JEFFREY DUDGEON,
Sir, - It is not true to say Casement's sexuality "didn't matter then" as B. Keneghan writes (March 27th), nor that the debate about his sexuality is "an irrelevance" as Robert O'Byrne wrote (Opinion, March 21st).
If Casement had not been gay he might not have been both an energetic humanitarian and a revolutionary. He would probably have had a wife and family, which would have made treason and the tropics less attractive options.Homosexuality has only recently been decriminalised and Casement would have been imprisoned, like Oscar Wilde, if discovered. The age of some of his partners, even today, would have brought him to the edge of the law.
This notion of his sexual orientation being irrelevant helped toward an unfortunate elimination of two key elements in Casement's story from both the RTÉ and BBC programmes. First to go was a view from someone openly gay as to how sexual orientation can inform assessments of Casement's public life. This was followed by the excision of someone who could speak to the issue of Ulster, and the 1916 Rising in particular, who was neither from an Irish nationalist background or English.
I write as someone combining both attributes, who was interviewed at length for the two TV programmes and then excluded. This occurred despite being sufficiently recognised to speak at the Royal Irish Academy symposium on Casement in 2000, and later at the Public Record Office in Kew about my researches into the diaries and Casement's well-documented homosexuality.
This work, to include the diaries' text, is shortly to become a book on Casement's life, his family background in Ulster and his involvement in separatist politics from 1904.
I thought we had moved on from this (double) marginalisation but, as I pointed out to the programme makers, in a grand example of Casement rage, it would be like deciding on air if Martin Luther King was black or white without a person of colour taking part, and then ignoring the fact that he came from the deep south. The words pathetic and mono-cultural were also used.
Obviously I do agree with Robert O'Byrne that to believe, after the diaries were first revealed to the public in 1959, that they were other than genuine, is derived from "anti-British sentiment and homophobia". Or perhaps it is just a mark of great silliness. - Yours, etc.,
JEFFREY DUDGEON,
Mount Prospect Park,
Belfast 9.