‘Fire Ireland’ by Greg Thorpe

In the story that I am writing about Roger Casement, his lovers call him ‘Roddy’, if they call him anything at all. Roger travels around with his own douching kit and a homemade lubricant made of honey and glycerine. This is true. I’m working out my yearnings for Roger through my writing and by incessantly talking about him. The other week I swung by the National Gallery and asked if their Casement portrait was currently on display.

‘It isn’t, I’m sorry,’ consoled the pleasant woman at the desk. ‘Nor is the Graham Norton, I’m afraid.’

I cycle to Dún Laoghaire to look at Roger’s statue instead, and there I get an idea for a story that will be fragmented and erotic and which I will probably never finish writing. I watch a seagull land on Roger’s head before it lets go a slippery black and white shite down the bronze shoulder of his jacket. I’m re-reading Casement’s diaries in the context of AIDS narratives. Roger goes to the Congo and acquires something there that will ultimately be the death of him (in his case, staunch Irish Republicanism). The Congo is also the place where a simian immune deficiency virus morphs into a human immune deficiency virus as it passes from primate to person sometime in the early 1900s.

Just like many journals from the plague years, 1981–1996, before effective treatments, Casement’s diaries of a century before are also litanies of joyful promiscuity and ill health – piles, night sweats, bad stomachs, cruising, sodomy, restlessness. Sometimes Roddy’s on three dicks a day. The Black Diaries are David Wojnarowicz’s Waterfront Journals with a cane and a pocket watch. I don’t know exactly where I want to go with this Casement story, I’m just trying it all on for size – this is where my stories begin and sometimes where they abruptly end. I feel inspired by Angela Carter’s ‘Black Venus’ which tells the story of Jeanne Duval, Baudelaire’s legendary Creole mistress, and closes with these lines:

Until at last, in extreme old age, she succumbs to the ache in her bones and a cortège of grieving girls taking her to the churchyard, she will continue to dispense, to the most privileged of the colonial administration, at a not excessive price, the veritable, the authentic, the true Baudelairean syphilis.

Roger’s HIV is the metaphorical spectre in the centre of my story, but metaphor for what? I wonder about this as I look at his befouled statue placed, not on a city street or town square, but at the very edge of the island, just in case we change our minds about him and he can be discretely gotten rid of.

*

I have been living alone in Dublin, reading Ulysses and The Black Diaries, researching my family history, programming a queer film festival, and coming to terms with my auntie’s stroke which has robbed her of almost all of her voice and movement. Her voice was her identity to me – broad Dublin, full of smoke and wisdom. I’m grieving.

‘Who will I talk to about Dublin now?’ asks my mother. She does talk to her other siblings about Dublin, but not in the same way. She is always trying to protect them. Things surface all the same, some of it delicious. Only a few years ago, Mum’s brother Eamonn came to visit. I sat in the room with them, reading and eavesdropping. Mum was cutting Eamonn’s hair as she always does when she sees her brothers, just like she did when they were kids, only now they’re both in their sixties.

‘Eamonn, where was Da living in Dublin when the flat was burgled?’

‘I don’t know that Jean.’

‘You don’t remember when he had that break-in?’

‘Jean that wasn’t a break-in, that was one of the fellas he brung home that done the place over.’

‘What fellas?’

‘Jean, you know Da was bisexual don’t you?’

This is typically how I find things out in my family, but even these can be revoked, memories elided or retracted over time, leaving you with a handful of mysteries, feeling as if you invented them yourself. Like the Ouija board session that the brothers once held in the house, coaxing the youngest, Rory, off his bed to join them in their occult circle on the carpet. After a few unsuccessful attempts at rousing a spirit, they looked back at the mirrored wardrobe and there in its reflection was little Rory, still inexplicably seated on the bed, as if the mirror had somehow taken a photograph from moments before. We were told never to tamper with the Ouija for this reason. Now nobody can recall this story but me. (Plus, didn’t Grandad once see a ball of fire flying through the streets of Camden?)

So Granda was bisexual, and his brother Artie never married, and neither did their handsome sister Nellie, and another sister was widowed on her wedding night, and the other, poor Vera, died at Grangegorman, the mad house. The family remember this happening to her as a teenager, but I discovered she lived until she was 31. Before she had her stroke, I sent Vera’s death certificate from Grangegorman to my Auntie Dee because I couldn’t read the handwriting. Dee could, the Irish scrawl was second nature to her. She emailed me cause of death. Pulmonary tuberculosis. Cardiac Failure Certified. Wasn’t Vera young for cardiac failure? Starvation probably, Dee replied. Most likely she did it herself to get out of Grangegorman. Vera was ahead of her time. There are posters all round Dublin with ‘Grangegorman’ written on because TU Dublin is there now. I shiver when I read the name because it sounds like a horror film to me. Some Dublin place names seem gothic and cruel because they’ve only ever been spoken of with fear and despair – Mount Jerome, Saint Vincent’s, The Coombe, Crumlin, Dolphin’s Barn, Leopardstown.

*

I was born on the Isle of Man – which in my accent is an exact homonym for ‘I love man’ – but I was raised in Blackpool, gay mecca of the North of England, and Blackpool in Irish is ‘dubh linn’, or Dublin. The indigenous Manx language is Gaelic too because of the Irish missionaries who settled there, acolytes of Saint Patrick. The Isle of Man, tiny British Crown dependency, is more or less equidistant between Dublin and Blackpool, perched in the Irish Sea. Homosexuality was only decriminalized there in 1992, one year before Ireland. The first homosexual thing I ever remember seeing was the two dishy men locked in an embrace inside a copy of The Watchtower which came through our front door in Blackpool one day. The accompanying text warned that homosexuality was a temptation, and boy were they right. I was intrigued by the men’s inexplicable physical closeness to one another, and the fact they wore pyjama bottoms but no jackets. What kind of heterosexual describes gay sex as a ‘temptation’ and why did they have such good bodies? Then there was the gay couple in the park in Annie Hall which Dee sat me down to watch, aged about 13. Remember those gays?

‘Look at these guys. Oh that’s hilarious,’ Woody Allen says. ‘They’re back from Fire Island. They’re giving it a chance.’

What’s Fire Island? Giving what a chance? Around this time I had also become obsessed with anything to do with the 1960s.

‘Were you The Beatles or The Stones?’ I once asked Mum.

‘I was The Supremes, darling,’ she replied. Some people deserve a gay son and Mum is one of them.

*

At school, if somebody spilled their milk or gave a wrong answer they’d sometimes get called ‘Irish’. One time my school pal telephoned our house and, hearing Mum’s Dublin accent said, ‘I didn’t know your Mum was American!’ and I stupidly said, ‘Yes, and my Dad too and he’s in New York and that’s why he’s not around.’ Nobody had a dad anyway and nothing could be more embarrassing than being Irish, except for being gay. When my dad left, my uncles came from Ireland to help out my mum, and the woman down the road told the police how the red-headed Irish lady had strange men coming and going all hours and it wasn’t right what with kids in the house. See, the Irish were suspect, and yet daft; clumsy, and yet dangerous enough to set fire to things on News At Ten.

A week or so after my dad left, he came back in his girlfriend’s sports car and gave Mum a bicycle so that she could sell it to get some money. I don’t remember this, I wasn’t even two years old. Not long ago my other half tricked me into stopping at a bike shop so he could ‘have his gears checked’. In fact, there was a new bicycle waiting there for me, for my birthday. No way could he have known the power of the association but I almost cried. Men can give you bikes for all sorts of reasons.

*

I love Dublin very much but my nocturnal anxiety hikes from about a three to a six whenever I’m here. I double my Escitalopram the moment I arrive. I’m convinced it’s a type of epigenetic trauma – but then again I can be quite dramatic. I can’t tell Ma about it, she’d blame herself. When the people at the cemetery here said they wouldn’t (wouldn’t, not couldn’t) help me find my grandmother Mary’s unmarked grave, but would happily sell me a map for €8, I experienced some dreadful new emotions – Catholic ones, I think. The emotion came from my stomach, the same place that my anxiety comes from at night. I instantly recalled my mum describing a priest crawling the streets of Dolphin’s Barn in his car, the only person they knew to ever own a car, wearing the shiniest shoes in Dublin, going house to house asking for money for the church. My mum, not yet a teenager, was already hiding away any bit of cash she could find so that it wouldn’t be drank. When she told me about the priest, I felt a fearful kind of rage. These things didn’t happen to us in England, we were never even baptized. I gave the cemetery ten fucking euro for their map and told them to keep the change. I eventually found my grandmother without their help after three days of looking.

*

Dee used to tell me that their Uncle Artie didn’t even know what age he was. I thought it was some kind of joke about the sweet simplicity of his nature. I’ve since found the records for Artie’s enrolment in school, and in fact a year had been shaved off his life – to make up for missing so much education probably, but also setting him off with uncertain origins for the rest of his solitary existence. Our family had just been moved from the slums of the Liberties into an actual semi-detached council house. It’s still there, at Ceannt Fort. I’ve just been to look at it, apparently a desirable address now. It would cost a fortune to live there, they wouldn’t believe how much. The tenements where they’d previously existed – five, seven, nine to a room – with their parents in a constant state of poverty, alcoholism and pregnancy, were torn down as they departed. I think there are one or two brittle shells still left over on Francis Street where my little coffee costs me three euro and fifty cents.

My great-aunt Nellie was one of those Francis Street babies. As a grown-up she worked at the Player Wills cigarette factory from 1946, one year after The Emergency, until 1969, the year of the Stonewall Uprising and Woodstock. She found my mum a job at Player Wills too, in about 1967, and Mum hated it of course. She never smoked, for one thing. One day she heard they were looking for redheads up at the film studios in Bray. She got herself an Equity card, went to Bray, and began working as a movie extra. She quit Player Wills and wound up in films with the likes of Stanley Baker, Tommy Steele and Susannah Yorke instead. She suddenly had money for the first time, and so off she went on a holiday to the Isle of Man and she loved it. She came back to Dublin to rescue her youngest brother, beautiful Rory, alone, gay and going mad in his bedroom in Finglas. He loved it too, he blossomed on the Isle of Man. They both found jobs. One day he coyly told my mum about a good-looking chef who was working at his hotel. Bring him over, Mum said. Rory did. He was right, the chef was good-looking. That was my dad. That’s how he and my mum met. Mum never lived in Ireland again after that, so you might say cinema is the reason I didn’t grow up Irish.

*

In my thirties I was often single and stringing men along across several cities and writing them all down in a big long list, and then a film called Weekend by Andrew Haigh came out and all the men I’d been seeing and stringing went to see it and they all messaged me virtually at once to say, Someone’s made a movie about you. This was not meant as a compliment and so I went to see it for myself and I immediately cancelled my night out and all of my dates and made a promise to myself that the very next nice decent good-looking man that I met, who wanted to stick around, that I would open my mind to that and maybe something more. The very next beautiful man that I met was named Oisín and he had worked on the film Weekend and has a cameo in it and took the photographs for it too and he brought me over to Dublin so he could introduce the film at GAZE Film Festival and to exhibit his photographs there and that was my first GAZE. We’re together eleven years and now I run GAZE, and so you might say cinema is the reason I came back to Ireland, and 10mg should be enough to see me through tonight and tomorrow night too, and my grandmother’s headstone is up at last.

From issue #15: spring/summer 2023

About the Author
Greg Thorpe is a writer, curator and creative producer. He divides his time between Dublin, Salford, and Todmorden in West Yorkshire. He is the Festival Director of GAZE International LGBTQ+ Film Festival and also works on heritage, writing and curation for Islington Mill, an independent artist community in Salford, Greater Manchester. His writing has appeared in Best British Short Stories, Foglifter, On Curating, FRUIT, Feast and The Quietus.