Niall Herron
Does gay public sex help end violent conflict? Perhaps, or at least it makes for a good start. Men cruising for sex in the context of a deeply divided and deeply homophobic society offers an alternative way of thinking about public space and the identities of queer people. The history of cruising in Belfast, a city notorious for its sectarian segregation, prompts us to consider how queer sex in public subverts such divisions and expectations, trading violent altercations for fleeting sensualities. However, the social relationships generated by those returning to cruising spots, transgressing boundaries of sexuality, class, and religion, suggests familiar tensions are difficult to overcome.
Northern Ireland / the North of Ireland (NI) remains a highly segregated region divided between Catholic and Irish nationalist areas and Protestant and Ulster unionist areas. Simmering tensions due to unresolved constitutional aspirations combined with decades of anti-Catholic socio-political discrimination erupted into a thirty year-long violent conflict colloquially referred to as ‘the Troubles’ from 1969 to 1998. The city’s residential districts were strictly territorialised, with strange and unknown trespassers in highly segregated areas becoming prime targets of violence.
Despite this, sectarian divisions softened somewhat in the city centre and the immediate area around Queen’s University Belfast. Intimate interactions in the public toilets of the militarised centre and the alleyways surrounding the university campus offered a mix between the social and the sensual. Men met with men from across the ethnonational divide in these spaces, where sectarian divisions were deprioritised, not simply for sex and bodily pleasure, but also to socialise in larger groups.
Gavin, a young working-class Catholic who had moved to Belfast from a rural area in 1990 recalled:
people have a perception of ‘you were cruising … You were meeting men out in public?’, but the reality was you were having frickin’ conversations. … people were kissing and people were smoking, people were chatting, people were, you know—blowjob, whatever. Um, so that felt like really exciting. And you knew that there was something that then you were kind of part of, but you kept it secret.
Within the cruising context, departures from conventional masculine behaviour could be gleefully engaged with. Despite pressure to act as ‘hard men’ in Belfast’s militarised context, those engaged in the city centre cruising scene practised effeminacy recreationally. Brenden, a working-class Catholic man from nationalist north Belfast recalls these dynamics amongst those frequenting the Royal Avenue public lavatories in the early 1990s:
They weren’t all very obviously effeminate but everybody would – in that world, everybody would camp it up like mad. I’ve got these guys from the Shankill, who were these real working-class guys going, [in accent accentuating femininity and north Belfast intonation] “How are you darlin? It’s good to see ya! See her over there!” referring to a man, you know, “see her over there? She thinks she’s God’s gift runnin’ in and out of that toilet!”
Cruising in a non-commercial public space, distinct from the city’s bar scene, gave rise to encounters both spontaneous yet readily available, though not without jeopardy. Excited fears of sectarian violence and a fear of homophobic bashing mingled uneasily with the draw and desire to seek out queer sex.
[T]his is at a time when the British Army and the RUC [Royal Ulster Constabulary] and paramilitaries are all around everywhere, you know? So in one way, that excitement of cruising … I know it sounds strange, but you’re kind of, it’s like a double fear or a triple fear, um, because you still had to walk home to where you were going….
Belfast’s cruising scene offered the possibility of anonymity, which might not have been possible in smaller settlements in the region. Jim, a working-class Catholic from Derry who moved to Belfast in 1985, engaged in with cruising in both cities. He noted that “Belfast had more opportunity” while “Derry was tiny … [and] if you were living in Coleraine or Ballymena, dear God … So [it] could have been so much worse”, indicating a preference for the more anonymous cruising Belfast had to offer.
For many men cruising was their sole engagement with their queer sexuality during the Troubles. Such was the case for Jim, for whom these meetings where “purely functional”, meaning that ethnonational background wasn’t a concern, nor was it readily discernible, as “you only ever had one goal in mind … it didn’t matter what foot you kicked with, you know? We’re all built the same.” Anonymous and covert public sex consumed sectarian differences, mystifying ethnic affiliations and facilitating the desegregation of both bodies and space. Despite this, familiarity yielded sociality, and with this, divisions were re-identified.
Belfast’s cruising scene additionally functioned as a social outlet. Brenden remembers that “there were often friendships that developed even with very closeted men … more than you actually had any sexual contact with people to be honest”. The segregated population of the region interacted in the alleyways and toilets of the NI capital. An underground, social element of the public lavatory generated a kind of communal awareness of its own, which Brenden remembers as a pleasure in itself:
some of it was enjoying, enjoying the sort of Freemasonry of being in an in-group that had a secret world that people don’t, don’t know about. Cause you could stand on Royal Avenue talking about this and all these people walked past you … [who] did not have a clue what was going on here. You had your wee secret world.
The social relationships formed in these spaces encountered sectarian division in a way sex alone did not. Introductions and conversations meant revealing one’s name and one’s neighbourhood – information that could reveal religion, and implied politics, as Brenden argues:
this is an intensely segregated city. So obviously, Harry from the Donegal Road, you knew where he was from, you know, Sean from Andytown you know where he was from.
These divisions and the ongoing political violence were acknowledged in these settings in a managed and deliberate manner. Brenden recalls that “they would talk about It [the Troubles] but in a very ritualised way that had firm limits”. Revealing one’s background and politics was a risk, one that required frugality in what was shared beyond the body itself. Only the sexual experience of cruising could avoid engaging with such conversations, but the practice brought enough people into familiarity that the social circles it produced necessitated a process by which to handle uncomfortable topics. As a result, Brenden recalls there was “a ritual limit about what you talked about in mixed company, because you can’t make assumptions.”
When looking to the past for examples on how space has been shared successfully, historical queer encounters have often been suggested as sites of successful integration. The extent to which the gay social scene of the Troubles was truly able to solve sectarian divisions is contested. Queer sex in public, however, offered a spatial context in which sectarian and ethnonational affiliations were truly unknowable and deprioritised. And yet, cruising, while providing anonymous sex that did not require words, names, or explanation, produced a social scene of its own in which segregation became implicitly acknowledged. Seemingly, the context in which queerness in NI succeeds in escaping segregated realities is not through the creation of community, but in following the desire for sexual release.
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I just came back to Montreal from my first ever visit to Belfast and, oh my goodness, this post is so helpful in giving me an understanding of how gay sex/cruising places at that time allowed gay men to cross the sectarian borders. With caution, of course. Thank you. A gay friend of mine was an undergraduate at QUB in the mid-90s and he shared his stories from those days with me too.