There is no sign that it was ever there.Ī brilliantly articulate campaigner … Panti Bliss celebrates in Dublin, following the same-sex marriage referendum in 2015. Soon, no one will remember when the owners of Minsky’s on Ely Place, believing their clientele to be too stuffy, changed its name overnight to The Shaft, and the place rocked for a while. Or the front part of Rice’s pub at the corner of Stephen’s Green and South King Street, or Bartley Dunne’s on Stephen’s Street. I imagined a walk that two men of my generation – I came to Dublin in 1972 – might do to revisit the gay places that have gone, such as The Gym, a sauna just a stone’s throw from Dublin Castle, or Incognito, another sauna, much favoured by priests. While the Irish Queer Archive is housed in the National Library, it was hard not to feel on the day of the count that, with all the new freedom, much will be lost and forgotten. In Gay Bar, a brilliantly written and incisive account of gay life in Los Angeles, San Francisco and London, Jeremy Atherton Lin quotes the critic Ben Walters on gay history that is “fragile from fear and forgetting, too often written in whispers and saved in scraps”.
