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  • The Vanishing Homoerotic:Colm Tóibín’s Gay Fictions
  • Eibhear Walshe

In 2003—a decade after homosexuality had been legally decriminalized in Ireland—novelist Colm Tóibín was asked to comment on how the changed legal and cultural climate had affected attempts to represent Irish gay identity in fiction. Tóibín answered that

Gay liberation is very like Northern Ireland. Once the troubles are over the novelists have a different story to tell—one which isn't intrinsically as dramatic. In a repressive society, every single gay man's story is fascinating. . . . if you're French, out to everyone, have a nice boyfriend and two dogs, it's intrinsically not as interesting.1

It seems a stretch to say, as Tóibín claims here, that a "post-gay moment" means that "every single gay man's story" is now intrinsically less interesting to Irish fiction writers as a whole. But this claim does appear to characterize Tóibín's own imaginative concerns, and to influence his choice of narrative form. Three of Tóibín's novels, in particular—The Storyof the Night (1996), The Blackwater Lightship (1999), and his recent The Master (2004)—stand as contemporary Irish texts that foreground gay identity.

Decriminalization in 1993 validated a range of Irish lesbian and gay cultural identities that had been evolving, often outside the law, throughout the twentieth century. In the decade since legal reform, Irish writers have responded to this legal validation, notably in the work of Cathal Ó Searcaigh, Emma Donoghue, Jamie O'Neill, Keith Ridgeway, and Mary Dorcey. In The Contemporary Irish Novel, Linden Peach suggests that these "marginal voices question the frames of reference that inform society's narratives about itself."2 Alan Sinfield goes further; he argues that, "If les/bi/gay people have some reason to take [End Page 122] the long view of their situation, we know also that, in our current modes, we are a recent and ongoing creation. . . . We have been making our history and therefore ourselves, though not, of course, in conditions of our own making. Now it seems, we may be growing out of 'gay'. Suddenly, improbably, we are in a position to envisage a new refocusing of sexual dissidence for the new millennium."3 Sinfield sees a contemporary refashioning of the old dissidence—a "post-gay" moment for new social formations around sexual difference.

Critical perspectives advanced within queer theory have already made problematical any notion of an essentialist lesbian or gay sexuality. From the 1960s onward, in both the United State and Europe, the political agitation for legal validation of homosexuality was accompanied by a parallel academic interest in locating a valid gay past. Historians like John Boswell used scholarship to assert the existence of a legitimized, knowable "gay past" and, thus, to construct the idea of a coherent and continuous historical tradition of male and female homosexuality. This deployment of a "gay past" arose from an urgent political imperative: a need to find an historical parallel and, thus, a justification for current social rethinking around sexuality.

Reacting to this use of the word "gay," the French philosopher Michel Foucault set about dismantling any essentialist notion of sexual identity or any concept of a transferable and coherent sexual identity common to disparate cultures and historical eras. Foucault contended that the idea of a homosexual identity was a post-Enlightenment, nineteenth-century invention, a codifying of diverse and isolated aberrant sexual acts as a mean through which they could be controlled and thus contained. Foucault questioned the very idea of a single meaning for any sexual identity, thereby unsettling any idea of a "tradition" or a "history" of gay identity.4 Yet, to argue for unstable sexual identities is to ignore the fact that in contemporary Ireland, the words "lesbian" and "gay" continue to have a specific meaning connoting a sexual identity defined by same-sex attraction.

Such categories as "lesbian" and "gay" have concrete meanings in contemporary culture. The idea of a coherent sexual identity—however much Foucault argues against it—is a kind of useful shorthand, a necessary simplification at a time of cultural change and refashioning. Literary texts help us to deduce...

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