The Queer Life and Afterlife of Roger Casement
by Brian Lewis
[Published in the Journal of the History of Sexuality (Texas): October 2005]
The year is 1910, the scene Iquitos in northeastern Peru, a river port as far up the
Amazon as steamboats traveled. Roger Casement, sauntering along the waterfront at
night, is on the prowl, hoping to make eye contact. He exchanges glances with a
handsome youth. The youth heads along a wooden pier and under the boardwalk.
Casement follows. They are entirely alone.
Wordlessly they stare at one another—now it is evident that the lad wants it as
much, as hard and as anonymously as Roger. They grasp at one another, falling
into the mud, rolling and tumbling, working out the frustrations of their mutually
unknown lives as, above their heads, the footsteps of the unsuspecting townsfolk
can be seen through the gaps in the wooden boards.
Hard, dirty, satisfying sex.1
This is an imaginative reconstruction by scriptwriter Michael Eaton, based on
Casement’s notorious Black Diaries. The script captures the essence of Casement the
practised, habitual cruiser, lusting after transient pleasures with young male bodies, and is
just one example of an on-going fascination with his sex-life.2 Casement, some allege,
deserves to be remembered for other things: his campaigns against the brutalization of
indigenous peoples in the Congo and in the Amazon, his turning to revolutionary Irish
nationalism, his treachery against the British, and his willingness to die for a cause he
believed in. Maybe so. His is a stirring life-story. But there were other humanitarian
heroes and Irish revolutionaries of the same period who are scarcely known outside a
scholarly audience. Casement would probably have shared a similar fate, slipping under
the radar of popular consciousness, a figure to be resurrected only periodically by
students of humanitarian movements against colonial oppression or by Irish politicians
feeling the patriotic urge to appeal to a parade of historical martyrs. 3 The irony is that
Casement remains a hot topic much less on account of his public acts than because he left
behind him a set of diaries describing his promiscuous gay sex-life in explicit detail.
The debate over the authenticity of the diaries has raged for decades and will
probably never be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. But in 2002, Dr. Audrey Giles,
supervised by a team of academics under Professor Bill McCormack of Goldsmiths
College, London, conducted the most thorough set of forensic tests and handwriting
analysis yet attempted, and dealt a substantial blow to the dwindling ranks of forgery
theorists. Her conclusions only confirmed the belief of most Casement scholars for quite
some time: Beyond reasonable doubt Roger Casement did indeed write the diaries. It
became ever more difficult to deny him his queerness.4
This article is not another intervention in the authenticity/forgery debate. It has
three main aims. The first is to discuss his life and sexual exploits, set in context,
1
evaluating the evidence for his own sense of sexual identity and assessing what the
diaries tell us about homosexual practices in the early twentieth century. The second is to
illustrate the dramatic changes in accounts of his sexuality as attitudes towards male
homosexuality have evolved over the last nine decades. It ends with some reflections on
the enduring use and abuse of him for disparate agendas, most notably in recent years as a
gay icon.
*
Roger David (“Roddie”) Casement was born in 1864 near Dublin. His father was
a captain, invalided out of the army on half pay, and the family during Roddie’s early
years lived a peripatetic existence searching for cheap accommodation in healthy climates
in France, Italy, and England. His father was a member of the Church of Ireland and
Roddie was brought up a Protestant; but his mother was Catholic, and she secretly had
him and his two brothers baptized in the faith when he was three. Both parents were dead
by the time he reached his teens, and he grew up with relatives in Ulster and Liverpool. In
his youth he began work as a clerk for the Liverpool-based Elder Dempster Shipping
Company, and it was as a purser on an Elder Dempster ship that he first travelled to West
Africa at the age of nineteen.5 In 1892 he moved into the British colonial administration
in the Oil Rivers Protectorate (later Nigeria), then into the consular service. He had the
task of setting up the new British consulate in the Congo in 1900. It was here that he
established his reputation in humanitarian circles. The crimes against humanity of
Leopold II of the Belgians in his Congo Free State had already generated powerful voices
of protest. Best remembered is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1898) based on his
travels up the Congo River in 1890. Conrad’s descriptions are harrowing, but the
situation deteriorated even more gruesomely when the pursuit of rubber superseded the
pursuit of ivory. Edmund Dene Morel, on the staff of Elder Dempster, which carried
cargo to and from the Congo, noted not only vast quantities of arms shipments but also
that goods sent to Africa were a tiny fraction of raw materials received in exchange. He
deduced the existence of slavery: “I had stumbled upon a secret society of murderers with
a King for a croniman.” Reports began to trickle out of women and children, elders and
chiefs kept hostage to force the younger males to supply the requisite quantities of wild
rubber; non-compliants were shot en masse, hands (and sometimes penises) severed from
corpses to prove the efficient use of bullets. In Britain the outcry and the pressure grew to
such an extent that the Foreign Office sent their man in the Congo, Casement, on a trip
into the interior in 1903. His report, bearing all the weight and authority of a British
consular official, outlined the contours of Leopold’s rapacious system in stark and
chilling detail. It sparked the formation, by Morel, of the Congo Reform Association, the
most widespread, passionate, and effective of all British humanitarian crusades since the
heyday of the anti-slavery movement. The campaign helped force Leopold to sell his
private empire to the Belgian state in 1908. With the end of the worst atrocities and the
introduction of the rule of law (on paper at least), the CRA wrapped up its work in 1913.
Morel credited much of the movement’s success to “a man of great heart … Roger
Casement.”6
In 1908 the Foreign Office posted Casement as Consul to Rio. Two years later,
because of his Congo experience, he was given the task of investigating allegations of
atrocities in the Putumayo River region of the northwest Amazon committed under the
2
aegis of the Anglo-Peruvian Rubber Company. There he discovered that the forcedlabour brutality was just as bad, if not worse, than that in the Congo. His 1911 report
caused a sensation. A knighthood followed. But this highpoint of his incorporation into
the British Establishment was deceptive. As an Irishman and—one can speculate—as a
homosexual, he never perceived himself as an insider. He had for some time been
nurturing a hatred for Britain, building the suspicion that white men’s misrule in Africa
and Latin America was scarcely better than—maybe the equivalent of—Britain’s
oppression of the Irish. He began to publish anti-British essays in 1911, resigned from the
consular service in 1913, and became a full-time convert to revolutionary Irish
nationalism. “The ‘white Indians’ of Ireland,” he wrote in 1913, “are heavier on my heart
than all the Indians of the rest of the earth.”7
When war broke out the following year, he wrote an open letter to the Irish press
from New York exhorting the Irish not to fight: “Ireland has no blood to give to any land,
to any cause but that of Ireland … Ireland has suffered at the hands of British
administrators a more prolonged series of evils, deliberately inflicted, than any other
community of civilized men.”8 Subsequently he journeyed to Berlin, via neutral Norway,
and attempted to recruit Irish POWs for an insurrection in Ireland with German
complicity and arms. He met with such little success that when he returned to Ireland in a
U-boat ahead of a munitions ship with only a token quantity of arms, just before the 1916
Easter Rising in Dublin, he probably intended to try and halt it. 9 But British intelligence
had been tracking his movements carefully and arrested him soon after he landed on the
west coast. The authorities bundled him off to London to be tried for High Treason. The
case against him was straightforward: He had colluded with the enemy and attempted to
foment rebellion in the realm in Britain’s time of need; he had conspired to stab his
country in the back.10 His claim from the dock that his country was Ireland, not Britain,
did not sway the jury. He was found guilty, sentenced to death and stripped of his
knighthood.
All of this was highly uncomfortable for British government and officialdom.
Here was a celebrated humanitarian who had forsaken Britain and sided with the “evil
Hun.” British and Ulster public opinion demanded no less than death, but how could an
Irish martyrdom be avoided? How would influential Irish-Americans view a hanging at a
time when the British were courting the United States to join the Allies, and after the
execution of the other Easter Rising rebels had already caused so much damage? And so
a whispering campaign began. During the time that he was under surveillance by British
intelligence, the police had discovered his diaries, which he had left behind in a trunk in
his London lodgings. The diaries were a godsend, confirming anecdotal evidence the
secret services had picked up in Norway that Casement was queer—a degenerate, a
pervert. Selected pages were distributed among journalists, politicians, and leading
Americans—anyone who might be prepared to mount or support an appeal for
clemency.11
The strategy worked: The outcry was muted. In a final testimony copied out by
his priest (at the eleventh hour he had embraced Catholicism), he positioned himself in a
long line of Irish martyrs: “It is a glorious death for Ireland’s sake with Allen, Larkin and
O’Brien, and Robert Emmet—and the men of ’98 and William Orr—all for the same
cause—all in the same way. Surely it is the most glorious cause in history.” 12 He was
hanged on August 3, 1916, in Pentonville Gaol, London. Then a final indignity. After a
3
postmortem, the Pentonville Medical Officer sent a memo marked “Secret” to the
Medical Commissioner of Prisons:
I made the examination, which was the subject of our conversation at the Home
Office on Tuesday, after the conclusion of the inquest today, and found
unmistakeable evidence of the practices to which, it was alleged, the prisoner in
question had been addicted.
The anus was at a glance seen to be dilated and on making a digital examination
(rubber gloves) I found that the lower part of the bowel was dilated as far as the
finger could reach.13
His corpse rotted in quicklime in the grounds of Pentonville until the 1960s, when
improved Anglo-Irish relations prompted a gesture of goodwill from Harold Wilson’s
government. In 1965 the scanty remains were flown to Ireland for a lying in state prior to
the solemn pomp of a national funeral. Here was an opportunity for the infant public
television broadcaster, RTÉ, to display an Irish version of the televised funerals of John
F. Kennedy and Winston Churchill. On the day itself, the cortege paraded along
O’Connell Street, past the General Post Office where the rebels had proclaimed the Irish
Republic in 1916. Casement was buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, after a graveside
oration from another of the 1916 rebels, the elderly President Éamon de Valera. 14
*
Such, in brief, was the life and death of an enigmatic traitor-martyr. What of his
sex-life? Apart from a smattering of inconclusive hints and innuendo in other sources, 15
the evidence arises from the three so-called Black Diaries (for 1903, 1910, and 1911),
plus a cash ledger. All of these detail amidst a welter of other happenings and
observations his (exclusively same-sex) sexual exploits: thirty-nine such entries in 1903,
seventy in 1910, several hundred in 1911.16 The scrawled jottings in pen and pencil
describe casual, often anonymous, sexual encounters, usually with young men and
teenagers, frequently recording size of genitals and prices paid. Casement generally
preferred to be the so-called passive partner in anal sex. This compounded the shock for
British officialdom. Indeed, being buggered violates a persistent stereotype of
homosexual carnal relations from ancient Greek pederasty to prison cultures of today,
built around the image of the older and/or higher-class and/or paying male as active and
dominant—giving not receiving semen. But Casement’s choices only point to the
commonsensical notion that many men must have breached the established “rules” in
negotiating their own pleasures.
When he was in London, Casement trawled around known locales for “trade,”
including the shadows around Hyde Park Corner, pick-up sites on Piccadilly, and the
lavatories at Marble Arch or the railway stations, juggling these explorations with his
daily routine and socializing with friends.17 Here is a one example, from July 15, 1910:
At F. O. [Foreign Office] from 11.30 looking over papers until 5. Home to Lizzie
and Louie and after dinner to Brompton Rd. and Albert (10/-) X. [sex] In Park.
4
Then M. Arch and fine type in Park but fled and home at 12.50. 15 1/2 years
Albert.18
According to other contemporary accounts of men in pursuit of sex with males, this
level of promiscuity was by no means unusual. Take, for instance, the tales and
experience of John Addington Symonds, the celebrated late Victorian writer; Edward
Irenaeus Prime Stevenson, an American writer in London who wrote the most detailed of
early twentieth-century descriptions of homosexual behavior under the pseudonym
Xavier Mayne; John Maynard Keynes, the economist, who kept a detailed record of his
homosexual encounters between 1906 and 1915; and, a little later, Joe Ackerley, writer
and literary editor for The Listener magazine.19 It certainly comes as no surprise to most
gay men today, who find such levels of cruising entirely credible.20
Again following well-established patterns, much of the sex Casement enjoyed was
across class lines, nearly always in return for cash, either as a straightforward transaction
for services rendered or as an appropriate “gift” from an older gentleman. Guardsmen
stationed near Regents Park or at other barracks notoriously sold their sexual favors as an
income supplement (Casement was a regular purchaser); so did working-class teenage
lads—stable hands, messenger boys (Oscar Wilde’s “feasting with panthers”)—to eke out
low and uncertain wages, or for the pleasure of the encounter, or maybe for both.21
Casement seems to have had little interest in building any real relationships and rarely
coupled with anyone approaching his own level in society. Millar Gordon, a friend he
apparently repeatedly hooked up with whenever he was in Belfast, comes closest; he
might have had a sexual relationship with his manservant, Adler Christensen, during the
final, fateful visit from the United States to Germany via Norway; and he sought out
former tricks when he revisited certain ports on his travels and may have written to some
of them in the interim.22 But that is all; the preponderant pattern is overwhelmingly one
of casual encounters. Perhaps the driving force was personal preference for the furtive
and transitory, and certainly an occupation that kept him on the move opened up an everchanging feast of such opportunities. But presumably casual sex also minimized the risk
of being found out in a post-Wildean era when, outside very limited circles, it was well
nigh impossible for males to live as couples without attracting suspicion or the attentions
of blackmailers. Ironically, after Casement had embarked on his road to treason, Adler
Christensen betrayed him to the British authorities in Christiania (Oslo), giving them their
first clear intimation of Casement’s sexual orientation.23
Casement’s pursuit of casual sex did not differ markedly when he was away from
London. The 1911 diary, somewhat fuller, raunchier, and more literary in style than the
others, provides some particularly graphic and choice examples. Here is one, in Pará,
Brazil, dated September 18:
[A]t street corner waiting for tram saw a fine type who looked across street at me
too. I waited for two trams to pass and then walked along and was looking back at a
lovely Ceará caboclo [copper-colored Native American] sailor when a moço
[youth] hurried over and held out his hand and it was this boy. He had followed—at
once took my arm and squeezed and led away side—arranged meet at Nazareth
Square at 8. To Dickey ill and then to Nazareth and at 8.15 he came and at once led
me off—Felt. Huge—thick as wrist—only 17 or 18. From Lisbon. 4 years in Pará.
5
Walked to Sao Braz he squeezing hand and wrist all time and there “assenta!” [sat
down] on grass in dark travessa [lane]. He admitted his wish at once and so I took
it. First Spittle but so big could not get in—then glycerine & Honey and in it went
with huge thrust and he suck on me and worked hard. “Calor”! [Hot] Refused any
present.
Here is another, dated December 14 in Manaos, Brazil:
Out to João Pensador by tram, bathed there and walked back to cricket and to the
bathing pool there. Seven school boys (one a cafuzo [of mixed parentage] 17-18)
and 5 of them white and 4 had huge ones and all pulled and skinned and half cock
all time. One a lad of 17 had a beauty. All “gentlemen”. After dinner out at 7.10
met Aprigio on seat. Stiff as poker and huge. So together to terracos baldia
[uncultivated terraces] where sucked and then he in. Left and met Antonio my
sweet Caboclo of last time and he followed and showed place and in too—hard.
Huge testeminhos [“witnesses”—i.e. testicles] and loved and kissed. Nice boy.
Then young Alfandega Guarda mór [chief customs inspector] darkie big and nice—
bayonet and felt it huge and stiff as his bayonet. Awfully warm. Nice lovely Italian
boy passed at 11 and smiled and so to bed.24
Casement recorded his attempts to satiate his libido in similar fashion in London,
Paris, Dublin, Belfast, Lisbon, Madeira, the Canary Islands, Sierra Leone, and in the
cities and ports of the Congo and the Amazon.25 While he discovered sexual pleasure as
readily at home as abroad,26 continuing his pursuit under the noses of unsuspecting
respectable society, foreign travel did afford him greater opportunity to indulge across
national and racial boundaries, and he noted with pleasure the many stimulating sights of
unabashed sexual display—nudity, unembarrassed erections, masturbation—he witnessed
among the male youth of less morally inhibited cultures.27 When he failed to score, this
voyeuristic pleasure would oscillate with frustrated observations, dripping from his pen
onto the pages of the diary, of what he had seen but not tasted. On other occasions, such
as on transatlantic crossings or during his up-river investigations, sex was practically
ruled out, and then his jottings entered the realm of fantasy.28
*
In an age when sexology and medical science were classifying the distinctive
categories of the “invert,” the “pervert,” the “intersex,” the “uranian,” the “homosexual”
with new vigor, when legislative and moral codes were policing the boundaries between
“normality” and “deviancy” as never before, and when the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895
had helped cement in the public mind the equation of homosexuality and effeminacy, 29
someone like Casement could pass as straight with ease. He was tall, slim, and bearded;
friends and acquaintances variously described him as a “knight-errant,”30 a figure out of a
Velasquez painting;31 “his countenance had charm and distinction and a high chivalry.”
For Joseph Conrad there was a touch of the Conquistador in him.32 E. D. Morel wrote of
him as having “A long lean, swarthy Vandyke type of face, graven with power and withal
of great gentleness…. Here was a man indeed.”33
6
So if he could so easily pass as straight, why did Casement take the enormous risk
of keeping secret diaries? We can but speculate. The recording of prices, at one level,
particularly in the 1911 cash ledger, suggests a meticulous accounting, a keeping of tabs
on all his outgoings, just like any other member of the modestly salaried classes lacking
independent means. More importantly, presumably the diaries served as aide-mémoire,
something for him to read and reread in the manner of porn: an aid to masturbation,
perhaps—just as, where sexual activity was impossible, his fantasizing on paper acted as
a substitute. Annotations and underlinings in different inks and with different pencils
suggest that he returned repeatedly to recollections that turned him on.34 On occasions he
jotted down thoughts as the day wore on, in anticipation of erotic adventures to come (“3
o’clock. Waiting for José my fly open…. Will José’s be up too?”).35 At a deeper and
maybe unconscious level, perhaps keeping a journal formed some kind of release from
the secrecy of his double life, and perhaps he relished the thrill of living dangerously, of
being caught, of being found out. For him to embark on his dangerous mission to
Germany, leaving the diaries in a trunk at his London lodgings where they would almost
certainly be discovered if anything went wrong, suggests more than a degree of wilful
recklessness.36 The diaries are not polished, posterity-positioning, self-reflective, selfjustificatory, literary artifacts in the grand Victorian style, but even so it is fair to suggest
that they were a way for him to give expression to the full, true, real self, because he
could not avow this publicly. And if this is accurate, at some level, consciously or not, he
was seeking an audience, he did want them to be read.
We know a great deal about his evolving ideas of Irish national identity through
his various writings; we know precious little about a self-conscious sexual identity, or
how the two might have been related. Presumably he was aware of the works of
sexologists of the day, but if so he said nothing about them. He made comments about
homosexuality on only one or maybe two occasions. There are some intriguing diary
entries for 1903 in response to the suicide of Sir Hector MacDonald, the commander of
British troops in Ceylon, who was accused of having sex with scores of youths. 37 The
first of these reads, “The reasons given are pitiably sad. The most distressing case this
surely of its kind and one that may awake the national mind to saner methods of curing a
terrible disease than by criminal legislation.”38 If he truly believed this, he was buying
into a medicalized discourse on homosexuality: that it was a disease beyond the patient’s
control, and not a self-willed act or sin, but that it could be cured. There is no evidence
that he ever sought a cure for himself.
Contrast this with the old-age recollection, in 1954, of his leading counsel at his
trial, A. M. Sullivan. After the diaries were made known to the defense, Casement
“instructed me to explain to the Jury that the filthy practices and the rhapsodical
glorification of them were inseparable from genius, and I was to cite a list of all truly
great men to prove it.”39 Sullivan shortly after clarified this by writing, “He took up the
attitude that we pigmies could not understand the conduct of great men and had no right
to pass judgment on it. He was neither glorifying nor repudiating what was alleged
against him.”40 This assertion may or may not be true, but it has the ring of truth because,
drawing on a very different discourse of inversion of the period, it fits very precisely the
notion of some in literary homosexual circles across Europe that homosexuality could be
a sign of mental, cultural, and physical superiority—that high-minded homosexuals were,
in a sense, hyper-masculine Übermenschen—with a list of “non-degenerate,” “non-
7
effeminate” Great Men from Alcibiades to Frederick the Great via Shakespeare to prove
it.41 If it is true, it could indicate merely that his ideas remained conflicted, oscillating
between exuberant self-affirmation and internalized self-loathing, or that his reading and
thoughts had evolved considerably between 1903 and 1916: from homosexuality as a
pitiable medical condition to homosexuality as a mark of greatness.
*
In the summer of 1916, the reaction to revelations about the diaries was one of
horror. The Daily Express editorialized that if all the gentlemen trying to turn him into a
martyr read the diaries, “no man—and certainly no minister of religion—would ever
mention Casement’s name again without loathing and contempt.”42 Walter Page, the US
ambassador to London, warned Secretary of State Lansing to steer clear of the case
because of the “unspeakably filthy character” of the diaries.43 The poet, Alfred Noyes, a
Casement supporter who was shown extracts of a diary, wrote, “Page after page of this
diary would be an insult to a pig’s trough to let the foul record touch it.”44 The Home
Secretary, Herbert Samuel, conceded in a letter to his wife that, while the cabinet decision
not to reprieve him was unpleasant, “Had Casement not been a man of atrocious moral
character, the situation would have been even more difficult.”45
Others, friends and foe alike, sought an answer to why such a good man had gone
so wrong in a fashionable language of mental degeneracy. Sir John Harris, Secretary to
the Aborigines Protection Society, an ally since the Congo days, saw the diary as “the
unfolding of a life which for years had been poisoned by disease.”46 Ernley Blackwell,
Home Office legal adviser, thought that, “Of late years he seems to have completed the
full cycle of sexual degeneracy, and from a pervert, has become an invert—a ‘woman’ or
pathic who derives his satisfaction from attracting men and inducing them to use him.”47
Two Harley Street doctors, asked to pronounce on the diaries, shied from declaring him
certifiably insane but regarded him “undoubtedly as a mentally abnormal individual.”48 A
Dublin clergyman, in whose parish Casement had lived in 1914, suggested to the Home
Office that he be confined to a criminal lunatic asylum (even though “my wife thought
him the most interesting and charming man she had ever met”), apparently because “he
had the habit of walking the roads bareheaded and swinging his arms in the air, so that
the people thought him mad.”49 This question of potential insanity was important during
and after the trial because, although the cabinet concluded Casement was not mad enough
to save him from the rope, Attorney General F. E. Smith did try to induce the defense to
bring the diaries into evidence, which might have saved him on grounds of mental
incompetence but would have destroyed his reputation and damaged the Irish republican
cause. Sullivan would have none of it, and determined that it was better for his client to
die than be publicly queer. “I knew it might save his life,” he later said, “but I finally
decided that death was better than besmirching and dishonour.”50
The language of moral perversion surrounding the trial was, of course, wholly
unexceptional in discussions of male homosexuality. “The thing we find here is carrion, a
pestilence, a crime … a moral disease that religion and conscience and all that is upright
in us should uncompromisingly condemn.”51 This is actually a quotation from Casement
himself, describing the atrocities he had seen in Peru, but it differed little in tone or tenor
from the condemnation of homosexuality: Consensual sex could be seen as equally as
appalling as a regime of brutal slavery. This is partly an astonishing testimony to the
8
power of socialization into the mindset of a particular code of gendered and sexual norms
in a particular period, and partly a tribute to willed denial. These authority figures were
men of the world; many of them would have experienced same-sex experimentation at
the public schools they nearly all attended, if the tales and memoirs of the period are to be
believed; some of them would have had a consciousness of same-sex desire themselves;
and others would not have cared. The shoulder-shrugging 1928 comment of a one-time
friend, the maverick travel-writer R. B. Cunninghame Graham, is perhaps more
representative of real opinion than the stock language of condemnation: “[W]e cannot
hang all who have Casement’s vice, and after all it is not a disease that is catching in the
least.”52
The leading lights of Irish nationalism, constitutional and radical—John
Redmond, Michael Collins, John Devoy of Clan na Gael in the US, and (one can surmise)
Éamon de Valera—had no difficulty in private in believing the diaries to be genuine.53
But a public avowal of a queer Casement was out of the question. The Irish nationalism
associated with the Easter Rising had elements of a genuine human-emancipatory
rhetoric, especially with the involvement of the Socialist leader, James Connolly, but
overwhelmingly its ethos was that of De Valera and Patrick Pearse (notwithstanding his
own sublimated homosexuality),54 informed by a heavily conservative, family-based,
agrarian Catholicism. The new Ireland did not have room for sexual deviants. Still
decades away from accepting that an Irishman could possibly be a patriot and gay, it was
easiest for most supporters of the Irish Free State to fall back on denial and to denounce
the diaries as vicious British forgeries.
None of the authors who peddled the forgery thesis in the mid-twentieth
century—from William Maloney, The Forged Casement Diaries (1936),55 through Alfred
Noyes, The Accusing Ghost or Justice for Casement (1957),56 and Roger McHugh,
Casement: The Public Record Office Manuscripts (1960),57 to Herbert Mackey, Roger
Casement: The Truth about the Forged Diaries (1966)58—disputed the equation of
homosexuality with perversion. McHugh, a professor in the National University of
Ireland, for example, littered his account with terms like “psychopathy,” “insanity” and
“degeneration”; the forger had created a “moronic or sub-human type,” “a dull degenerate
who has reached the last stages of abnormality, who has no moral scruples and who is
under … a compulsive or obsessive neurosis.”59 For Mackey in the mid-1960s, “it would
be fantastic to suppose that any human being except a criminal lunatic would attempt the
enormities mentioned there, let alone record them.”60
A counter-current, accepting Casement’s sexuality and working with it rather than
against it in attempting to understand his complex character, has—from small
beginnings—steadily grown stronger. W. B. Yeats was one of the first. His poem, “The
Ghost of Roger Casement,” denouncing the execution, is well known. Less familiar is his
hope that the diaries prove genuine and his comment that, “If Casement were a homosexual what matter! But if the British Government can with impunity forge evidence to
prove him so no unpopular man with a cause will ever be safe.” Yeats’s cousin, Monk
Gibbon, in the Irish Times in 1956, believing Casement to be gay, was perhaps the first in
Ireland publicly to raise the possibility that patriotism and homosexuality might be
compatible. “A man is a great patriot; at all costs it must not transpire,” he wrote
sardonically, “that he was also a homosexual!”61
9
In the same year, René MacColl, Daily Express journalist, wrote a popular
account of Casement that exemplified what passed for liberal tolerance in a decade
caught between continuing crackdowns on gay sex and slowly opening up (in Britain, not
yet in Ireland) to the findings of Kinsey and the Wolfenden Committee.62 He wrote,
I share with other “normal” persons a lack of understanding of what makes perverts
behave in the way they do. But because I do not understand this particular form of
sexual gratification I do not necessarily condemn out of hand all of its practitioners
as monsters. And so, although I am certain that Roger Casement was a pervert, it
makes as little difference to me, in assessing his place in history, as if he had
possessed a club-foot.63
More charitably, in his introduction to the first, partial edition of the Black Diaries,
published in Paris to avoid potential prosecution under the Official Secrets Act, Maurice
Girodias warned against holding Casement up to inappropriate standards: “Saint or
pervert? Traitor or hero? Roger Casement may well have been all four at once, and he
certainly cannot be judged in accordance with XIXth century morals.”64
The introduction in England and Wales of a circumscribed permission for gay sex
in 1967 and the raising of the gay rights banner by activist groups in the early 1970s
provided a backdrop for more accepting perspectives of Casement. Some of the
commentary continued to be unfavourable, notably the essay by A. L. Rowse,
homosexual himself, in his rather distasteful Homosexuals in History (1977). Dipping
back into the language of 1916, Rowse concluded that a lunatic asylum would have been
better than hanging for Casement, and that “underneath the handsome masculine exterior,
he had the soul of a woman, and his physical tastes were in accordance.”65 More serious
British writers in the 1970s and ’80s, producing blockbuster biographies, made more
intelligent use of his sexuality, though they continued to be troubled by it and felt the
need to editorialize and (to an extent) to moralize. Brian Inglis in 1973 wondered why
Casement’s homosexuality should be any more destructive of his reputation than it was of
that of contemporaries like Wilde, Gide or Proust. “At most,” he wrote, “it could only
help to explain some puzzling features of his career.”66 B. L. Reid in 1976 agreed that
“we must begin by forgiving his kind of sexuality, if it required forgiving,” but then
immediately continued by writing “and pitying it only because it drove him into pitiable
straits.” For Reid, Casement was “a schizoid personality, hazardously rooted in the real
world,” who became obsessed with the pursuit of sex to the point of pathology. 67 Roger
Sawyer in 1984 also fumbled around in a drawerful of psychoanalytical tools, subFreudian this time, to explain why the young Roger went wrong in the first place: “[T]he
effect of family tensions on the youngest orphan helped to produce the deviation from the
sexual norm which accustomed him to commit frequent and illegal acts over many years;
at the emotional and physical level he became a classic example of the effect of frustrated
mother-love.”68
What all of these accounts are doing, of course, is attempting to explain in terms
of his sexuality the contradictions in his life: the British official turned Irish rebel, the
Ulster Protestant turned Catholic, the madcap adventurer who went to Germany while
leaving incriminating documents behind, the charmer prone to temper tantrums and
manic depression (if some accounts can be believed), the man who (critics and friends
10
said) preferred emotion over reason.69 There is obviously some truth to this. But it is not
self-evident that he was any more conflicted and contradictory than anyone else whose
life has been scrutinized in such detail, or that he was more sexually obsessed and
insecure than any of the rest of us. As Reid had the honesty to admit, Casement’s mind
was no filthier than his own.70
*
Moving beyond A. J. P. Taylor’s “so what?” in a 1973 review (“What was the
relevance of the diaries even if they were genuine? None…. [I]t never affected his policy
or public conduct”),71 an alternative to the tolerationist or “flawed hero” line slowly
gathered momentum. David Rudkin was one of the first actively to celebrate Casement’s
sexuality. In a 1973 BBC Radio play and a review in Encounter, far from seeing
Casement’s sexual explorations as pitiable, he rhapsodized about his “emancipated
anality”; Casement was a man “in absolute sensual harmony with his own backside.”72
But only really in the 1990s, with the explosive growth of the “Celtic Tiger,” the
widespread discrediting of the moral authority of the Catholic Church, and liberal
legislation catching up with Western European standards, did gay activism come of age
in the Irish Republic.73 The Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, felt comfortable enough to advocate
a conference on the diaries in 1999, with the understanding that if they proved to be
genuine and Casement was indeed a homosexual it did not really matter any more.74
Revelling in this climate, gay and lesbian activists adopted Casement alongside Oscar
Wilde as a symbol of the new, revisionist Ireland, even as a gay saint, and forcefully
made the point that gay people, too, were part of the story of Irish nation-building.75
Liberal voices in the 1990s reached something of a consensus that Casement’s
sexuality was the key to all the laudable aspects of his life. Róisín McAuley, who
reported on the authenticity of the diaries for the Radio 4 series “Document” in 1993,
wrote,
He can now be claimed by us all. He couldn’t have been Sir Roger Casement
humanitarian hero if he hadn’t believed in an enlightened role for the British
Empire. He wouldn’t have been Roger Casement republican hero if he hadn’t seen
the oppression of Empire abroad. And if he hadn’t been homosexual, knowing what
it was like to feel oppressed and marginalized, he might not have been a hero to
anyone.76
The German writer, W. G. Sebald, concurred that “it was precisely Casement’s
homosexuality that sensitized him to the continuing oppression, exploitation, enslavement
and destruction, across the borders of social class and race, of those who were furthest
from the centers of power.”77 The novelist, Colm Tóibín, wrote in 1997,
Perhaps it was his very homosexuality … which made him into the humanitarian he
was, made him so appalled. Unlike everyone around him, he took nothing for
granted. His moral courage … came perhaps from his understanding of what it
meant to be despised. He is … a gay hero…. I admire Casement more because of
his Diaries. I admire the quality of his desire, his passionate nature, his erotic
complexity, his openness, his doubleness, his sexual energy.78
11
Not every commentator was persuaded. John Bruton, the former Taoiseach,
reviewing the impressively detailed 2002 biography and new edition of the diaries by
Northern Irish gay activist Jeff Dudgeon, did not see the relevance of Casement’s private
life to any understanding of his public actions. He ignored the question of Casement’s
homosexuality until the final paragraph, where he made the bizarre comment that, “These
diaries have no literary, and now little historical value, and should not have been given so
much space in an otherwise stimulating, fair and well-written book.”79 Others, backing
the forgery thesis, displayed crude anti-gay prejudice or (let us be charitable) were not so
much homophobic themselves but could not stomach the particular sexual exploits of the
diarist. Eoin Ó Máille and Michael Payne, in their 1994 pamphlet, The Vindication of
Roger Casement, talked of the “forger” as a “degenerate and moron” and, moreover, that
“freedom by a pervert would be a perverted freedom and not acceptable.”80 The Dublin
author, Ulick O’Connor, called the diarist in 1999 a “dangerous, degenerate monster.”81
The Taoiseach’s special adviser, Martin Mansergh, at a Royal Irish Academy symposium
in 2000, described Casement as the inspiration for Irish foreign policy but the diarist as a
conscienceless predator.82 In 2001, Eoin Neeson, a writer and former director of the Irish
Government Information Bureau, wrote in the Irish Times of the “alleged degeneracy and
sexual perversion” of his hero.83 A reviewer in Sinn Féin’s journal, An
Phoblacht/Republican News, could not, in 2002, bring himself to accept a gay Casement
or the diaries as genuine. He accused Bill McCormack, the Irishman who instigated the
Giles Report on the diaries, of being “anti-Irish and anti-Roman Catholic,” and
condemned his book as “just another attempt to discredit one of the most creditable
figures in republican history.”84
The foremost recent exponent of the diaries-are-fake thesis, Angus Mitchell, alleges
that the diaries do not serve the gay community or merit a place in twentieth-century
homosexual literature; they are homophobic documents, painting homosexuality as a
sickness leading to guilt, repression, fantasy, hatred, alienation, and loneliness.85 It is an
interesting twist, but perhaps as unpersuasive as the overblown paeans to Casement’s
emancipated sexuality quoted above. Both are examples of the distortions that can creep
in when we tone down or play up alleged personal failings in the hunt for heroes and
villains. The debate over the youthfulness of Casement’s sexual partners is a case in
point. While proponents of pederasty make use of him as an iconic figure of their own,86
critics have accused him of “sexual imperialism” across racial, class, and generational
lines, using a privileged white man’s power and money to seduce exploited young men
and boys.87 Indeed, what are we to make of this entry for November 7, 1911 in Iquitos?
Saw small mestizo boy of about 9 (tall and slim, perhaps 10) tossing himself off in
street, from window—close to me. It was fully 7" long and sticking out half a
foot—a huge one and a very nice looking boy indeed, but quite a child.88
Casement is admitting his desire (but not acting upon it) and, in the final four words,
drawing back, reminding himself of a boundary or limit. In an age of recurrent moral
panics over pedophilia, such passages have generated considerable unease among some
of his defenders, even as they point out that all of his sexual activities and of his other
sexual observations are with or about older boys (though, on occasions, not much older).
12
If one wished to mount a defense, it seems scarcely just to single out for
condemnation Casement’s transgressions from the mess of macro and micro-exploitations
in Britain’s Edwardian Empire, nor does it seem fair to impose retroactively a notional
age of consent of, say, sixteen that we feel comfortable with today. It is hard to see
Casement as a pedophile or seducer of the innocent; he liked them young but, as we have
seen, also hung—well-formed and willing partners. But why mount a defense?
Republican patriots, in the desire to canonize him, knotted themselves into a skein of
denials regarding the diaries. Gay and gay-friendly writers and activists are in danger of
repeating some of the same mistakes if they insist on presenting him as a plaster saint for
a new cause. Historians can never be wholly neutral and search for some kind of bland,
insipid “objectivity” that bleaches the colour from historical narratives. But we can aspire
to present such figures as Casement in their full, complex, humanity.
The multiple takes on his diaries and life indicate clearly enough that any simple
reading of a liberated or a neurotic figure is inadequate. He is far too interesting to be
airbrushed for any particular cause. His restless pursuit of casual sex is human,
understandable—far from “perverse” or “degenerate”—but scarcely heroic or iconic. He
did not stand up for gay rights, if the anachronism can be forgiven; he did not sacrifice
his neck on this issue. He was, in the end, an ordinary human being with ordinary human
needs, desires, emotions, and failings, albeit living an extraordinary life. We do not need
to canonize him afresh. The fact that his sexuality can now be discussed openly,
unapologetically, non-judgmentally is sufficient, part cause part indication of the
tremendous progress gay rights have made in recent years. Ironically enough, the
posthumous Roger Casement has done more than anyone in Ireland to force people to
confront their own prejudices. This is his latest, unwitting, contribution to the
humanitarian cause.
Brian Lewis
McGill University
13
NOTES AND REFERENCES
I am grateful to Nancy Partner and to members of the Montreal British History Seminar,
the Southern Ontario British History Group, and the Archives Gaies du Québec, to whom
I gave versions of this paper, for their very helpful comments.
1
Michael Eaton, “Ruling Passions: The Story of Roger Casement,” Critical Quarterly 41,
3 (Autumn 1999): 82-83.
2
See Lucy McDiarmid, “The Posthumous Life of Roger Casement,” in Gender and
Sexuality in Modern Ireland, eds. Anthony Bradley and Maryann Gialanella Valiulis
(Amherst, Mass., 1997), p. 131.
3
See, for example, Andrew Porter, “Sir Roger Casement and the International
Humanitarian Movement,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History XXIX, 2,
(May 2001): 59-74. For an example of a Taoiseach “accused by political opponents of
seeking to take cynical electoral advantage” of a patriotic occasion, see “Ten republicans
executed by British get Irish state funerals,” The Independent, Oct. 15, 2001, p. 14.
4
W. J. McCormack has a comment to this effect in Alan Gilsenan’s documentary, “The
Ghost of Roger Casement” (Crossing the Line Films for RTÉ, 2002). See also his Roger
Casement in Death: Or Haunting the Free State (Dublin, 2002), p. 194. But by no means
everyone is persuaded by these tests. See Michael O’Sullivan, “Lies, Damn Lies &
Forensics: The Ghost of Roger Casement,” History Ireland 10, 2 (Summer 2002): 5-6.
5
Benjamin Lawrence Reid, The Lives of Roger Casement (New Haven and London,
1976), chap. 1; Jeffrey Dudgeon, Roger Casement. The Black Diaries. With a Study of his
Background, Sexuality, and Irish Political Life (Belfast, 2002), chap. 2.
6
Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost. A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in
Colonial Africa (London, 2000) (quotations pp. 181, 273-74); Jules Marchal, E. D. Morel
Contre Léopold II. L’Histoire du Congo 1900-1910 (Paris, 1996), vol. II; Wm Roger
Louis and Jean Stengers, eds., E. D. Morel’s History of the Congo Reform Movement
(Oxford, 1967); Wm Roger Louis, “Roger Casement and the Congo,” Journal of African
History V, I (1964): 99-120; Neal Ascherson, The King Incorporated. Leopold II in the
Age of Trusts (London, 1963), chaps. 27-28.
7
Quoted by Roger Sawyer, Casement: The Flawed Hero (London, 1984), p. 92.
8
Irish Independent, Oct. 5, 1914, quoted by Alfred Noyes, The Accusing Ghost or Justice
for Casement (London, 1957), pp. 73-75.
9
Basil Thomson, Queer People (London, 1922), pp. 89-90; Reinhard R. Doerries,
Prelude to the Easter Rising. Sir Roger Casement in Imperial Germany (London, 2000),
pp. 19, 31.
10
Earl of Birkenhead [F. E. Smith], Famous Trials of History (New York, 1926), p. 263.
On the ironies of having Smith, the Attorney General, as chief prosecutor, when he and
his government colleagues, Sir Edward Carson and leading Unionists, had organized or
backed the smuggling of German arms to the Ulster Volunteers in 1914 to prevent Home
Rule, see Owen Dudley Edwards, “Divided Treasons and Divided Loyalties: Roger
Casement and Others,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th ser., 32 (1982):
156-57, 165. Also see letter of Michael Francis Doyle, Jan. 3, 1957, quoted by Noyes,
The Accusing Ghost, pp. 187-88; and the verdict of George Bernard Shaw, quoted by
Brian Inglis, Roger Casement (London, 1973), p. 375.
14
11
Admiral Sir William James, The Eyes of the Navy. A Biographical Study of Admiral Sir
Reginald Hall (London, 1955), p. 114; Sir Basil Thomson, The Scene Changes (New
York, 1937), pp. 298, 329; Henry W. Nevinson, More Changes More Chances (London,
1925), p. 296. See also the comments of Christopher Andrew and Roger Sawyer in
Gilsenan’s documentary, “The Ghost of Roger Casement.”
12
Quoted by Herbert O. Mackey, The Life and Times of Roger Casement (Dublin, 1954),
pp. 133-34.
13
PRO, HO 144/1637/311643/141, Dr. Percy R. Mandler to Sir Herbert Smalley, Aug. 3,
1916. Colm Tóibín, “A Whale of a Time,” London Review of Books 19, 19 (Oct. 2, 1997),
p. 27, succumbs to the temptation to view British officialdom’s rectal examination of an
Irish patriot’s corpse as a metaphor for the Anglo-Irish relationship.
14
Kevin Grant, “Bones of Contention: The Repatriation of the Remains of Roger
Casement,” Journal of British Studies 41 (July 2002): 329-53; McDiarmid, “The
Posthumous Life of Roger Casement,” p. 148.
15
See, for example, PRO, FO 95/776, memo of Francis Lindley described in letter of
Mansfeldt de C. Findlay to Sir Edward Grey, Oct. 31, 1914, quoted by Roger Sawyer,
Casement: The Flawed Hero (London, 1984), p. 116; Ernest Hambloch, British Consul.
Memories of Thirty Years’ Service in Europe and Brazil (London, 1938), p. 74; Princess
Blücher to René MacColl, Mar. 10, 1954, in MacColl, Roger Casement: A New Judgment
(London, 1956), p. 152; R. B. Cunninghame Graham to W. H. Nevinson, 1928, quoted by
Jeffrey Meyers, A Fever at the Core. The Idealist in Politics (London, 1976), p. 85; W. J.
McCormack, Roger Casement in Death. Or Haunting the Free State (Dublin, 2002), p.
77; Adrian Weale, Patriot Traitors. Roger Casement, John Amery and the Real Meaning
of Treason (London, 2001), p. 55; Reid, Roger Casement, pp. 147-49; Dudgeon, Roger
Casement, pp. 119, 162, 341-42, 435, 445-46, 503-4, 550-58, 568-79.
16
H. Montgomery Hyde, Trial of Sir Roger Casement (London, 1960), pp. cliv-clv.
17
The 1911 Black Cash Ledger, Jan.-Aug., is particularly rich in examples for London;
Dudgeon, Roger Casement, pp. 258-98; also, for 1911 Black Diary, pp. 326-27.
18
Dudgeon, Roger Casement, p. 225.
19
John Addington Symonds, The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, ed. Phyllis
Grosskurth (London, 1984); Xavier Mayne [Edward Irenaeus Prime Stevenson], The
Intersexes: A History of Similisexualism as a Problem in Social Life (privately printed,
1908); J. R. Ackerley, My Father & Myself (London, 1968). More recently, for the most
famous mid-century examples, see John Lahr, ed., The Orton Diaries (London, 1989);
Tom Driberg, Ruling Passions (New York, 1977).
20
See Colm Tóibín, “The Tragedy of Roger Casement,” New York Review of Books, May
27, 2004, p. 55; Dudgeon, Roger Casement, p. xvi: “He showed himself to be an early
exemplar of what is now standard sexual behaviour for most gay men.”
21
For the locales and practices of casual sex between males, particularly in London, see
Mayne, The Intersexes, pp. 212-20, 426-40; Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out. Homosexual
Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London and New York,
rev. ed., 1990), chap. 3; Jeffrey Weeks, “Inverts, Perverts, and Mary-Annes: Male
Prostitution and the Regulation of Homosexuality in England in the Nineteenth and Early
Twentieth Centuries,” Journal of Homosexuality 6, 1/2 (Fall/Winter 1980-1): 113-34;
Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society. The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800 (London
15
and New York, 1981), pp. 111-14; Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London, 1987), pp.
366-68; Randolph Trumbach, “London,” in David Higgs, ed., Queer Sites: Gay Urban
Histories Since 1600 (London and New York, 1999), p. 196; H. Montgomery Hyde, The
Other Love. An Historical and Contemporary Survey of Homosexuality in Britain
(London, 1972), pp. 138-41, 164; Richard Davenport-Hines, Sex, Death and Punishment.
Attitudes to Sex and Sexuality in Britain Since the Renaissance (London, 1990), p. 146;
Dudgeon, Roger Casement, p. 334; Matt Houlbrook, “The Private World of Public
Urinals: London 1918-57,” The London Journal 25, 1 (2000): 52-70; Matt Houlbrook,
“For Whose Convenience? Gay Guides, Cognitive Maps and the Construction of
Homosexual London 1917-1967,” in Identities in Space: Contested Terrains in the
Western City since 1850, eds. Simon Gunn and Robert J. Morris (Aldershot, 2001), pp.
165-86; Matt Houlbrook, “Soldier Heroes and Rent Boys: Homosex, Masculinities, and
Britishness in the Brigade of Guards, circa 1900-1960,” Journal of British Studies 42
(July 2003): 351-88; Matt Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885-1914
(Cambridge, 2003), pp. 22-41.
22
Reid, Roger Casement, pp. 484-86; Dudgeon, Roger Casement, chaps. 13, 15, and
passim.
23
PRO, FO 95/776, memo of Francis Lindley described in letter of Mansfeldt de C.
Findlay to Sir Edward Grey, Oct. 31, 1914, quoted by Sawyer, Casement, p. 116.
24
PRO, HO 161/4. I am largely relying on the transcriptions by Dudgeon, Roger
Casement, pp. 335 (Sept. 18), 372 (Dec. 14).
25
Roger Casement, The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement, ed. Angus Mitchell,
(London, 1997), pp. 26-27.
26
Ronald Hyam’s suggestion in his Empire and Sexuality. The British Experience
(Manchester, 1991) that the Empire acted as a magnet for many homosexual men seeking
freedom from domestic strictures of space and morality is thus not really applicable to
Casement.
27
Dudgeon, Roger Casement, pp. 232-36.
28
Sawyer, Casement, p. 90.
29
Angus McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity. Policing Sexual Boundaries 1870-1930,
(Chicago and London, 1997), chap. 1; Angus McLaren, Twentieth-Century Sexuality. A
History (Oxford and Malden, Mass., 1999), chap. 5; F. B. Smith, “Labouchere’s
Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Bill,” Historical Studies [Australia] 17, 67
(Oct. 1976): 165-75; Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the
Queer Moment (New York, 1994).
30
Stephen Gwynn, quoted by Noyes, The Accusing Ghost, p. 118.
31
Louis McQuilland, Sunday Herald, Apr. 30, 1916, quoted by L. G. Redmond-Howard,
Sir Roger Casement. A Character Sketch without Prejudice (Dublin, 1916), p. 8.
32
G. Jean-Aubry, Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters (London, 1927), vol. I, pp. 325-26,
quoted by Reid, Roger Casement, p. 14.
33
Quoted by Catherine Ann Cline, E. D. Morel 1873-1924. The Strategies of Protest,
(Belfast, 1980), p. 38. See also Denis Gwynn, The Life and Death of Roger Casement,
(London, 1930), p. 23.
34
For example, May 29, 1910; Dudgeon, Roger Casement, p. 215.
35
Oct. 21, 1911; Dudgeon, Roger Casement, p. 346.
16
36
Dudgeon, Roger Casement, p. 117.
See Hyam, Empire and Sexuality, pp. 33-35.
38
April 17, 1903; Dudgeon, Roger Casement, p. 121. Forgery theorists used to believe
that the sexual exploits in the 1903 diary were crude interpolations into a genuine
document, so they explained away this passage as the musings of a relatively enlightened
liberal. See, for example, Roger McHugh, “Casement. The Public Record Office
Manuscripts,” Threshold 4, 1 (Spring/Summer 1960): 34.
39
Interview with MacColl, in MacColl, Roger Casement, p. 228.
40
Letter to Irish Times, Apr. 16, 1956, quoted by Noyes, The Accusing Ghost, pp. 165-66
41
Mayne, The Intersexes, chap. 12. See also H. G. Cocks, Nameless Offences:
Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century (London and New York, 2003), chap. 5.
The truth of the remarks has been doubted because it flatly contradicts Casement’s
outraged denials to other members of the defense team when they broached the subject
with him. See memo of Michael Francis Doyle, quoted by Herbert O. Mackey, Roger
Casement. The Truth about the Forged Diaries (Dublin, 1966), p. 38; letter from Doyle
to Noyes in Noyes, The Accusing Ghost, p. 167; Brian Inglis, Roger Casement (London,
1973), p. 333; Reid, Roger Casement, pp. 471-72.
42
Quoted by The News of the World, July 16, 1916, quoted by William J. Maloney, The
Forged Casement Diaries (Dublin and Cork, 1936), pp. 14-15.
43
Walter Hines Page to Robert Lansing, July 3, 1916, quoted by Mackey, Roger
Casement, pp. 27-28.
44
Quoted by H. Montgomery Hyde, Trial of Sir Roger Casement (London, 1960), p.
cxlv.
45
Quoted by Brian Inglis, Roger Casement (London, 1973), p. 366.
46
Unpublished autobiography, quoted by Hyde, Trial of Sir Roger Casement, p. cxxi. See
also PRO, HO 144/1636/311643/49, memo of Harris, n.d.; Harris to Archbishop of
Canterbury, July 20.
47
Memo to Cabinet, July 17, 1916, quoted by Noyes, The Accusing Ghost, p. 18.
48
PRO, HO 144/1636/311643/40, Opinions of Dr. R. Percy Smith and Dr. Maurice
Craig, July 10, 1916.
49
PRO, HO 144/1637/311643/67, Rev. Canon Lindsay to Home Secretary.
50
Interview with MacColl, Nov. 16, 1954, in MacColl, Roger Casement, p. 288. See also
A. M. Sullivan, The Last Serjeant (London, 1952), p. 272.
51
Quoted by William J. Maloney, The Forged Casement Diaries (Dublin and Cork,
1936), p. 186.
52
Letter to W. H. Nevinson, quoted by Jeffrey Meyers, A Fever at the Core. The Idealist
in Politics (London, 1976), p. 85.
53
See Hyde, Trial of Sir Roger Casement, p. cxlvi; Reid, Roger Casement, p. 460;
McDiarmid, “The Posthumous Life of Roger Casement,” pp. 136-37; McCormack, Roger
Casement in Death, p. 172.
54
Ruth Dudley Edwards, Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure (London, 1979), pp.
52-54, 126-28.
55
William J. Maloney, The Forged Casement Diaries (Dublin and Cork, 1936).
56
Alfred Noyes, The Accusing Ghost or Justice for Casement (London, 1957).
37
17
57
Roger McHugh, “Casement. The Public Record Office Manuscripts,” Threshold 4, 1
(Spring/Summer 1960), pp. 28-57.
58
Herbert O. Mackey, Roger Casement. The Truth about the Forged Diaries (Dublin,
1966).
59
McHugh, “Casement,” pp. 40-41, 47, 49.
60
Mackey, Casement, p. 56.
61
Dorothy Wellesley, ed., Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley,
(London and Oxford, 1940), p. 128, quoted by McDiarmid, “The Posthumous Life of
Roger Casement,” p. 136; Irish Times, Apr. 21, 1956, p.9, quoted by McDiarmid, p. 142.
62
Alfred C. Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia and London,
1948), chap. 21; Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offenses and Prostitution [The
Wolfenden Report] (London, 1957); Patrick Higgins, Heterosexual Dictatorship. Male
Homosexuality in Postwar Britain (London, 1996); Peter Wildeblood, Against the Law
(London, 1955).
63
MacColl, Roger Casement, p. 285.
64
Peter Singleton-Gates and Maurice Girodias, The Black Diaries. An Account of Roger
Casement’s Life and Times with a Collection of his Diaries and Public Writings (Paris,
1959), p. 18.
65
A. L. Rowse, Homosexuals in History. A Study of Ambivalence in Society, Literature
and the Arts (London, 1977), pp. 259-63.
66
Brian Inglis, Roger Casement (London, 1973), p. 15.
67
Reid, Roger Casement, pp. 40, 145-46.
68
Sawyer, Casement, p. 145 and passim. See also Roger Casement, Roger Casement’s
Diaries. 1910: The Black and the White, ed. Roger Sawyer (London, 1997).
69
See, for example, Ernest Hambloch, British Consul. Memories of Thirty Years’ Service
in Europe and Brazil (London, 1938), pp. 73, 75-76; Ernest Hambloch, Here and There.
A Medley of Memories (London, 1968), p.94; Inglis, Roger Casement, p. 388; New York
Public Library, Quinn Collection, Joseph Conrad to John Quinn, May 24, 1916, quoted
by Reid, Roger Casement, p. 15.
70
Reid, Roger Casement, p. 481.
71
A. J. P. Taylor, Essays in English History (Harmondsworth, 1976), p. 217 (TLS review
of Inglis, Roger Casement (1973)).
72
David Rudkin, “The Chameleon & the Kilt. The Complexities of Roger Casement,”
Encounter XLI (Aug. 2, 1973): 74-76. An amended version of the broadcast is published
as Cries from Casement as his Bones are Brought to Dublin (London, 1974).
73
See, for example, Kieran Rose, Diverse Communities: The Evolution of Lesbian and
Gay Politics in Ireland (Cork, 1994).
74
Speech of Apr. 25, 1999. Fianna Fáil web site, <http://www.fiannafail.ie>. Retrieved
Oct. 6, 2001. The resulting symposium, organized by the Royal Irish Academy, took
place in May 2000. For more ambivalent signals coming from the Irish government, see
Ruth Dudley Edwards, “When truth is at odds with our image of an Irish hero,” Sunday
Independent (online), Mar. 17, 2002.
75
McDiarmid, “The Posthumous Life of Roger Casement,” pp. 150-52; McDiarmid,
“Martyr for Many Causes,” New York Times, “Book Review,” Feb. 8, 1998; Michael
Carson, The Knight of the Flaming Heart (1995); Eibhear Walshe, “Oscar’s Mirror,” in
18
Lesbian and Gay Visions of Ireland: Towards the Twenty-first Century, eds. Íde
O’Carroll and Eoin Collins (London, 1995), pp. 149-51; Jamie O’Neill, At Swim Two
Boys (London, 2001).
76
Guardian, Mar. 16, 2002.
77
W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (New York, 1998), p. 134.
78
Colm Tóibín, “A Whale of a Time,” London Review of Books 19, 19 (Oct. 2, 1997), p.
26.
79
Daily Telegraph, Jan. 6, 2003.
80
Eoin Ó Máille and Michael Payne, The Vindication of Roger Casement—Computer
Analysis and Comparisons (privately printed, 1994), quoted by McCormack, Roger
Casement, p. 209 and Dudgeon, Roger Casement, p. 576.
81
In a public discussion with Dudgeon; Dudgeon, Roger Casement, p. 602.
82
Ruth Dudley Edwards, “When truth is at odds with our image of an Irish hero,” Sunday
Independent (online), Mar. 17, 2002.
83
Irish Times, Aug. 22, 2001.
84
Jack Moylett in An Phoblacht/Republican News, Sept. 26, 2002. For an interesting
insight into Republicanism’s problems with homosexuality, see Brendí McClenaghan,
“Letter from a Gay Republican: H-Block 5,” in O’Carroll and Collins, Lesbian and Gay
Visions, pp. 122-30.
85
Roger Casement, The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement, ed. Angus Mitchell,
(London, 1997), p. 9.
86
As I discovered during a question-and-answer session after a talk to the Archives Gaies
du Québec at McGill University, Mar. 19, 2004.
87
Charles Nicholl, “Into the dark heart,” Times Literary Supplement, 4945 (Jan. 9, 1998),
p. 32; Christopher Andrew, review of Dudgeon, Roger Casement, in Sunday Telegraph,
Jan. 5, 2003. See also Dudgeon, Roger Casement, p. xix; Ronald Hyam, Empire and
Sexuality. The British Experience (Manchester, 1991), p. 36.
88
Dudgeon, Roger Casement, p. 353.
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