becomes centered solely around sexuality. Alan, who played on the show, he noted that when he was cast, he came in for the coming out. Following the coming out, he left the show and was asked to come back again, but this time it was for the gay kiss, and then after that was for the relationship. So he felt that there wasn't an opportunity to develop and write a really believable character, and that his identification on the show was only solely hung around a coat hanger on these gay queer moments, and that there wasn't the space for this character to have a sustainable representational space on Irish television. And he felt that that was really problematic and whatnot. He loved playing the character, he loved the show. What he kind of said that there needs to be more space to actually manifest this in a character. So, funnily enough, then, with regards to the gay kiss, RTE is referred to the gay kiss as this watershed moment that is really significant. That is RTE finally entering the new age of modernity in which they're accepting of diversity, inclusion and equality. And even RTE's most famous show, Reeling in the Years, which is Ireland's most populous popular television show, which is this basically audio visual archival show that's 30 minutes long that looks towards Irish history and whatnot, or of a particular year that has the gay kiss in Fair City. But interestingly, while it's called a gay kiss, on Ireland's first gay kiss, a kiss doesn't happen. It's a near kiss. And there's a very particular production situation that led to that near kiss. What happened was, in the original script, Owen and this character Liam had a kiss in the kitchen and they shared an intimate moment. But then when it came to rehearsing it the day before the shooting of the broadcast version, the kiss was omitted. And then there were promised reproduction. Oh, no, don't worry, the kiss will be back in it tomorrow. So they came in to shoot the episode that would be the version that would go to air. And what happened was that the kiss wasn't in the script. And then Owen or Alan, who was very passionate about his character, Owen, approached the producer and said, I see the kiss is gone. What's the story? Are we doing this or not? And he was essentially told through one way or through the jigs and the reels as it were, that the kiss wasn't happening and that the suits upstairs were concerned about us and that it wouldn't be happening. So Alan kind of said, we're at a really, really important moment here. He says, like Melrose Place are about to do this. We could be on the international scale with Melrose Place. We could really make a mark for ourselves here by doing this. Let's just have the bravery to do this. But no, it wasn't to be at all. And even as he went on, he eventually went got into a relationship with another character later in the series, a few years later, and it was never written into the script that him and his boyfriend would hold hands or kiss, but they would have to put it in themselves through their own kind of mini ways of getting onto camera. And oftentimes it was caught, but sometimes it made it in. And that was their way of strategizing that some sort of gay intimacy made it on screen. So you can see particular modes of regulation, particular modes of tentativeness and conservatism do control the contours of visibility during this period through those particular case studies that I look at. So once again, while we're in this decriminalization moment, April, what we're seeing is that tug of war once again, that while we're making this progress, we're only going to give you that little bit of it. We're going to pull you back a little bit. 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Avril Earls
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- [56:06]
Avril Earls
Yeah, and I One of the, one of the moments in that chapter that really resonated with me was you talked about at least one of the actors who played a gay character, or maybe this is the next chapter. But they essentially had to go on a talk show to assert that they were not themselves in real life. Gay. Right. Like, and that sort of tentativeness is also really startling. Or not maybe not maybe expected, but still sort of feels like a part of that tug of war. Right. A step forward, but then a major step back.
- [56:40]
Para Kerrigan
Absolutely. And this comes down to the institutional treatment of the gay case. So that's when Peter Warnock, the car, the. The actor who played Liam, he appeared on Kenny Live, which was a Saturday night show that went out in RTE. So again, this is all of RTE's own institutional programming promoting this within the era of scarcity. But he's part of this relatively progressive storyline. And I say relatively because we got a near kiss. Like, listen, there's queers on TV in the 90s in Catholic Ireland. It's something. It's not great. It's something, though. So that's me. That's me being blase. But what I mean is Peter Warnock appears on Kenny Live and he's asked by the presenter, you know, it's like a pack. Any opens with this and I have it in front of me here. My next young guest. My next guest is a young man who's created quite a stir once he arrived in Carrick's town. A real sex symbol. The ladies of Karakstown, as well as those at home were knocked out by his good looks. Imagine the shock, though, when he almost got caught in an embrace with Owen, a character who has been acknowledged to be gay. Like, that is the intro that the presenter makes for this character. So already we're on this snooty, condescending footing with the storyline. And then when he comes out, essentially Pat Kenny asks Peter Warnock, and what did your family make of the script? What did they make of the storyline? And then he kind of Just goes, my grandfather just told me to take the check. So literally, he's gay for pay. Think of the check, honey. And I just find that baffling. Absolutely. And I think that's possibly the gayest thing of the whole thing. Right. Or the queerest thing of the whole thing, the gay for pay element. But here we are. And I just feel like, yes, Averill, that completely speaks to that tug of war dynamic that even RT institutionally, which are allowing the case, are actually then throwing out these other dynamics that are completely disrupting the contours of that.
- [58:28]
Avril Earls
Yeah. Oh, what a disappointment to the gay viewers. The young men at home, boys at home.
- [58:32]
Para Kerrigan
Oh, the writers of GC End were furious. The writers of Gay Community News were absolutely. There was one letter that said, oh, come on, we have some gays and tv, let us have a kiss and a shag. Come on. I remember that was a line in one of the. The letters. So the. The community of Ireland were up in arms.
- [58:48]
Avril Earls
Good. But obviously we have some better, greater progress with the Celtic Tiger. Right. The period of economic boom. And I think I'd love you to talk a little bit about how that, that period, that shift in Ireland, socially, economically, politically, maybe shaped queer visibility, particularly on. On these popular television programs, these. Entertainment television.
- [59:13]
Para Kerrigan
Yeah. So I come to chapter six, which is queer visibility, Television, drama and the Celtic Tiger. So that goes from 1999 to 2007. So as you pointed out rightly earlier, I do end the book around this point of 2007, 2008, because if I go any further than this, I can't not look into social media. And that itself becomes its own whole thing with the way in which the networked social media, society and infrastructure interacts with mainstream media. And again, certainly part of a book project for the future. But what this book or what this chapter aims to do is to look at the globalization of queer Irish identity. And it opens up at the coming out of Stephen Gately, who was a member of the Irish boy band Boyzone. Now, I don't think you could think about a gayer name than Boy Zone. Deliberately so now. But. But. And boys on with his edge, for those of you who are not familiar with them, but with this, Stephen becomes one of the first boy band members in the UK and Ireland and Europe to be openly gay. And I think this is a part of George Michael, actually, although I might be standard corrected on that. But this is really significant and important because this puts global Irish queers on a footing internationally and it brings international queer Irishness to the Fore a bit. And that's kind of is my opening salvo to the chapter that represents much of the discourse that comes from this. So the Celtic Tiger is very international in its outlook. It's. It's as a result of international foreign direct investment in Ireland, particularly in the construction industry. And because Ireland's economic system becomes more global and Ireland itself becomes a global site for international business, with the likes of Apple and Amazon and whatnot choosing to locate here. We see a sense of modernity coming to Ireland. And this sense of modernity similarly comes with media. Media significantly changing at the time, the media infrastructure has changed substantially. We now have gone from the era of scarcity to the era of choice. We have satellite television, we have many numbers of channels to choose from. And as a result that puts huge pressure on the likes of RTE in terms of an Irish broadcasters. We have a few new broadcasters such as TV3 emerge and TC Caher at the time. And it puts huge pressure on them to be able to compete with these international broadcasts and broadcasters from the US and the uk. So at the time, shows such as Sex and the City, Willing Grace, Friends, they become Buffy Charmed. These shows become really, really popular in Ireland on Irish channels. We buy them in from the US as foreign imports, but also US and UK channels are here broadcasting them. So Irish networks feel this pressure to keep up with the fashionable, up to date, contemporary quality television as it was at the time. And part of that was whole new tropes of queerness. So queerness then begins to emerge through these shows that are being imported. Irish people are beginning to see gay characters played by Murray Barclays on Sex and the City, for example, or gay storylines of Will and Grace, or as we said, the gay wedding and Friends. And this really becomes a crucial, crucial dynamic in transforming the industry. So we see a swath of new programming emerge that attempts to interact with this. So reality tv, for example, we have the likes of Eurostar, a singing contest, Treasure island off the Rails. These bring in queer presenters and gay presenters and contestants. So there's a whole new emergence of a, I suppose a generation that's more diverse. TV dramas begin to shoot in gay clubs and gay bars. So even the iconography or what Dublin looks like begins to change significantly. It begins to change from the dreary, drab dublin of the 90s and 80s that we see in the likes of the Barrytown trilogy with the Commitments and the Snapper. There's something that's cosmopolitan, global, sexy and cool. So this global cosmopolitanism, sexiness and coolness becomes embedded in TV drama. And I selected the Clinic, which was a Irish variation of, I suppose, Grey's Anatomy. It was a local variation of the medical drama, internationally recognizable, but set in a clinic around a set of characters that are doctors, classic surgeons and nurses and whatnot. And this introduces a character called Alex, who represents this whole new cosmopolitan trans glob, transglobal queer coolness. And he kind of fosters the role of Carson Kressley on Queer Eye from the Straight Guy, in which he dresses up his male colleagues in better clothing. He's the gay best friend for his gay best friend for his female friends in their plight with guys. And he serves as this neoliberal character that's a disciplinary force in the text that teaches all the other characters how to judiciously work on the self and how to consume, how to consume tastefully. So he serves as this very Queer Eye for the Straight Guy role within the show. And this is kind of representative of much of what we see in the US and the UK during this period. This neoliberal citizen that the queer embodies, that they are consumers and purveyors of taste, fashion and class, and that this certainly becomes embodied within this cosmopolitanism. And he is used as a conduit by which we can see this new and emerging goblin. When we're with Alex, we're in an art gallery in the Irish Museum of Modern Art. We're in the George Gay Bar in Dublin, where we're on the streets of some sexy market in Smithfield. So we are at the cusp of this city, which has changed substantially since the 90s. So that's kind of the ways in which we begin to see it emerge. And it kind of really becomes a synagogue or a symptomatic of the Celtic tiger as this Ireland that's now modern, that's changed, that's now all accepting and all in and all, all inclusive of queerness. And that's kind of where the book ends to a degree that this is the moment of, you know, oh, wow, opportunity and liberation. But at the start of that chapter, this is also, in terms of the literature, the most, I suppose, stagnant part of, or the stagnant moment of gay Irish activism or queer Irish activism. Now, towards the end of the 2000s, particularly in 2008, we see the marriage equality movement begin to become mobilized by Catherine Zaporn and. And Weed, Gilligan's case and the Kal case becomes mobilized from 2004 to 2008 into a series of marriage equality movements. And that's kind of where I depart the book into my conclusion then. So that's kind of what happens during the Celtic Tiger era. We become globalized, we become sexy, we become cool.
- [65:53]
Avril Earls
Yeah.
- [65:55]
Para Kerrigan
How great. Obviously, when it's problematic after effects.
- [65:59]
Avril Earls
Yeah, yeah. I mean, and obviously throughout the book, you're touching on moments when parts of Irish queer visibility are globalizing. Right. They're like, seeking out ways to break into and make connections with the international gay rights movement, the international AIDS awareness movement. But, yeah, I think you're right that, that it's when. When Ireland opens its doors, it allows sort of the world to see what Ireland is beyond just this. This narrow vision.
- [66:32]
Para Kerrigan
Absolutely. And just on that point, it's really important to point out that Ireland, in chapter, in chapter six, doesn't just become transglobal and clue and international, but it was always that way. April, you're absolutely right. You mean in the earliest appearance on the first appearance of a gay man on Irish television, Franklin E. Kameny from the Match Society in the US he was there as an insert to speak to the Irish gay community. So these international coalitions have always been there throughout the decades.
- [67:00]
Avril Earls
Now, Parikh, I don't know if this was a question you set out to answer, but I think it's one that you are going a long way to answer in this book. And it's why 1993? Why was that the moment that Ireland finally decriminalized sex between men? And it's a question that we scholars of our sexuality have been mulling over for decades now. And I think. I think your book really goes a long way to helping us answer that.
- [67:22]
Para Kerrigan
So why is 1993 the moment? There's kind of several reasons for that. For one, it's just such a long process that David Norris had to decriminalize it through his campaign for homosexual law reform. He initially took it to the high court, was thrown out by conservative judges, went to the Supreme Court, was thrown out by conservative judges. And those cases took three years in the first hand, five years in the second hand, then finally to the European Court of Human Rights, where the judgment did happen in 1988. But although that judgment happened, nothing happened in terms of the government. And this is kind of the really important part that Bill sat there and none of the preceding governments did anything about it. And this is like a really, really, really important strategic point for the Gay, Lesbian and Equality Network. Glenn. And they were waiting for. They kept lobbying the government to do this. They kept lobbying them to try. And it was fal governments during the period and it was just never on the agenda for them. So in this moment prior to 1993, it's just wavering away there as the community tries to get the government to. To legislate for this. And it's not until faul go into a coalition government with the Labour Party. Labor Party generally has been a party centered around. Now I say this in previous years, not, not necessarily been the case, but centered around ideals of social justice and fair distribution of economic wealth and whatnot and fair taxation. And they had sympathetic members towards the community in that. So as part of the deal with the government, Maura Geoghegan Quinn was the Minister for Justice at the time. And this kind of really did enable the Irish gay rights movement and the Irish gay civil rights movement to engage with them. Now she was a Fianna Fall politician, but the labor coalition really did help get the gay people or get Glenn into the room. So once and Labour were very much lobbying Fianna Fall as part of being a government coalition and partnership to hear them out. So essentially Morgan Quinn was the Minister for Justice at the time. She had complete say over this area. And Glenn strategically used the Irish money. Phil Moore, who we saw in that late, late debate, late show debate back in 1988. And Phil Moore spoke to Maura Gagan Quinn and just opened up the question, are you a mother? And she said, yes, I am. And then she goes and she began the conversation like that. And the rest, as they say, is history. And Fillmore used her powers of persuasion, use her powers of being able to relate to another human, which she so beautifully has. And she really convinced Morgue and Quinn that day. And Morgue and Quinn said, I would support this bill wholeheartedly. And that is then when we see the move towards formalizing the decriminalization bill. So there's a really nice story in that moment before we see decriminalization in 1993 and now it is a battle from the European judgment to that five years. It's a long time to sit in that. Right. But it happens. And that's the in between bit there. The reason why it took so long historically. Well, we can bring a being, Ireland being a colony, British imperialism, British imperialism and their laws still being part of our administrative structures, coupled with the fact that the movement didn't really try to destroy or to counteract those laws until the 70s. So it was actually quite a quick process from the get go.
- [70:57]
Avril Earls
Yeah.
- [70:58]
Para Kerrigan
What do you think about it?
- [70:59]
Avril Earls
I have to imagine that like the young men and women who saw themselves reflected in television for the first time in the 70s and the 80s, that that sort of visibility also sort of shifted the. And opened the possibility for that, for that legislative change. So really, really fascinating, but I think we've taken up enough of your time today. But before we let you go, will you tell us what is next? What projects or project are you working on now?
- [71:28]
Para Kerrigan
Yes, so what I'm actually working on now is a really exciting product. I am really, really, really, really sorry if I say really one more time, does that convince you that I'm really excited about it? But it's a project about Dublin, that Hirschfeld Centre, so it's currently titled Disco Liberation, Dublin's Hirschfeld Centre and Queer Irish Memory. And this is essentially a book that's going to argue about Dublin's Hirschfeld Centre, which ran from 1979 to 1987, being a really important support service and activist hub for the Irish LGBTQ community. And myself and my colleague Maria Fromaggiore are co authoring this book and are co collaborating on this project or collaborating on this project. And we're arguing that this is an important institution for Irish cultural history and queer Irish history more broadly, because the Hirschfeld Centre is the centre of activism, media activism, it's the centre of diversity, it's the centre of huge energy that is centralized in Dublin nationally and internationally. It's not only just Dublin Hub, but it has this national story, it has this international story. And what we're beginning to do now is we're going to start the process of collecting and collating queer oral histories from this project and collecting as many as possible to tell the most vibrant tale of this archive of the Hirschville that we don't want the story being forgotten. Many of these people are now older and we want to capture the stories of these really important older people in our community as to what happened in this institution. This institution has shaped many of the activists that went on to become powerful during the marriage equality which referendum. That and this incubated the generation of activists and a generation of queers. And I think it's just really important that we account for the oral histories, have them accessible for everybody, but also that we encounter this in the book and a series of multimedia events. So that's kind of the big project that I'm working on with my colleague, Professor Maria Pajour over the next few years. So more on that soon.
- [73:23]
Avril Earls
Wow. Yeah, sounds like something I can't wait to read. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Park. I'm so delighted you're able to join us.
- [73:32]
Para Kerrigan
I'm delighted to be here. Thank you.
- [73:34]
Avril Earls
Yeah, thank you folks. After you subscribe to the new Books in Irish Studies podcast, make sure you order yourself a copy of LGBTQ Visibility Media and Sexuality in Ireland for your own collection because you do not want to miss this one. Parak, thanks again for being on the show. I enjoyed chatting with you and about queer visibility in Irish media.
- [73:52]
Para Kerrigan
Thank you so much, April. Much appreciated.
- [73:54]
Avril Earls
Thanks again. Bye.
- [73:56]
Para Kerrigan
Hi.
- [74:08]
Commercial Narrator
Here we go.
- [74:09]
Para Kerrigan
Count on Sundays with the NFL on CBS and Paramount. Plus, this is incredible. Watch your local NFL game live all season long. And he's in for a touchdown. Visit paramountplus.com NFL to get started today.