CinÉireann May 2018 | Page 19

In cultural broad strokes, the movies might be the most important indication of how we (literally) see ourselves. To grow up as a queer person in Ireland, then, was historically to have no self-image at all, no representative role in a filmic idea of Irishness, no presence through which to feel to belong. The Irish cinema, in short, like the Irish society it reflected all too well, was an overwhelmingly straight space which reinforced the implicit erasure visited on any identity outside the heteronormative ideal. But if the historical absence of LGBT characters from our films was an obvious omission in a society that continued to criminalise those lives through to 1993, what are we to make of the ongoing exclusion at any appreciable scale of these narratives a quarter century on, in the midst of a culture ostensibly much more accepting of divergent gender and sexual identities?

Unpacking the injuries of so long an absence from the cultural conversation is complex, from so bare a basis all the more; deprived of a heritage of coming out stories or same-sex romances to build upon, any fledgling Irish efforts might only have seemed hopelessly pedestrian beside the then-emergent New Queer Cinema to which it would inevitably have been compared. And just as social exclusion once drove much of our LGBT populace overseas in search of fulfillment, this arrested development of our national cinema has largely left the queer Irish to look abroad for reflections of our realities. The result, of course, is an identity that’s anything but intersectional, where “Irish” and “queer” as labels, in cinema, remain resolutely unaligned.

The exhilarating deconstruction of this divide in I’m Roger Casement, as explored in awe in our December issue, evidences the extent to which the long-withheld bounty of an Irish Queer Cinema was desperately needed; it’s often only in tasting pleasures we come to consider just how much we’ve thirsted for them. And with that sense of wonder and relief comes a deep-seated despondence with the sense of cinematic belonging deprived so many: if our failure to fully reckon with the lasting legacies of queer pain is an unsurprising shame, there’s an all the more inexcusable one on the way if our inability to render the contemporary queer experience on screen is allowed to carry on unquestioned. Interrogating the particularities of LGBT representation in Irish cinema, then, is nothing short of a critical imperative.

Why has our cinema moved on so marginally, and so slowly at that? Has the comparative clip of social change, taking us in these last twenty-five years from a society of entrenched homophobia to one held up as a paragon of progress, just been too fast for our filmmakers to keep pace? Do the economic realities of Irish film production continue to preclude the presence of marginalised communities in a mass market medium? Is there evidence in this absence of a broader discomfort in sexuality as a subject? Or is it altogether unreasonable, in an indigenous industry still small by international standards, to expect the space to have an Irish Queer Cinema at all?

A lack of easy answers is no excuse for avoiding awkward questions, and it’s in this spirit and all its frustrations and fixations, its curiosities and crankiness, its exhaustion and impatience that Queer Ire is born. As we pay tribute this month to that quarter century since decriminalisation, it’s time to hold to account Irish film past and present for its (mis)representations of LGBT life, to dive into the infamies and obscurities of an oft-contested canon, and plunge ourselves deep into the closet of cinema to pull at the threads of all we find in there. From queer readings of classics to cockeyed considerations of new releases, we’ll be glancing askew at the films you know and shining a spotlight on those you don’t, all in pursuit of an understanding of how Irish queer identity has manifested on-screen. There are as many quiet victories to call out as there are eyebrow-arching outrages to decry. So come with us as we gaily skip into the wreckage of representation, and see what surprises we may find.

CinÉireann / May 2018 19

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I'm Roger Casement