Cork’s cruising scene in the 80s and 90s: An investigation into the primary sources

There is only one thing worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

This Oscar Wilde quote, chosen as the ‘Thought for the week’ in the August 1997 issue of sh..Out!! newsletter,¹ is emblematic of many issues facing Irish LGBT history. Years of suppression and criminalisation have left wide gaps in the historical record, especially regarding the everyday lives of LGBT people. One area which has left especially little evidence are the very sexual encounters between men that were criminalised until 1993. The sex lives of gay men in Ireland in the 80s and 90s is a topic which has received almost no scholarly research. As a subject it suffers from the same limits as all aspects of queer life in this period in that those who lived through it left almost no accounts of their experiences. This limit to research is hampering enough in other areas of research into LGBT history, but it is especially pertinent when it comes to men’s specific sexual practices. Most apparent of the reasons for the lack of primary accounts is the fact that these acts were a criminal offence until the last seven years of this period and so to create documentation of one’s experience was tantamount to signing a written confession to a crime. Furthermore, the social stigma surrounding gay sex was perhaps especially felt in this area because of the fact that, as the sources available demonstrate, a significant portion of the men engaged in sex with other men did not participate in any other aspects of gay life, whether because they were not able to come out, or because they did not consider themselves to be gay and thus not part of that scene. It is this fact that makes this topic especially deserving of further investigation. Current understandings of Irish LGBT history are dominated by politically involved activists who understood the importance of documenting their community’s stories and being out to the public in order to fight stigma, often at the expense of their own comfort and safety. Unfortunately, there is another, much larger group of people who lived their whole lives in adherence to heterosexual hegemony and never openly expressed their true nature. This group’s stories are naturally extremely difficult to uncover given that they were never in the open to begin with. One of the only avenues for gaining an insight into this group is through the few records of casual sexual practices of the time, in particular cruising and anonymous sexual encounters between men.

The documents relevant to cruising can be divided roughly into two groups. First are those written by sexual health groups with the aim of preventing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV and Hepatitis B. The second includes texts found in published works such as magazines and books targeted towards gays and lesbians. Documents written by healthcare organisations are generally more informative about specific practices and demographics in Ireland’s cruising scene, however these do not appear in the record until the second half of the 90s when the worst of the AIDS epidemic had passed. This temporal context must inform the information provided. The timing of these texts’ creation coupled with the lack of insight into pre-AIDS sex-culture makes it difficult to gauge how ‘standard’ the practices recorded were or how informed they were by the recent public health crisis and ensuing moral panic. Nevertheless, the outreach work recorded by these groups provides invaluable statistical and allegorical data. Contrasting the serious and factual tone of the medical establishment, written publications mentioning cruising approach it with far more humour. It would appear that the target audiences of these publications, typically out, socially involved gays and lesbians, were assumed to be knowledgeable about cruising culture. The practice is never explained, nor is guidance given to those who wish to participate. Cruising in these magazines is used as a backdrop for light-hearted social commentary and outrageous stories that characterise the magazine’s sense of humour. However entertaining these stories are though, the typical coy, sarcastic tone of the humour makes their utility as bearers of historical fact sometimes difficult to ascertain.

The sources from health-related groups largely centre around outreach work into the cruising scene. The most detailed description of Cork’s cruising scene comes from an undated outreach plan, likely from the Southern Gay Health Project (SGHP)². This plan details three main areas where cruising occurred: Fitzgerald Park, the toilets by Nano Nagel Bridge referred to as “bomb site,” and Sesame St. The first two are both described as being primarily used by “off-scene” men, while the third caters to a mix. These off-scene men are explicitly stated to be the main targets of this work because of the fact that they would not be reached by any of the group’s other initiatives, “The outreach work[‘s] aim is to reach men who we would not be able to reach in our work on the scene.” It was evidently well known amongst those involved in HIV prevention that making a presence in cruising spots was essentially the only way of spreading knowledge about safe sex to this demographic. The SGHP’s June 1995 HIV Prevention Project acknowledges the difficulty of reaching this group in the first place, and calls later evaluation of work done, “virtually impossible,”³ and a similar sentiment is expressed in Galway’s AIDS Help West group in a 1994 evaluation.⁴ This attitude highlights the unique and important role of cruising in Irish queer history. The very fact that groups such as SGHP observed it as a means of making contact with these off-scene men is some of the only proof we have of their existence, proof that the growing number of openly gay people was not a growth in numbers of gay people but a growth of acceptance.

men who participated in cruising and who were not involved in the gay community were not only harmed by heterosexual hegemony by their inability to come out, they were also made more vulnerable to physical harm. Group meetings by the SGHP in 1996 record a common view that safer sex practices had been widely adopted in the gay community by the second half of the 90s.⁵ People felt that they understood the precautions and the consequences of not taking them, and participants had the view that riskier behaviours such as anal sex were uncommon in casual encounters. They also commented, however, that those in the closet or in the early stages of coming out were less vigilant in their sexual safety. It is notable too that the minutes from the May meeting specify that this fact applied “regardless of age,” suggesting that it was not age or maturity which was contributed to safer practices, but rather access to and involvement in the gay community.

However, minutes from group meetings held by the SGHP offer a small insight into attitudes towards cruising from men involved in the Cork gay scene. Participants in a February 1996 meeting agreed that posting stickers - presumably related to sexual health or resources for MSM - was a good idea, while some in the April meeting believed that this would only draw unwanted attention. In both the April and May meetings, although many participants had participated in cruising in the past, none had done so in Cork or in recent years, one reason being that there was a sense that “there was nothing happening.” If this is to suggest that the Cork cruising scene was not very busy, then that would be in conflict with the assessments of the outreach plan. It is possible that these attendees were removed enough from that scene as to have an inaccurate view of it, or perhaps their involvement in other areas of gay social life provided them with more desirable options which made cruising seem inactive and unreliable by comparison. This second explanation is speculative, but it would corroborate the high frequency of off-scene men in cruising demographics and the popular observation that gay men who were ‘out’ were less likely to engage in risky sexual behaviours than those in the closet or in the coming out process.

Of course, these meetings provide an extremely limited view given that they were attended firstly by a very small number of men, and secondly because it is quite possible that the attendees were not representative of the community as a whole. In one meeting the participants are observed to all have well-paying jobs, and the minutes from the most recent - possibly final - meeting available on the Cork LGBT Archive are closed off with the line, “I feel that I have exhausted my list of friends and acquaintances,” possibly suggesting that attendees had all been known to the person running the meetings.⁶ This inevitably limits the range of opinions that these gatherings could offer on the subject.

Just over a decade before this meeting took place, the first Cork-specific reference to cruising that I could find was written in the Spring 1984 edition of the magazine Quare Times.⁷ The subject is given a full but brief article titled, “Cruising for change,” which details the author’s thoughts upon seeing a group of men lining up outside of a public toilet with the clear intent of “cottaging,” (cruising in a public bathroom). Immediately apparent are the differences between this type of text and the health group documents discussed previously. The magazine is less factual and more pensive. The author’s unenthusiastic description of the practice reveals a point of view that is not widely seen in the record. He writes that he “had always rather abhorred” the practice, “regarding it as not quite ideologically sound.” This negative view is divergent from the more objective, unopinionated observations of the SGHP documents, but also from stylistically similar publications later in the 90s.

The decade of decriminalisation saw in Cork the introduction of the sh..Out!! newsletter at the Other Place nightclub. These newsletters offer an insight into the position of cruising within Irish gay culture post-decriminalisation, and over a decade on from the murder of Declan Flynn. There are not enough sources to justify making sweeping claims about the popular view of cruising at the time, or to be able to grasp how representative sh..Out!! was of general sentiments, however, the context of the time of their publication is a valuable factor to consider when drawing what small conclusions we can. Overall, references to cruising in sh..Out!! are sparse but consistent in their tone and representation. The newsletter as a whole is overwhelmingly humorous and casual, and it would seem that the audience was assumed to be familiar with gay culture. The first, and most political, mention of cruising is made in the first issue from July 1997. An article proposing that Senator David Norris should run for president ends with a suggestion for his campaign slogan: “Come cruise with me for Ireland!”⁸ It is only a quick throwaway line, but it could be said to be exemplary of the attitude this newsletter takes to the topic. Cruising is not treated as a topic to be discussed or interrogated, but rather as a punchline, or as the backdrop to humorous stories.

Later issues expand upon this approach. Issue seven includes an article about a German tourist cruising on Sesame Street, titled “Ich Liebe Dick !!” Although it is clearly intended to be humorous and not exactly a perfect representation of reality, it is notable how the author presents the ritual of cruising. One line says, “you know the scenario,” which, at the risk of taking it too literally, possibly suggests that knowledge of the practice was at least prolific enough among the newsletter’s readership to justify the inclusion of an article like this. Furthermore, the article talks about there being regulars on the Sesame Street scene, corroborating earlier suggestions that those involved tended to be repeat rather than once-off participants. In the same issue, as well as issues three and six, appear articles by a character named “Ronald Rent.” These letters to the editors depict a satirised form of the cruising scene. Ronald writes first about “the Spanish invasion,” or the influx of Spanish tourists who he says are making business difficult for “Rentboys Action Group.”⁹ He later writes “Greetings to all in Sesame Street,” to tell of the sheep farmer he has fallen in love with while cruising in Kerry.¹⁰ Ronald’s stories discuss cruising and prostitution (“rent”) as if there was a lot of overlap. These stories appear to be the only explicit mentions of a link between Cork’s cruising scene and prostitution, with the only other suggestion of a link coming from a proposed questionnaire which asks “Is there much rent going on?”¹¹ I would speculate that this questionnaire was likely connected to the SGHP’s cruising outreach work, however, it is not labelled as belonging to any organisation and is undated. It is therefore impossible to definitively place it before or after Ronald Rent’s time. This exposes one of many gaps in the historical record regarding the experiences of gay men in Ireland. Evidently, casual sex and prostitution were both practiced at least to some extent by gay men in Cork, with Sesame Street being synonymous with such practices in sh…Out!! However, it is difficult to grasp to what extent these practices overlapped, and what the demographics of participants were.

This lack of clarity characterises the issue of gay men’s casual sex as a whole during this period. The sources available demonstrate that for many men, cruising was the closest they ever came to interacting with the gay community. Their lack of alternative interactions with the community may have left these men at a higher risk of disease or violence, and it was a commonly held belief that understanding of safe sexual practices was the result of community engagement. At the very least, these facts demonstrate that homophobia in Irish society cannot be fully understood without analysis of the experiences of closeted individuals. This is naturally a difficult area to study given the lack of sources, however, I would suggest that this topic is of great importance and delays in its study run the risk of losing certain individuals’ stories to time.