Homosexuality and lesbianism in Irish newpapers, 1861–1922

To write a history of those whose sexualities fell outside the bounds of the legal,  the acceptable, or even the recognizable poses enormous challenges, even more so when the terms such as ‘sexuality’ hardly existed in the period. Indeed, the terms  homosexual and heterosexual were coined in 1868 to denote sexual deviancy, that  is, sexual acts which had erotic aims deprived of any procreative function.1 How  can we know about the sexual practices of the ‘ordinary individual’, who leaves no  written record of everyday sexuality, whether of licit, procreative and marital intercourse, or of the illicit. To look at, for instance, court records of sodomy, one reproduces the language of deviance and disempowers the original subject yet again. To  use medical records, one reinforces the psychiatric and medical discourses of ‘moral  degeneracy’ or ‘moral illness’, and the queer subject becomes, yet again, a patient.  Yet these problems can and are overcome with sensitive use of the court or medical  material. What of the majority of individuals who never came to the attention of  court or doctor, whose lives and loves were unrecorded, and often unlived fully, due  to the fear of disclosure or the interiorisation of society’s disdain?