Belfastmen: An Intimate History of Life before Gay Liberation

Join us for an in-conversation event with author Tom Hulme to mark the publication of Belfastmen: An Intimate History of Life before Gay Liberation. In this ground-breaking new book, historian Tom Hulme reconstructs the everyday experiences of queer men in Belfast, showing how queer lives before the gay rights movement were not only possible but also rich, exciting, and fulfilling. Tom will be in conversation with Bad Bridget historian Elaine Farrell.

Books will be available for sale and Tom is happy to sign copies.

About the book

Belfastmen reconstructs the everyday experiences of queer men in a region infamous for its recent history of intolerance, violence, and religious homophobia to show how queer lives before the gay rights movement were not only possible but also rich, exciting, and fulfilling.

Irish churches and governmental authorities found the topic of sex between men unmentionable and imagined such vice as a problem only found in decadent and degenerate societies abroad. Belfastmen shows how this tacit ignorance and public silence paradoxically enabled male queerness to flourish with only rare exposure, condemnation, or regulation.

Tom Hulme traces the intimate lives of men across time, space, and self-understanding: their meeting places, their sexual and romantic relationships, the scientific and social models of desire they used to define themselves, and the responses to them from families, neighbourhoods, and the law. From Belfast’s industrial boom in the late nineteenth century to the social transformations accompanying WWII, Belfastmen reveals how homosexuality finally emerged as a recognized social problem in the 1950s. Only then did Northern Ireland start to transform into the expressively homophobic society of the more recent past.

About the author

Dr Tom Hulme is a cultural historian of modern Britain and Ireland, Reader in Modern British History at Queen’s University Belfast, and Principal Investigator of the AHRC project “Queer Northern Ireland: Sexuality before Liberation.” He is author of After the Shock City.