Averill Earls
Love in the Lav tells the hidden and sometimes heartbreaking stories of Dublin’s men who desired men and the Gardaí who pursued them. The book highlights individuals whose stories illuminate the criminalization of their sexualities, through courtroom testimonies, police records, and family archives. The author focuses on issues of teenage sex workers, consent, and standards of social acceptability.
Of the case studies that didn’t make it into Love in the Lav, I was most conflicted about serial sex criminal Michael Moore. Few men were arrested twice for “gross indecency” in independent Ireland’s 70 year history of policing same-sex sex. Yet, in the 23 years that followed his first encounter with the law, Moore was arrested seven times in Dublin: for gross indecency, but also for assault, wounding with intent to do grievous bodily harm, and vagrancy. There are so few repeat gross indecency offenders that survive in the court records—none, actually, besides Moore—that it seemed wrong to exclude him. While each of the men I discuss in my book required careful discussion of the complexities of consent, age, and regulation before legalization, Moore’s cases involved boys aged 12 to 14. I decided that Moore was not the same as the others, and including him would have derailed the project.
By the time he was 18, Michael Moore knew how to survive the Dublin streets on his own. He’d do odd jobs around the city during the day, and then find an older man who’d trade sex for lodging, food, or money. When the gardaí knocked on the door of James Power’s flat in April 1928, Moore was already in the 62-year-old man’s bed. Moore claimed that Power had anal sex with him nightly. Power, a retired British soldier, insisted that he’d never touched the boy, though he admitted he had Moore in his bed several nights a week for “company.” The he-said he-said was not enough for a conviction. Power was found not guilty, and the state opted to withdraw charges in Moore’s case (a nolle prosequi).
In many ways, the beginning of Moore’s story is consistent with the other “rent boy” examples I included in the book. But then, as an adult, Moore placed fake wanted ads in the newspaper seeking boys aged 12 to 14. Sometimes he advertised for a page boy, sometimes a shepherd. He lured those who answered into remote areas of the county. When they arrived, Moore proposed that he would pay them for sex, and proceeded depending on if they agreed or not. On all the occasions he was arrested, it was because the boys had objected and immediately gone to an adult to intervene. Moore insisted that his victims agreed more often than not. Maybe that was true. Dublin, like most European cities at midcentury, had a cadre of under- and unemployed boys who had sex with men for money, lodging, food, and gifts.
After Irish independence in 1922, the newly-formed police force, An Garda Síochána, pursued same-sex desiring men with greater vigor than the Royal Irish Constabulary ever had. Still operating under the British 1861 and 1885 laws prohibiting sex between men, the Garda surveilled and entrapped men in Dublin’s streets, parks, movie theaters, and public lavatories. Over two-thirds of men arrested were caught having sex with other adult men. The other third of gross indecency and sodomy cases, however, involved a mix of male children under 12, “juveniles” 13-16, or “juvenile adults,” 17-21. Some of those boys were victims of unwanted sexual assaults. Others occupied that uncomfortable liminal space of the “rent boy”—those who got money or gifts by selling sex to men.
When he was a boy, Michael was one of those boys. When he was a man, he preyed on those boys. In Moore’s own words, he didn’t think there was “any harm in [having anal sex] with men,” and he believed propositioning and paying teens for sex was simply the way things were done. At 41, Moore reflected that it was his “initiation” into intergenerational sex work that launched him into a life of crime.
I was taught this crime by a strange man when I was 14… I have had a great passion for this crime at times, though I have made sincere efforts to conquer it, even to the extent of attending 2 masses each day. I have thought things over very carefully during my Remand, and, I think that if I did not meet the class of people, who led me into this temptation, for a good while, I would be able to conquer it. (NAI, Dublin Circuit Courts, State Files, Box V14-30-22, January 1951)
When he was using the newspaper, he would write several letters back and forth to a boy about what kinds of tasks were expected, and even asked for references. In 1945 and 1951, the garda collected dozens of pages of witness testimonies from parents, the boys, detectives, and Moore himself, as well as the newspaper clippings of the ads that Moore had placed, and the letters written by Moore and the boys. In 1945, Moore wrote a letter to the judge seeking empathy for the hard life he’d lived.
Starting from the year 1928, I made several attempts to join the Royal Navy, the British Army, the Army of Soarsteat Eireann and subsequently the Eire Army, the last time since the emergency. I was rejected in all cases as not completely fit. At the forming of the Reconstruction Corps, I did not try as I thought it would be of no use. Since my arrest I have been told by a member of the Garda that I would be accepted in the Corps, as they are not so strict about a man’s condition as the Regular Army. If you Honour will grant my request as above, I promise to join the Reconstruction Corps, on my release. I could then keep out of trouble as my mind would be engaged in honest and interesting work. (NAI, Dublin Circuit Courts, State Files, Box, 1D-27-12, April 1945)
In addition to his concern about being unable to find stable employment, so common among the laboring class from which Moore came, Moore suggests here that he was of a “condition” rejected by the Irish and British military. It is unclear if by “condition” Moore meant his sexual desire or some kind of physical ailment. A medical examiner six years later found him of sound body and mind, though “weak minded,” a term applied to a variety of mental institution patients, including the suicidal and “morally depraved.”
In 1951, after being arrested for the same crimes, he again asserted that his woes were rooted largely in his employment troubles. “My chief difficulty in life is want of employment. I was never taught a trade. The Labour Exchange would not even send me to one of the turf camps; they said I would not be strong enough for the work.”
In 1951, Moore placed an advertisement in the local newspaper seeking a boy to “tend sheep.” Fourteen-year-old John Murray answered the ad, only to discover that it wasn’t sheep tending that Moore wanted from him. According to both of their testimonies, Moore met the boy at the bus station. When Moore explained to the boy what he actually wanted—not a shepherd—the boy told Moore he didn’t want to have sex, and that he was going to run ahead and “get food” from a nearby house. Before he left, Moore said to the boy that he knew Murray was going to turn him in to the police, and that was ok, that he deserved it. The boy did indeed alert the gardaí, and Moore was arrested. While investigating the case, the gardaí found several other boys who’d been taken in by Moore’s newspaper advertisement ruse. In 1951, as in 1945, the judge was not moved by Moore’s insistence that this was learned behavior, and when convicted, he got another three years imprisonment.
Moore’s story is particularly hard to process. As a Dubliner plagued by the economic hardships of the young and laboring class, Moore reveals the sociology and economics of sex work in Dublin. He was a boy socialized into manipulated and manipulative intergenerational sex work, and left records of both his schemes and his perception of his behavior. His unfortunate life is preserved in the gross indecency records of the National Archives of Ireland. He was assessed by prison doctors, and he wrote letters to the judge to beg for mercy. In many ways, his is the saddest of the stories that didn’t make it into my book—and I excluded him intentionally.
In Love in the Lav, I examine the experiences of working- and middle-class same-sex desiring men in Dublin between 1922-72. Dealing first and foremost with court records, and those charged with “gross indecency,” I made a conscious choice: I only included cases involving men who had sex with individuals who were themselves old enough to be charged. Per the precedents the Irish judges set, that included “juveniles” aged 15-16, “juvenile-adults” aged 17-21, and other adults, aged 21+. Michael Moore fit my parameters at his first arrest – but by his second, he was paying 12, 13, and 14-year-old boys for sex, and luring them into remote areas for that purpose. So I excluded Michael Moore from my book. But I also excluded all the men whose cases involved boys 14 and under, even if the boys in question described their own seemingly willing participation. The judges and attorney general’s office made some choices—in the charges they levied, in the punishments they meted out—that differentiated between “victims” under 15 and “victims” 15-21, so I did too.
The “gross indecency” law, Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act (1885), offered no real parameters for differentiating between “gross indecency offenders” based on age. But the state solicitors did not prosecute any boys under 15, even though many were involved (and declared their own willing participation) in sex with men. I applied the precedent set by the courts to set my own study parameters.
It was perhaps cowardly, maybe even stupid, to draw these lines in the sand. But I needed a line, and I clung to that one. I leaned into the invented legal categories imposed on “rent boys” by the Irish state. It was easier to use that artificial framework than grapple with the intricacies and discomfort of Dublin’s broader sexual economy, which included children, and a wide range of intergenerational relationships, interactions, and coercions. I struggled to include any children (by modern standards) at all; but to deny the significance of these boys in the desperate landscape of same-sex desire under socio-legal repression would have been just as irresponsible. That’s why Matthew Nyhan (15) and Leslie Price (17)—who were both charged and convicted under the gross indecency laws—are in my book, but Michael Moore’s victims are not.
Few historians, with notable recent exceptions, have dared to grapple with the sexuality of children, despite Michel Foucault’s entreaty in the History of Sexuality. And in some ways, Moore resembles Michel Foucault’s 1867 Lapcourt village man, whose “games” with the “urchins” were, according to Foucault, a simple and “everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality.” But like the petty mayor and police and doctors and judge of Foucault’s anecdote, I struggled to view Moore’s life without the social constructs that govern sexuality in my own time.
When Moore was a boy, he was treated with leniency, like the majority of “boys” (under-21s) who were caught involved with men. When he was a man, he was imprisoned for two to three years each time he was caught and convicted—just like the majority of “gross indecency offenders.” The reasons I didn’t include him in my book reflect my own modern sensibilities rather than the realities of mid-century Ireland. I saw his predation as distinct from almost all of the other cases, even the other cases involving under-15s; the boys that Michael Moore lured out of the city had less agency, as they were coerced through trickery. But I also convinced myself that the 13- and 14-year-olds who loitered around Dublin’s docks or sold newspapers and sex didn’t belong in my book either. Though judges often handed out harsher punishments for men who assaulted children under 15, there was no law that said they had to. I let the socio-legal constructs of the time shape the parameters of my study, which allowed me to separate out men like Moore from men like James Hand, Ronald Brown, and Henry Coghlan.
The wild thing is, despite the artificial lines that the judges and attorney general set when dealing with the rent boys of Dublin, more often than not the state wasn’t actually doing much to protect children from sexual violence. The gardaí were instructed by their superior officers to watch public lavatories and patrol parks in search of adult men engaging in consensual (albeit public) sex. The cases involving sexual assaults of children were almost always (92%) because a boy or a parent made a direct complaint, and not all complaints were followed-up on. The police weren’t hunting for child sexual abusers, though there were plenty of those around, hidden in plain sight. They instead used their limited resources to punish men who were having sex with men, to eliminate the visibly queer from Dublin’s streets and parks. And unfortunately, these policies of moral containment typified the new state, which permitted the violence against and erasure of citizens (especially women, but also queer people and children) in the name of presenting to the world as a pure, Christian nation.
The source material for this essay comes primarily from court records at the National Archives of Ireland. Dublin Circuit Courts, State Files, Box #s 1C-90-39 (April 1928); 1D-20-112 (January 1934); 1D-20-112 (April 1936); 1D-20-112 (April 1940); 1D-20-112 (October 1942); 1D-27-12 (April 1945); V14-30-22 (January 1951).
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