From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 20 Jun 1995 22:53:36 -0400

Subject: TO HONOR GAY IRISHMEN

New Lesbian and Gay Voice
1747 "S" Street, Northwest
Washington, DC 20009
Tel:  (202) 483-1311
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The New Lesbian and Gay Voice seeks to advance unconventional thought and
writing within the Lesbian and Gay Community.  In the days after the Supreme
Court's decision on the Boston St. Patrick's Day Parade, this item is
especially appropriate.

The following item appeared in the Washington Blade on Friday, March 17,
1995.  Mr. Gordon is a free lance writer based in Bethesda, Maryland, who can
resist everything except temptation.  This item is being submitted with Mr.
Gordon's permission.

This item is submitted to your because we have noticed your address among
those of lesbian and gay news media.  If you are associated with this media,
please consider this item as being submitted for publication.   Mr. Gordon
will accept any renumeration that it is your custom to pay for unsolicited
submissions, and would very much appreicate a copy of the issue in which the
item is published.

If you are not associated with a gay or lesbian newspaper or magazine, please
feel free to read and enjoy this account with our compliments.

Should you wish to receive further such submissions in the future, please
advise.  We prefer to submit -- and many prefer to receive --  items by
e-mail, so if you have an internet address, please advise as soon as
possible.

                         IRELAND'S GAY HERO                             

by Hal Gordon
4853 Cordell Avenue:  No. 920
Bethesdaa, Maryland 20814
Tel:  (301) 907-8657

The ghost of Roger Casement
Is beating on the door.
				          				 --W.B. Yeats

    The Supreme Court has upheld the right of the Boston Veterans to exclude
gays and lesbians from their St. Patrick's Day parade. But if we can't march,
we can still celebrate the memory of an authentic Irish hero who was also
unquestionably one of our own. Roger Casement (1864-1916), who was one of the
leading patriot-martyrs in the struggle to free Ireland from British rule,
may be said to have been hanged as much for being gay as for being a rebel.

    Early photographs of Casement show a man who seemed destined for a
happier fate. Tall, slender, and handsome, with a trim beard and smoldering,
deep-set eyes, he entered the British consular service in 1895. Posted to
remote locations in Africa and South America, he won international fame for
exposing the brutal exploitation of native peoples in the Belgian Congo and
the Putumayo basin between Peru and Colombia.

    His humanitarian work earned him a knighthood in 1911, and his future
success seemed assured, but the courtly exterior that Casement presented to
the world concealed a painfully divided inner man. A servant of the British
crown, he was an Irishman at heart who came to loathe the empire he
represented. Baptized a Catholic but bred an Ulster Protestant, he carried
within him the same ancient antagonisms that tear Ireland today. Outwardly
chaste, he was a secret homosexual, prowling dark streets at night in search
of furtive, anonymous satisfaction.

    The cumulative effect of these deep-seated national, religious, and
sexual conflicts was to make Casement an erratic figure, dangerously prone to
romantic fantasies and quixotic acts--the last of which cost him his life.
Throwing over his career as a consul, Casement joined the most radical wing
of the Irish nationalists, those who wanted complete independence rather than
Home Rule within the United Kingdom. He was in America, on a mission to raise
funds from local Irish communities, when World War I broke out.

    For the ultra-nationalists, the war meant that the hour of Ireland's
deliverance had struck. With Britain locked in a life-or-death struggle with
Germany, it suddenly seemed possible that a revolution could succeed --
especially if the Germans would provide sufficient military support.

    To secure that support, Irish rebel leaders appointed Casement their
agent in Berlin. He sailed from New York in the fall of 1914, accompanied by
a strapping blond Norwegian sailor named Adler Christensen, twenty-four years
old, who acted as his secretary-bodyguard, and possibly his lover.

    Arriving safely at his destination, Casement skillfully negotiated an
alliance between the rebels and the German government, which pledged German
military support for a projected Irish rebellion. But his triumph was
short-lived. After an initial spurt of enthusiasm, German interest in Ireland
flagged, and Casement's drive to recruit an invasion force from Irish
prisoners of war produced only fifty-five volunteers.  Despite his admiration
for the manly charms of German soldiers and sailors, his lack of success left
him deeply discouraged. His dejection would have been even greater had he
known that Cristensen -- his "dear faithful friend" -- was playing a cynical
double game with British intelligence.

    The date of the long-awaited Irish rising was set for April 23,1916--
Easter Sunday. When the Germans told him they would do no more than attempt
to smuggle a small cargo of arms to the rebels, Casement realized that the
rising was doomed from the start. In a desperate attempt to prevent useless
bloodshed, he returned to Ireland in a German submarine but was captured just
hours after being put ashore. It was April 21, Good Friday.

    Casement had not only failed to stop the rising, he had put his own neck
in an English noose. Transported to London, he was tried and convicted of
treason, and condemned to death.

    Even then, his life might have been saved. The Easter Rising, as it
turned out, was a pathetic affair, easily quelled by British troops. But the
panicky British overreacted. Within days after the surviving rebels were
taken prisoner, they were tried in secret by a military court and shot. Irish
opinion, which until then was indifferent or even hostile to the rebel cause,
was outraged by this exercise of summary justice.  Executing Casement, even
after all due forms of law had been observed, would only canonize another
martyr and further alienate Ireland from England -- the very goal the rising
was meant to accomplish.

    Others -- important others -- would be alienated as well. Casement was
still world-famous for his humanitarian work in the Congo and the Putumayo.
The Vatican appealed for clemency, and "Save Casement" drives were mounted as
far away as South America and the United States. Even in England, Casement
did not lack friends: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (the creator of Sherlock Holmes)
circulated a petition on his behalf that was signed by such other
distinguished writers as Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, and John
Galsworthy. Liberal newspaper editors and prominent churchmen added their own
pleas.

    The British government was even more sensitive to public opinion in
America.  The war was going badly, and Britain's leaders were hoping that
America would come in on their side. If at all possible, they did not wish to
offend a coveted ally.

    President Woodrow Wilson, meanwhile, was himself in a quandary over
Casement. Wilson was stoutly pro-British, but 1916 was a presidential
election year and Irish-Americans (good Democrats all) were flooding the
White House with letters and petitions calling on the President to intervene.
A resolution was introduced in the Senate, and William Randolph Hearst threw
his chain of newspapers behind the cause.

    In the face of all this pressure, the British government might have had
no choice but to accept the prudent suggestion of George Bernard Shaw and
treat Casement not as a traitor but as a prisoner of war. Instead, the
government played a squalid trump card. British investigators had managed to
get hold of Casement's diaries, in which his life as a covert homosexual was
laid bare in entry after entry. By leaking this explosive find, the
government could have exactly what it wanted:  Casement not only dead, but
damned.

    The diaries were shown to King George V, who in turn showed them to the
Bishop of Durham, a leading Casement supporter. The Archbishop of Canterbury,
likewise known to be sympathetic, was similarly dissuaded from acting on
Casement's behalf.    Extraordinary pains were taken to acquaint prominent
Americans in Britain with the contents of the diaries. They were shown to the
American ambassador, Walter Hines Page, and to the Associated Press
representative in London. The British prime minister, Herbert Asquith, went
so far as to inquire personally of Ambassador Page if he had seen the
diaries. When Page said he had, Asquith replied: "Excellent -- and you need
not be particular about keeping it to yourself."

    Page wasn't particular -- nor were many of the other eminent voyeurs who
were allowed to peep at Casement's private life. If his homosexual jottings
were unprintable under the journalistic standards of the day, that did not
prevent newspapers from blackening his character in general terms. The
reprieve campaign sputtered and stalled, and Casement was hanged on August
3,1916. He died gallantly, walking to the scaffold "with the dignity of a
prince" as one awed spectator later described the scene. His dying wish, to
be buried in Ireland, was denied. English law compelled his interment within
prison grounds.

    His ghost did not rest quietly. Casement had seemed so much the
chivalrous knight that many of his loyal friends and admirers simply couldn't
believe that Ireland had not been his only love. Persistent rumors circulated
that the diaries had been forged -- rumors that snowballed when the British
government abruptly classified the originals as state secrets. Resentful
Irishmen, convinced that a good man had been libeled, sang a ballad about him
that vowed, "God is not an Englishman/and truth will tell in time."

    Truth did tell in time, but it was not the truth that Casement's
partisans were hoping to hear. When the diaries were opened to public
inspection -- in 1959-- they were found to be genuine, a verdict endorsed by
Casement's subsequent biographers.

    Were the Irish a less warm-hearted people, Casement's story might have
ended there. But it did not. Straight or gay, Casement had died to free
Ireland, and his countrymen remembered his sacrifice. They also remembered
his wish to be buried among them -- "Don't let me lie here in this dreadful
place," he had begged his friend son the eve of his execution.

    It took nearly fifty years to obtain the grudging consent of British
officialdom but finally, late in February of 1965, Casement's remains were
brought home. For four days the coffin lay in state in Dublin's Garrison
Church of the Sacred Heart, as 165,000 mourners filed past. On March 1,
Casement was given a state funeral.  Silent throngs lined the streets of
Dublin, braving snow, hail, bitter cold, and even thunder and lightning to
pay their final respects.

    Eamon de Valera, Ireland's ailing 82-year-old president, delivered the
graveside oration at Glasnevin Cemetery, despite his doctors' best efforts to
keep him in bed.  When de Valera insisted on being present, he was told that
at least he should keep his head covered. "Casement," he declared, "deserves
better than that."

    Casement's speech to the court that condemned him to death ranks as one
of the noblest and most moving of all patriotic apologia. In his concluding
words, he spoke as much for gays and lesbians as for the long-suffering
people of his beloved Ireland:    

		Where all your rights have become only an accumulated wrong, where men must
beg with bated breath for leave to subsist in their own land, to think their
own thoughts, to sing their own songs, to gather the fruits of their own
labors, and, even while they beg, to see things inexorably withdrawn from
them -- then, surely, it is a braver, a saner and a truer thing to be a
rebel, in act and deed, against such circumstances as these, than to tamely
accept it, as the natural lot of men.

    Roger Casement -- rebel, martyr, and homosexual -- lives on in the hearts
and minds of his countrymen. But if he lived in Boston, he would not be
allowed to march in the next St. Patrick's Day parade.

Hal Gordon, a freelance writer based in Bethesda, Maryland, traces his
maternal roots
to Ireland's County  Meath