Queer lives during conflict in Northern Ireland: deconstructing the “two communities” model

ABSTRACT

This article poses the question of how incorporating the “subjugated knowledge” of queer histories of the Troubles in Northern Ireland affects understandings of the conflict in international relations and security studies. It argues that while the centrality of the “two communities” model drives all other issues to the political margins and perpetuates division, adopting a queer approach can deconstruct the identities of those communities and suggest ways to move beyond that model. It uses Jack Halberstam’s queer methodology as a “scavenger methodology” to draw on existing published interviews, as well as plays and films representing queer experiences during the Troubles, and a queer theoretical approach that seeks to both foreground queer experiences and challenge normative and binary understandings of identity in this context. Focusing on queer lives during the conflict reveals that constructing the identities of the two communities depends on excluding the queer subject, that queer people’s security during the conflict was shaped by their queer identity, and that queerness can and has been mobilized to deconstruct received narratives and the apparently essential identities of the two communities, demonstrating some possibilities for dismantling the unionist/nationalist dichotomy.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexuality
• Northern Ireland
• the Troubles
• LGBTQ
• media

Introduction

In 1983, a year after male homosexual sex acts were decriminalized in Northern Ireland, the National Union of Students’ Lesbian and Gay Conference in Belfast was targeted by protesters from the “Save Ulster from Sodomy” campaign, organized by the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). Gay activist Tarlach Mac Niallais responded with a T-shirt calling to instead “Save Sodomy from Ulster” (Fay 2020). This T-shirt pinpointed the paradox at the heart of queer issues in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. In a context where, even after the conflict, politics are shaped by sectarianism (Ashe 2019, 2), all other debates or interests were excluded from the public sphere (Conrad 2008, 117). During the conflict, queer issues were therefore not considered political, yet queerness was political. The British government used Northern Ireland’s supposed difference from the rest of the United Kingdom to justify omitting it from decriminalization in England and Wales in 1967 (Conrad 2004, 41), and the DUP’s campaign emphasized this political independence (Conrad 2004, 43–44). Mac Niallais’s counterpoint – that it was Northern Irish politics that were instead a threat to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people – highlights LGBTQ people’s exclusion during the Troubles. I argue that this exclusion was supported by the production of the “two communities” in Northern Ireland as essential and mutually opposed, and that this model has been reified in academic analyses of the conflict. In response, I suggest that a queer approach to studying the conflict and Northern Ireland reveals LGBTQ people in the region’s “subjugated knowledge” – knowledge that was functionally present but masked (Foucault 2003, 7) – and exposes the inadequacy of the two communities model.

I must first clarify how I am using some terms in this article, given the impossibility of an objective approach to Irish history (Mac Bhloscaidh 2020). “The Troubles” refers to the 1968–1998 conflict in Northern Ireland (Bew 2007). Nationalists (predominantly Catholics) want a united Irish state, whereas unionists (predominantly Protestants) support the union of Northern Ireland with Britain. Republicans and loyalists are those in each group respectively who are prepared to take up arms (Fulton 2002, 191). I expand on the two communities model in the context section below, but briefly it understands nationalists/republicans/Catholics and unionists/loyalists/Protestants as essential, diametrically opposed “communities,” and the tensions between them as inevitable. While certain political parties or paramilitaries may claim to represent these communities and contribute to their identity formation, the model refers to all people who identify with these terms.

While potentially anachronistic, “queer” is a useful term here as both a theoretical concept and a term that links diverse sexualities and gender expressions. I use both “queer” and “LGBTQ” to emphasize the multiplicity of sexualities and genders under this umbrella, and their potentially anti-normative positionality. Theoretically, I understand “queer” like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1993, 8) as an “open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.” For Cynthia Weber (2014, 597), queer international theories investigate how queer people “are disciplined, normalized or capitalized on by and for” international actors, which supports my study of the relationship between queer people, the Troubles, and the two communities framework. Like Katherine Fobear (2023), then, I use “queer” not only as an adjective but also as a verb to mean centering queer people’s experiences and voices, and deconstructing productions of sexuality and gender that uphold normative power and discourses. I thereby aim to highlight queer people’s experiences and their specificity during the conflict, and how the presence of queer people demonstrates the inadequacy of the two communities model.

This article makes the theoretical claim that a queer approach to the Troubles reveals that the two community identities depend on excluding queer people, but the queer counterpublic in Northern Ireland exposes the contingency of those identities and the model, including to the cisheterosexual public. I start with a brief discussion of the methods and sources used before establishing the dominance and exclusionary nature of the two communities framework. I then present three insights from a queer perspective: that producing the two community identities requires excluding queer people from those communities and academic analyses; that LGBTQ people’s (in)security during the Troubles was shaped by their queerness and masked by that exclusion; and that queer people’s art, political organizing, and relationships in Northern Ireland demonstrate the contingency of the two community identities and framework, including to the wider public through their role as a counterpublic. These contributions are significant because, as Sandra McEvoy (2015, 148) argues, it is irresponsible to ignore LGBTQ experiences in post-conflict studies as the limited research so far means that “we really do not know what we are missing.”

Methodology

I make my theoretical argument by centering queer people’s lives and thereby liberating subjugated knowledge about the conflict. There is emerging historical and archival research on queer lives in Northern Ireland (see for example Hulme 2024), but I turn instead to Jack Halberstam’s queer methodology as a “scavenger methodology.” This involves bringing together different methods to gather information about “subjects who have been deliberately or accidentally excluded from traditional studies” (Halberstam 1998, 13). I draw on extracts from interviews published in other studies and analyses of plays and films that depict queer lives during the Troubles. However, the minimal research available into queer experiences of the conflict has meant that this scavenging still necessarily draws on a limited number of sources.

The plays discussed are Divided, Radical and Gorgeous (D.R.A.G.) by Niall Rea and Trouble by Shannon Yee, two plays about LGBTQ people during the conflict produced by TheatreofplucK, a queer Northern Irish theater company that aims to contribute to a “counterpublic cultural discourse” (Rea 2016, 93). Plays written during the Troubles often do not have queer experience as their “dramatic driving force” (Corr 2020, 5), so I looked to plays written since the Good Friday Agreement. While there are more than a dozen plays with queer characters set in Northern Ireland, many remain unpublished and difficult to access (Rea 2016). While Trouble is unpublished, D.R.A.G. is included in Rea’s PhD thesis, and there is secondary literature about both that allows analysis of how they represent sexuality, gender, and the nation. The two films analyzed are The Crying Game (1992) and Breakfast on Pluto (2005), both written and directed by Neil Jordan. There is a distinct lack of Northern Irish queer films, even in comparison to the Republic of Ireland (Macleod 2018, 4). There are two documentaries (The Troubles I’ve Seen (2022) and Lyra (2022)) and a short film (Homebird (2022)) about queer experiences in the region, but Jordan’s are the only fictional films about LGBTQ lives during the Troubles. Drawing on these sources helps to mitigate some of the limitations of using interviews conducted and published by others. Using “aesthetic subjects” can yield “a different kind of political apprehension” than other sources (Shapiro 2013, 11), engaging with actual experiences and challenging epistemological certainties (Shapiro 2013, xv). This therefore lends itself well to the deconstruction of essentialized identities in this article.

A further motivation for basing my theoretical argument on already published empirical research is to minimize research fatigue. This harm is common among marginalized and over-researched populations (Ashley 2021) and may be likely in Northern Ireland, where some researchers report attempting to access marginalized populations at the same time as multiple others (Feenan 2002). The interview evidence cited is published in Marian Duggan’s monograph Queering Conflict: Examining Lesbian and Gay Experiences of Homophobia in Northern Ireland and in articles by Rob Kitchin and Karen Lysaght. Duggan’s work is based on 24 life history interviews with gay men and lesbians who lived through the conflict, conducted as part of her PhD, completed in 2010 (Duggan 2012, 5), and Kitchin and Lysaght’s centers on in-depth interviews with 30 LGBTQ people from Northern Ireland in 2000 and 2001 (Kitchin and Lysaght 2003, 492). Duggan’s findings are a major source for this article.

Context

Literature about the Troubles frequently demarcates diverse identities into the two communities of republican/nationalist/Catholic or loyalist/unionist/Protestant and assumes other aspects of political debate to be irrelevant (Zalewski 2008, 5–6). It portrays the communities as discrete, monolithic, and fundamentally opposed, framing the “Northern Irish problem” as a clash of religions or nationalisms and implying that conflict is inevitable (Vaughan-Williams 2008, 39). This ignores differences within communities and excludes individuals who do not primarily identify through community membership, marginalizing them discursively and in terms of access to space and politics (O’Rourke et al. 2013, 31–32). The next section explores more fully how this excludes queerness. Marysia Zalewski advocates demonstrating the instability of such foundational narratives “by illustrating how that which appears not to be present, is present and has effects” (Zalewski 2008, 6, emphasis in original) and encourages us to look “at the shape described by absence” (Zalewski 2005, 209). Adopting this approach demonstrates that the two communities framework depends on excluding non-normative sexualities and genders. I propose therefore that studying the conflict from a queer perspective can deconstruct and disrupt the dominance of this model.

Several groups are excluded by the two communities thesis. Minority ethnic and migrant communities continue to feel neglected by its dominance in policy and funding decisions (Northern Ireland Affairs Committee 2022) and face violent exclusions through, for example, rising racist hate crimes (PSNI and NISRA 2022). Another excluded group (despite many being practicing Catholics) are Irish Travellers (Nic Craith 2002, 22). Sinéad Ní Shúinéar (2002) argues that the Irish have transferred the othering imposed on them through colonialism onto Travellers to define who the Irish are not. In Northern Ireland, this results in racism and discrimination, leading to ill-health and extreme poverty (Sovacool and Furszyfer Del Rio 2022), which are exacerbated by discriminatory and criminalizing policies and state interventions that pursue assimilation rather than protection (McVeigh 2008). The monolithic production of the two communities thus impacts several groups who differ from dominant norms.

While other groups are excluded from the model, there are specific advantages to a queer theoretical approach and focus. As the fluidity of queerness “brings into question the coherence of all identity categories” (Conrad 2004, 21), it can deconstruct the identities that make up the two communities model. A queer lens highlights how LGBTQ people in Northern Ireland are mobilizing this, such as through art that seeks “to explode binaries and all identity constructions in Northern Ireland” (Rea 2016, 162), and thus extending its effects beyond queer people. LGBTQ people in Northern Ireland are a counterpublic that simultaneously addresses itself and the wider public, making space for alternative identity formations and discourses (Conrad 2008), and enabling solidarity. Moving away from identities and politics that are embedded in ethno-nationalism and heteronormativity can help to undermine state and paramilitary cultures, which may enable the rise of alternative political cultures outside of these institutions.

Northern Ireland’s heteropatriarchy

A queer analysis enables us to interrogate the mutual constitution of the “normal” and the “perverse” (Richter-Montpetit 2018, 224). I thereby demonstrate that the two communities’ “normal” identities depend on the exclusion of the perverse queer subject to define and legitimize themselves, and that the conflict reinforced those norms. We can see this process in the role of the family in Northern Ireland, the impact of Christianity and sectarianism, the “Save Ulster from Sodomy” campaign, and the construction of the nationalist community as feminized and of the paramilitary as queer.

In twentieth-century Northern Ireland, the heteronormative family maintained social control and reproduced the two communities’ identities, positioning the queer subject as a threat. In such contexts, the nuclear family, or “family cell,” which produces the “main” and “perverted” elements of sexuality (Foucault 1998, 108), defines and limits acceptable sexuality and the nation (Conrad 2004, 4). Colonization and patriarchal Christianity had made the family central in Ireland across sectarian boundaries (Conrad 2004, 4–5). As the state relaxed controls on sexuality at the end of the nineteenth century, continued surveillance and secrecy within the family (Conrad 2004, 9) made non-normative sexualities invisible. Unionist and nationalist discourses endorsed the family as defending morality and reproducing “the cause” ideologically and biologically (Conrad 2004, 10). This is provocatively illustrated by Bernadette Devlin McAliskey’s response during the peace process to the proposed requirement for a majority in the North to consent to reunification: “What are we confined to – outbreeding them? What are our choices? Either we shoot them, or we outbreed them. There’s no politics here. It’s a numbers game” (Cahill 1995, 57): Kathryn Conrad (2004, 14–15) therefore compares the family cell to a revolutionary cell, with each controlling information and reproducing their form of nationalism. Queer people were therefore understood not to reproduce the sectarian cause (Conrad 2004, 120) and were thus excluded from nationalism and unionism, with gay men especially represented as threatening the family cell and the nation state (Conrad 2004, 22). The family’s role in concealing transgressions is demonstrated by the greater scrutiny of women’s sexuality during the Troubles and in the accounts by lesbians of sexual assaults that were often tacitly condoned by their families, apparently with the intention of punishing, repressing, or even reorienting them (Duggan 2012, 106–107). Scrutinizing heteronormativity therefore enables us to understand how it structured identity in Northern Ireland.

Christianity further upheld heteropatriarchy and excluded LGBTQ people from both communities. High rates of religious practice originated during the nineteenth century (Larkin 1984, 5–9) concurrently with reforms in Irish Catholicism (Kitchin and Lysaght 2004, 87) that introduced greater regulation of sexuality (Martin 1997, 95). This sexual puritanism reinforced the “centrality of the heterosexual, procreative, patriarchal family” (Martin 1997, 96), as did the “shadow state” provided by the Catholic Church in post-partition Northern Ireland (Kitchin and Lysaght 2004, 87). Protestant denominations in Northern Ireland exhibited a similar social and sexual puritanism (Kitchin and Lysaght 2004, 87–88) and organizations such as the Orange Order reinforced normative Protestant sexuality (Kitchin and Lysaght 2004, 91). While loyalists had some of the lowest rates of church attendance in Northern Ireland, evangelical ideas and cultural relationships with Protestant churches were deeply embedded in their ideologies and subcultures (Mitchell 2010), demonstrating Christianity’s enduring influence even where rates of practice were lower. Conservative Christianity in Northern Ireland therefore upheld widespread heterosexism (Kitchin and Lysaght 2003, 493) and limited the queer community’s ability to provide a counter-discourse (Jeffrey-Poulter 1991, 147–148). Sectarian tensions and the emotional nature of evangelical Christianity contributed to the heated language in Protestant discourse on sexuality, such as the perceived threat to the traditional heterosexual masculinities of Northern Ireland (O’Leary 2009, 132). This language further excluded LGBTQ people and agitated attitudes that made them more insecure. The exclusion of LGBTQ people by heteronormative Christian identity in Northern Ireland was therefore reinforced by the sectarian tensions that drove people to fortify the boundaries of those identities by rejecting potential threats.

Defining oneself against LGBTQ people supported certain organizations’ construction of their community membership, as demonstrated by the DUP’s “Save Ulster from Sodomy” campaign. The campaign, launched in 1977 (Goldhaber 2007, 37), included large advertisements in national newspapers, targeting Sunday worshippers, and a petition opposing the decriminalization of homosexuality that gained 70,000 signatures (Duggan 2012, 53). Some LGBTQ people considered it to be designed to unify the DUP and hide internal instabilities by creating an external enemy that kept the DUP in the media spotlight for the “right reasons” and deflected bad press (Duggan 2012, 57). It did this by invoking faith and family as fundamental elements of Protestant identity as well as the fear of “God’s curse,” mass murder, and rape if male homosexuality were legalized (Duggan 2012, 53). The campaign’s construction of homosexuality as an uncontainable, foreign threat unified the Protestant community and cast the DUP as defending that community from Britain’s decriminalization, while making it harder for the Catholic Church to follow suit and appear to support the DUP (Conrad 2004, 44–46). The campaign therefore helped to construct the Protestant Northern Irish community as morally, socially, and politically distinct from both Britain (Conrad 2004, 44) and Northern Ireland’s Catholic population while explicitly defining itself on values that needed defending. Interestingly, this contrasts with some former colonies in the Global South, where a rejection of queerness is portrayed as a process of decolonizing but continues to reproduce the colonizer’s “binary structure of signification” (Kapoor 2015, 1619). Here, the DUP was not seeking to be independent of Britain, merely distinct, perpetuating both the heteronormativity of colonialism and the emerging homonationalism of a more “progressive” Britain.

The nationalist community also defined themselves against queer figures. Pre-partition, discourses that defined Irish national identity by the “disadvantages” of femininity and emotionalism were widespread (Cairns and Richards 1988, 50) and mobilized to justify or take the blame for colonization. Eibhear Walshe (1996, 161) argues that this gendered dynamic of colonialism causes postcolonial societies to struggle with queerness and to narrow gender hierarchies. The homoerotic was therefore expelled from Irish discourse (Walshe 1996, 162). Ashis Nandy (1983, 10) suggests that the colonized reclaiming their masculinity is the main threat to colonizers, an approach reflected by the prioritization of militarized masculinities by Irish nationalists and their distancing from homosexuality (Conrad 2004, 24–25). Normative Irish masculinity was supported by the establishment of organizations such as the Gaelic Athletic Association (Kitchin and Lysaght 2004, 90) and the linking of masculinity to militarism in republican propaganda (Martin 1997, 106). The example of Roger Casement, a nationalist tried for his role in the 1916 Easter Rising and hanged after evidence of his homosexuality emerged in his diaries, provides an early example (Conrad 2004, 22). Conrad argues that the British constructed him as the “‘abnormal’ Irish rebel/homosexual” (Conrad 2001, 128), whereas his supporters claimed that the diaries were a forgery (Conrad 2004, 27–28). These responses therefore reflect, as Rahul Rao (2020, 52) reminds us, the agency of the colonized in perpetuating and resignifying homophobia, and the “shape-shifting versatility” of homophobia in the service of both colonialism and decolonialism. However, highlighting this can help to delegitimize that homophobia (Rao 2020, 52). The co-constitution of sexuality, gender, and nationalism is further complicated in partitioned contexts (Fadem 2016, 28–29). Maureen Fadem (2016, 29) uses The Crying Game and Breakfast on Pluto as examples of “gender-burdened postcoloniality” necessitating escape, arguing that Northern Ireland’s fragmented location fails to constitute normative male protagonists who then become cut off from Ireland by the border dividing it and by their gender and sexual identities. Decolonial nationalism therefore appears to encourage heteronormative gender identities that are inaccessible for queer subjects.

The nationalist community’s desire to uphold heteronormative hypermasculinity may also have been a response to the association of treason and terror with queerness. Queer sexualities and treason have long been associated (Manjikian 2020, 109–110). In Northern Ireland, this led both republican and state forces to assume that gay men were unreliable and vulnerable to blackmail, pressuring them to remain closeted and avoid political activity (Kitchin and Lysaght 2004, 92). Jasbir Puar (2017, xxxi) suggests that this association extends to terrorism, citing the depiction of terrorists in the United States as emasculated, feminine, and pathological, and Ilan Kapoor (2015, 1616) specifically locates perceptions of queer security threats in (former) colonies. While the historical context is different and the racialized and Orientalist elements of the construction of Muslim terrorists do not apply to Northern Ireland, parallels can still be drawn. Mary Manjikian (2020, 44) suggests that paramilitaries are read as queer because they occupy an in-between space in the binary between legitimate, masculine military activity and the more “feminine” soft power of diplomacy. The queer figure of the republican terrorist is represented in Breakfast on Pluto as Kitten becomes a suspect in a bombing purely because she is Irish and transgender (Jordan 2005, 1:23:24), representing the British state’s equation of queerness and terror. Republican attempts to reject this framing are shown by paramilitaries refusing to shoot her because she is a “nancy boy,” despite her having destroyed a weapons cache (Jordan 2005, 45:46). They cannot be seen to be threatened by someone who is gender non-conforming and at the same time legitimize their own identity as nationalist heroes, which the film shows being constructed through the children’s game of “dying for Ireland” (Jordan 2005, 7:20). In this way too, then, the Troubles reinforced the pre-existing heteronormativity of community identities.

The dominance of the family and Christianity in Ireland therefore informed the construction of highly heteropatriarchal community identities that were only further reinforced by the sectarian tensions in Northern Ireland after partition and by the shoring up of political ethno-national identities during the Troubles. Studying this heteronormativity reveals how these identities relied on the exclusion of LGBTQ people and highlights the failure of the two communities model to account for queer people in Northern Ireland.

Queer lives during the Troubles

Security studies has rarely considered sexuality a factor in experiences of conflict (McEvoy 2015, 142) and thus scholars overlook the specificities of LGBTQ insecurity. By centering these specificities instead, I seek to contribute to a growing field of queer security studies that includes significant work in areas such as the Women, Peace and Security agenda (Hagen 2016), gender-based violence in conflict-related environments (Loken and Hagen 2022), forced migration (Ritholtz and Buxton 2021), and visual politics (Cooper-Cunningham 2022). Studying the Troubles through a queer lens uncovers the subjugated knowledge of LGBTQ people’s experiences of violence, including at the hands of the police and paramilitaries; how people managed insecurity, found community, and organized; and the psychological impact of insecurity. Much of the discussion here focuses on gay men, as their histories are more accessible due to the criminalization of male homosexual activity and the fight for decriminalization. This limitation to the data and consequent marginalization of other subjects such as lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people reflects similar problems in other studies of conflict-related violence (Hagen 2016, 316). This analysis is therefore only able to shed light on some LGBTQ experiences and likewise offers little insight into intersecting power structures such as class or gender.

During the Troubles, LGBTQ people faced high levels of homophobic violence and police harassment. The conflict both exacerbated and provided an excuse for police homophobia. Queer experiences of insecurity during the conflict were under-recorded; for example, the police only began recording homophobic incidents in 2000 (Radford, Betts, and Ostermeyer 2006, 16). However, the first survey quantifying homophobic violence in Northern Ireland conducted in 1994 found that 39 percent of respondents had experienced homophobic violence in the previous five years and that 67 percent had been verbally abused (Mason and Palmer 1996, 106). The police were often part of the problem. Duggan’s interview evidence suggests that the police frequently raided “gay-friendly” venues in Belfast, appearing more concerned with intimidating LGBTQ people than providing security (Duggan 2012, 62). This was part of a culture of police harassment; her interviewees recounted deliberate targeting of gay men, not reporting assaults for fear of arrest themselves (Duggan 2012, 64), and a concern about reprisals for reporting (Duggan 2012, 107). Some thought that the police’s heavy-handed approach was a response to the powerlessness that they felt over the conflict (Duggan 2012, 63). A 1994 report found evidence of police harassment of gay men in cruising areas and of homophobic and sexist police harassment of lesbians (McVeigh 1994, 136–138). This was motivated by “assumed knowledge or contacts” and a perception that non-normative sexuality was a “vulnerability” that would encourage cooperation with the police (McVeigh 1994, 136). The insecurity and homophobia of the period therefore effectively legitimized the state’s use of violence to control information (Conrad 2004, 124). The instability of the Troubles thus disproportionately impacted LGBTQ people as they provided the police with easy targets either in comparison to the paramilitaries or for blackmail.

Non-normative sexualities were policed within the communities too, particularly by paramilitaries. Conrad (2004, 125) suggests that paramilitaries treated those who were perceived as a threat to the heteropatriarchal family similarly to other “informers,” forcing some LGBTQ people, those rumored to be queer, and sex workers to leave local communities (Kitchin and Lysaght 2003, 493). Paramilitaries also targeted gay venues, such as by shooting a policeman in a gay bar in 1997 or attacking and attempting to extort another gay venue (Kitchin 2002, 215), demonstrating that queer sexualities were not tolerated (Duggan 2012, 35). LGBTQ people’s unwillingness to report such instances for fear of reprisals and of community members condoning violence against “deserving victims” exacerbated the resulting insecurity (Duggan 2012, 37), which may in turn have limited the political motivation to tackle homophobic violence (Duggan 2012, 36–37). The assumption that all violence was related to the conflict helped to erase these histories of violence, such as in the case of Frederick Davis, a gay Protestant man believed to have been murdered by republicans in 1973 (McKittrick et al. 1999, 377–378), whose case Jeff Dudgeon asked the police to reopen in 2006 to consider evidence that the murder was homophobic (Dudgeon 2006; Toops 2014, 55–56). The salient aspect of Davis’ identity was hidden in the record of his murder. The Troubles therefore not only made LGBTQ people vulnerable to violent policing of social norms by paramilitaries, but also subsequently erased those experiences.

The omnipresence of surveillance encouraged LGBTQ people to discipline their actions and become even less visible (Conrad 2004, 98). Surveillance made “passing” important (Kitchin and Lysaght 2003, 494), as individuals tried to hide their sexual identity. Self-regulation included socializing less with co-workers and neighbors, resulting in isolated lives (Toops 2014, 50). The precarious security of passing and the accompanying fear of exposure (Wilkinson 2017, 114) generates a specific form of insecurity. While some cited the home as a place of freedom, Kitchin and Lysaght’s interviewees were often still not out to their family (Kitchin and Lysaght 2003, 497–498) and had limited options for housing in safe locations, particularly in highly segregated cities such as Belfast (Mulholland 2002, 152–153) and Derry/Londonderry (Mulholland 2002, 128–129). In Belfast, many respondents chose to avoid working-class and sectarian areas, instead opting for mixed places with more transient populations. The queer population remained largely invisible despite this seeming concentration as individuals still self-policed (Kitchin and Lysaght 2003, 498–499). The dominance of surveillance therefore resulted in a choice between complete closeting or policing one’s behavior until difference was not seen as threatening. Duggan considers this the outcome of specifically homophobic violence that marks LGBTQ bodies as targets but also ensures invisibility (Duggan 2012, 41), which was exacerbated during the Troubles by often blaming the victim (Duggan 2012, 45), thus further encouraging invisibility.

This insecurity had a psychological impact, particularly as LGBTQ individuals were often still at risk in settings that were relatively safe for their cisheterosexual peers. They often struggled to reconcile their national/religious identity and their sexual identity (Duggan 2012, 66). Individuals with religious upbringings attested that church teaching on sexuality had generated considerable emotional and mental problems (Kitchin and Lysaght 2004, 88). Stefanie Lehner (2017, 103–104) illustrates this difficulty with reference to Yee’s play Trouble, which compares remaining in Northern Ireland as an LGBTQ person to an abusive relationship in which you seek but are denied acceptance. Some of Duggan’s interviewees recounted religious representatives telling them to choose between their faith and their sexual identity (Duggan 2012, 92). The exclusion of queer people from religion, and in Northern Ireland by association from nationalism, denied them access to “powerful identity-signifiers” that provide the idea of home and the maintenance of ontological security (Kinnvall 2004, 762). The limited tools or support for coping with trauma, along with periods of “morally condemnatory” public discourse, worsened LGBTQ people’s mental distress (Duggan 2012, 123), as did the loneliness of closeting and the psychological toll of passing, along with coping strategies such as high rates of drinking (Duggan 2012, 127–128). This may have disproportionately affected queer women, who were expected to remain closer to home and were thus under greater scrutiny than men (Duggan 2012, 128). LGBTQ people’s physical insecurity during the Troubles was therefore exacerbated by insecure identities and mental health problems.

However, a queer lens reveals that the conflict also allowed LGBTQ people to develop some safe spaces, particularly – and paradoxically – when the conflict was at its most violent. Bomb threats, troops on the streets, and curfews meant that few people were in Belfast city center at night. This allowed LGBTQ people to reclaim space as various gay or gay-friendly venues emerged in the 1970s, attracting people from across the region and facilitating the development of a scene that grew in visibility throughout the decade (Duggan 2012, 59–60). Safety remained an issue, though, with Kitchin and Lysaght’s interviewees recounting choosing their route and transport to venues according to the risk of homophobic abuse (Kitchin and Lysaght 2003, 505). The venues’ locations in areas with a higher presence of security forces (Duggan 2012, 61) and their attendance by army personnel increased the risks for other attendees (Duggan 2012, 64). Once conflict-related violence reduced, however, the venues attracted a wider range of customers (Duggan 2012, 61), making them once again insecure for the LGBTQ community. The peace process particularly – and counterintuitively – put the scene “under threat” as the city center and the Cathedral Quarter were redeveloped, physically reducing queer space and exposing its occupants to a heterosexist gaze (Kitchin and Lysaght 2003, 503–504).

The development of a community facilitated the movement for the decriminalization of homosexuality in the 1970s, while queer women became involved in the feminist movement (Kitchin and Lysaght 2003, 110–112). The movement’s visibility was actually increased by the “Save Ulster from Sodomy” campaign, informing some of Duggan’s interviewees that it was possible to have sex with other men (Duggan 2012, 58). Ironically, the campaign’s discourse produced the queer subjectivities that the DUP were trying to repress (Duggan 2012, 92), giving them a “visible and permanent reality” (Foucault 1998, 44) and providing the vocabulary for the reverse discourse (Foucault 1998, 101) of the gay rights movement. The establishment of organizations such as Cara-Friend also enabled thousands of LGBTQ people to access the queer community and the LGBTQ movement (Duggan 2012, 59). The provision and advertising of services such as their “Lesbian Line” helped to increase visibility through, for example, the decision to use the allegedly political term “lesbian” (Duggan 2012, 109). In some ways, therefore, the insecurity of Northern Ireland actually facilitated the development of spaces where LGBTQ people could express their sexuality and organize politically.

A queer approach to the study of the Troubles thus liberates LGBTQ people’s knowledge about how their security was differentially impacted during the conflict compared to that of cisheterosexual people and how those experiences have been silenced, in part because of those specific insecurities.

Deconstruction and queer alternatives

Applying a queer lens to the Troubles has thus far shown us how the two communities model depends on excluding queer people and how the conflict specifically impacted their (in)security. This section establishes how queer people in Northern Ireland and their art, political organizing, and relationships demonstrate the contingency of the two communities model. Queer theorists understand identity as a signifying practice (Butler 2006, 198) and a generated effect, meaning that “it is neither fatally determined nor fully artificial and arbitrary” (Butler 2006, 201). Following Conrad (2004, 21), I argue therefore that queerness challenges the supposed stability of ideas of the nation in the Northern Irish context because the fluidity of queerness “brings into question the coherence of all identity categories.” The performative nature of community identities means that while they appear to be natural, they are, “in fact, a changeable and revisable reality” (Butler 2006, xxiv). This section argues that a focus on queerness not only exposes the instability of the two community identities and centers queer experiences, but also shows how LGBTQ people act as a counterpublic that engages cisheterosexual people. It particularly investigates the potential impacts of queer performance such as drag, plays, and films; Pride parades; and queer community.

If the deconstruction of identities suggests the potential for alternatives to the two communities model, some may point to the Republic of Ireland as an example of these possibilities. Despite shared histories and identities with Northern Ireland, the Republic has begun including LGBTQ people in its identity construction. Susannah Bowyer (2010, 804) even suggests that the gay male figure became at the end of the twentieth century “an icon of postmodern, globalized national identity” for the Republic. I argue, however, that a queer response to the essential nature of Northern Irish identities can be more critical and radical than the Republic’s homonormativity (O’Brien 2020, 131), which pinkwashes violent nation-making practices such as its migration regime (Luibhéid 2018). By opposing the heteropatriarchy that supports the construction of nationalisms in Northern Ireland, some queer people are rejecting assimilation into the structures of the state that is increasingly possible in the Republic.

The potential that the queer community presents for Northern Ireland is that it not only lies outside of the two communities but also creates a counterpublic that brings others in. Conrad draws on Michael Warner’s conception of a public as “the social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse” (Warner 2005, 90) and a counterpublic as a public constituted by discourse that would be met with hostility in other contexts (Warner 2005, 119). The cross-community queer scene has created a queer counterpublic that is marked off from the dominant unionist and nationalist publics, and that addresses itself beyond out-LGBTQ people toward closeted people and the wider public (Conrad 2008, 120). Participation in queer counterpublics is transformative (Warner 2005, 122) as it creates more spaces in which people can recognize themselves (Warner 2005, 120) and transforms social relations (Warner 2005, 51).

Conrad recognizes the transformative potential of counterpublics in Pride’s occupation of Belfast public space with affection, forging emotional bonds with participants and onlookers and thereby changing the space and those who occupy it (O’Rourke et al. 2013, 32). Rea shows how the success of drag queens in Belfast with queer and straight audiences intervenes in public discourse. He cites one drag queen who hyperbolically performs her community background, seeking to point out “the ridiculousness of the outside world” and to have “a ripple effect out into the straight community” (Rea 2016, 105). Rea highlights the successful mobilization by drag artists of some cisheterosexual people against Iris Robinson’s homophobia (Rea 2016, 107) and proposes that “the continued success of gender disidentification on stage” might point toward a future with a “proliferation of viable identities, bodies and positions across the ethnosectarian divide” (Rea 2016, 117). The Northern Irish queer counterpublic thus imagines a public sphere incorporating new forms of organizing and public discourse while addressing a wider public that is not defined by two communities rhetoric (Conrad 2008, 123).

Queer parodies of community identity performance are not limited to the stage or to the post-Agreement period. Queer participation in political discourse during the Troubles on non-sectarian terms challenged the stagnation of Northern Irish politics and the meaning of self-determination (Conrad 2004, 121). This challenge was made most publicly by Pride parades, first held in Belfast in 1991 (Drissel 2016, 248). In an environment with a significant presence of sectarian parades that compete to dominate space (Drissel 2016, 245) and perpetuate ethno-national heteronormativity (Drissel 2016, 246), Pride parades physically challenge this with an inclusive, public presence and non-traditional expressions of collective identity (Drissel 2016, 249). Conrad (2009, 29–31) suggests that the camp of Pride parodies the structures of the conflict, performing an excess of those forms that reveals that they are neither natural nor inevitable. Adopting but “camping up” the strictly controlled performances (Drissel 2016, 252) and structures of parades, flags, and counter-protests (Conrad 2009, 31) signifies that Pride is part of Northern Irish political culture while simultaneously critiquing it (Conrad 2009, 32). This public critique exposes the performative nature of the structures that it parodies, showing them to produce identity through repetition and ritual (Butler 2006, xv). This reflects a similar practice to that which Kapoor (2015, 1621) proposes for former colonies in the Global South of “cultivating queer affect as a political strategy” to delegitimize hegemonic power, representing one potential response to the relationship between colonialism and sexuality in Northern Ireland.

Pride’s camp critique of essentialized ethno-national identities is mirrored in contemporary theatrical productions. One such example is D.R.A.G., a testimonial monologue of the relationship between a Belfast drag queen and a closeted republican paramilitary (Lehner 2017, 104) developed from the performers’ and director’s autobiographical memories (Lehner 2017, 108; Rea 2016, 10–13). D.R.A.G. demonstrates the incompatibility of LGBTQ issues with ethno-nationalism and uses queer identities “as an ‘analogous’ lens to deconstruct and disrupt sectarian divisions” (Lehner 2017, 104). By uncovering silenced histories, queer theater provides a transformative challenge to dominant memory and represents the reality of marginalized lives (Lehner 2017, 104–105). Lehner (2017, 107) argues that this unsettling challenge forces the audience to adopt a critical attitude toward received histories. The audience’s participation in D.R.A.G. exposes their complicity in Northern Irish surveillance culture, particularly during scenes where the main character dons a balaclava “as a confessional” (Lehner 2017, 109; Rea 2016, Appendix 1 ii–iii) and brandishes a gun at the audience after they have watched her put on her drag make-up (Rea 2016, Appendix 1 iv). Ultimately, Lehner (2017, 110–111) suggests that D.R.A.G.’s protagonist’s lover leaving her when he takes part in the peace process (Rea 2016, Appendix 1 xiii, xvi) demonstrates the incompatibility of a queer future and consociational Northern Irish politics, with the former troubling the essential identities that the latter upholds. D.R.A.G. therefore demonstrates the way in which contemporary queer theater disrupts the two communities framework.

Cinematic representations of queer subjects during the Troubles similarly highlight the contingent nature of the two community identities. For example, Breakfast on Pluto and The Crying Game demonstrate that it is not simply Northern Ireland’s postcolonial status that constitutes the subject and preserves hegemony. They predicate transformations of nationalist ideology on gender transgressions such as Fergus’ choice in The Crying Game to return to his transgender lover (Fadem 2016, 15–16) and not carry out a republican killing (Jordan 1992, 1:24:44). Mirroring Ireland’s partition through fragmented narratives and characters (Fadem 2016, 10), Jordan’s films show that pulling the “string” of gender can unravel the tight entwining of gender and nation in Northern Ireland (Fadem 2016, 17). Jordan tethers political transformation and gender metamorphosis to a trans woman who can never be at home in Ireland and a hypermasculine republican paramilitary incapable of killing for the nation (Fadem 2016, 30–31).

Fadem (2016, 11) further argues that Jordan’s films provide a “shadow account” of a traumatic and therefore “largely un-writeable” political history through dream narratives or splits in the narrative. In Breakfast on Pluto, the fairy-tale elements such as talking birds (Jordan 2005, 2:30) and the chapter structure (Jordan 2005, 1:05) therefore affirm the realism (Shapiro 2013, 14) of trans experiences and of the desire for escape. Both films represent a flight from Ireland through alternative gender expressions and sexualities (Fadem 2016, 18). In Breakfast on Pluto, Kitten becomes queerer with each confrontation with the Troubles, the border, or the nation (Fadem 2016, 20). She dismisses the conflict as “serious” (Jordan 2005, 27:17), destroys a weapons cache (Jordan 2005, 41:32) and fantasizes about infiltrating an Irish Republican Army (IRA) cell armed with a perfume bottle (Jordan 2005, 1:26:00) – a dream-like escape from the nationalist conflict that kills her normatively hypermasculine republican friend (Jordan 2005, 1:48:43). Jordan’s films therefore represent the alternatives that queerness offers to the dominance of the two communities model.

Queer transcendence of the two communities is not limited to cultural productions. During the conflict, much of the queer scene was cross-community, showing the possibilities for ways of living together in Northern Ireland that are not confined by the two communities model. Mixed-religion LGBTQ community organizations, gay pubs, and club nights were maintained from the late 1960s (O’Leary 2009, 125), with Dudgeon reporting in 1980 that “the band of common sexuality is far stronger than adherence to sectarian differences” (cited in Toops 2014, 63). This alternative world (Conrad 2001, 135) was a safe social space and a response to the need for activist organizing (Duggan 2012, 66), which in turn forged more cross-community allegiances (Conrad 2004, 47). The diversity of sexualities, gender identities, and subcultures evidenced in queer venues during the Troubles made the conflict seem futile to some of Duggan’s interviewees as they experienced the joys – rather than the threats – of difference (Duggan 2012, 60). Interpersonal relationships therefore demonstrated moves beyond division at least on a micro level (Conrad 2004, 127).

It is therefore clear that queer lives present an alternative to the two communities model, both by providing figurative escapes through art and by literally constructing counterpublics that are not defined by sectarian divisions and that reach out to those in the general public, demonstrating that such a move is possible. These alternatives reveal what can be achieved by deconstructing the supposedly essential identities of the two communities.

Conclusion

This article has demonstrated that studying the Troubles in Northern Ireland through a queer lens reveals queer people’s subjugated knowledge and deconstructs the apparently essential identities of the two communities of unionist/loyalist/Protestant and nationalist/republican/Catholic. It has done so by first establishing how heteronormativity structures the two community identities. This understanding supported an exposition of LGBTQ people’s specific insecurities during the Troubles and how these experiences were made invisible. Finally, incorporating LGBTQ lives into our histories of the Troubles made it clear that supposedly natural community identities are not inevitable and demonstrated how queer organizing and art about queer lives deconstruct those identities and bring in the general public by engaging them in that process.

Deconstructing the two communities model challenges its dominance of literature about the region, the conflict, and the peace process and proposes a more nuanced engagement with identity. Centering queer people contributes to an emerging literature on LGBTQ experiences in Northern Ireland and highlights alternative political cultures outside of ethno-nationalism and heteronormativity that may otherwise be neglected. This reframes what and who are understood to make up Northern Irish politics. An insistence on queerness as political demonstrates how sexuality informs the identities and actions of actors in conflicts and the differential effects of conflict. Further studies into the role of sexuality in the Troubles and the conflict’s specific impacts on LGBTQ people and others excluded from the two communities model would expand these insights, as would studies of the influence of sexuality and LGBTQ people’s experiences in other conflicts.

Just as the queer counterpublic undermines the heteronormative, monolithic, and exclusionary production of all identities in Northern Ireland, queerness may have destabilizing potential for other divided societies. While engagement with queerness does not necessarily encourage peace, it can demonstrate other ways of living together and trouble supposedly natural identities and relations. These possibilities are made visible to security studies through a queer lens. An example of this in Northern Ireland is the hip-hop group Kneecap. While still undoubtedly masculine and republican, they perform both their ethno-national and gender identities playfully (Ó hÍr and Strange 2021). Their more ambiguous relationship to queerness than that of traditional republicanism can be seen in a music video in which they dance with a drag queen and joke about conducting sex work for male and female clients (Kneecap 2019a) and lyrics that condemn DUP homophobia (Kneecap 2019b). This evidences engagement with the queer counterpublic and shifting relationships to sexuality, gender, and community identity. Their disordered republicanism is also demonstrated by a less zero-sum attitude toward loyalists than would be expected given the binarism of the two communities model, identifying shared experiences and interests with unionists, both as working-class people and as the victims of state failures (O’Toole 2022). An engagement with queer counterpublics in post-conflict societies can thus disrupt investments in identities based on the exclusion of others, and a queer perspective on security can make visible the influence of sexuality on identities mobilized by conflict and their potential destabilization.

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Aine Bennett

Aine Bennett is a PhD student in Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK, where she is researching the role of bisexuality in the treatment of asylum claims. Her main research interests are in queer theory, queer security studies, feminist international relations, and critical migration studies.