From: NewLGVoice@aol.com 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 Fax: (202) 265-9737 Internet: newlgvoice@aol.com 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