Abstract
When the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization (ILGO) applied to march in the New York St Patrick’s Day Parade of 1991, they were told that there was no room by the organizers of the parade, the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH). ILGO’s ongoing struggle for inclusion in what was then the world’s largest celebration of Irish ethnicity became a major news item that rumbled on seasonally for a number of years across the USA, in Ireland, in the international gay community and amongst the international Irish diaspora. Now, fifteen years after its first application to join the parade, ILGO is even legally prohibited from holding a protest at its own exclusion. The unquestioned assumption that being homosexual is antithetical to being Irish provided the fundamental premise from which it was successfully argued in US courts that the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization is a violent, obscene enemy bent on the destruction of Irish ethnicity and Irish communities. The argument was not made initially by lawyers employed by the Ancient Order of Hibernians, but by the influential American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which describes itself as working ‘to extend rights to segments of our population that have traditionally been denied their rights, including Native Americans and other people of color; lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgendered people’.1
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Notes
Thomas O’Connor, The Boston Irish: a Political History (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995), p. 61.
See Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Vol. 1: Racial Oppression and Social Control (London and New York: Verso, 1994), p. 139.
For an astute personal account of racialized conflicts between Irish-American and African-American working-class communities, in this case in Boston, see Michael Patrick MacDonald, All Souls: a Family Story from Southie (New York: Random House, 1999).
Mike McCormack, ‘The Ancient Order of Hibernians’ (21 September 2005), http://www.aoh.com/history/index.htm (accessed 21 March 2006).
Gerry Curran, ‘St Patrick’s Day and the AOH’, http://www.aoh.com/history/index.htm (accessed 21 March 2006).
Curran, ‘St Patrick’s Day’. See also Mike Cronin and Daryl Adair, The Wearing of the Green: a History of St Patrick’s Day (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), p. 37.
See Anne Maguire, Rock the Sham! ( New York: Street Level Press, 2006 ), pp. 138–9.
See, in Maguire: Lucy Lynch, p. 18; Tarlach MacNiallais, p. 20; Anne Maguire, pp. 28–9; and Marie Honan, p. 32. See also Brian Dooley, Black and Green: the Fight for Civil Rights in Northern Ireland and Black America (London: Pluto Press, 1998).
See Kathryn A. Conrad, Locked in the Family Cell: Gender, Sexuality and Political Agency in Irish National Discourse (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004), pp. 63–9.
Michael G. Cronin, ‘“He’s My Country”: Liberalism, Nationalism, and Sexuality in Contemporary Gay Fiction’, Eire-Ireland, 39/40:3&4 (Fall/Winter 2004): 250–67.
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© 2007 Katherine O’Donnell
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O’Donnell, K. (2007). St Patrick’s Day Expulsions: Race and Homophobia in New York’s Parade. In: Balzano, W., Mulhall, A., Sullivan, M. (eds) Irish Postmodernisms and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230800588_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230800588_10
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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