“Perfidious Official Guardians”: Ireland, the Nation, and Same-Sex Prostitution

‘“Perfidious Official Guardians’: Ireland, the Nation, and Same-Sex Prostitution” demonstrates how same-sex prostitution was routinely utilized during the Irish struggle for independence and Britain’s attempts to retain the Union.  The Dublin Castle Scandal of 1884, when English bureaucrats were charged with soliciting young Irishmen, was one such case.  As an incident of same-sex prostitution, the Dublin Castle Scandal came with an easily evoked, well-established narrative of exploitation that allowed Irish nationalists, such as William O’Brien, to transform the scandal into an ideological attack on the Union, arguing that the civilizing efforts espoused by the English were naive at best and blatantly hypocritical at worst.  Yet while Irish nationalists decried the sexual misdeeds of the English bureaucrats, they also intentionally and consistently stressed Irish involvement.  The young Irishmen, reportedly lured into sexual perversion by British wealth, came to embody all of Ireland—a metaphor of the collective perversion of British occupation.  As such, the queer sexual practices of a few men became a devastating condemnation of British rule as a whole.  Incidents like the Dublin Castle Scandal reveal that the relationship between nationalism and queer sex is often more nuanced than the generally perceived notion of outright, universal displacement.