Abstract
This article explores the role and impact of Gay Health Action (GHA), a voluntary AIDS organisation that operated in the Republic of Ireland between 1985 and 1989. Drawing on their publications and media engagement, it argues that GHA played a significant role in educating the general public about AIDS, while this group also challenged ideas about sexual health and dispelled negative stereotypes associated with homosexuality. In doing so, the activities of GHA begin to outline the initial public response to HIV/AIDS during the 1980s, while also contributing towards an emergent body of research on the changing nature of Irish society during the late-twentieth century. It suggests ways in which attitudes to the gay community were evolving and highlights the need for further research on AIDS, examinations of which can contribute towards the emergent histories of social change and health policy in this period.
Introduction
The audience did not understand and Derek Freedman was clearly frustrated. The consultant genitourinary physician addressed a range of AIDS questions during the popular discussion programme The Late Late Show on RTÉ in May 1987. Throughout the segment, he repeatedly emphasised the public health risk posed by this new epidemic disease and dismissed the notion that it was only relevant to a minority, as ‘anybody can get AIDS…it’s a disease of everybody’.
1
He was equally clear on the need for a widespread public education programme, declaring that without it ‘then we’re dead…[as] this epidemic is a time capsule’.
2
For Freedman, the Department of Health’s efforts were falling short and there was a need for decisive action. The only positive development that he highlighted was the work carried out by the gay community through a voluntary organisation called Gay Health Action (GHA), which had recently conducted a public information campaign that targeted young people in urban areas. Interviewed in 1994, Freedman reiterated the salience of this grassroots organisation to AIDS education in Ireland throughout the late 1980s. This group, he explained: on its own initiative and with little or no funding, set about informing people, organising lectures, producing leaflets, producing a telephone helpline service, and set up a HIV positive counselling group. This occurred years before anyone else saw the need.
3
Internationally, the disease offered an avenue for efforts by the voluntary sector, as Roy Porter underlined how AIDS gave activist groups the opportunity to ‘command a role often denied to those beyond the magic laboratory’. 10 This vigorous voluntary response emerged due to its initial association with marginalised groups that were considered uniquely susceptible to the disease, they were the ‘4Hs’: homosexuals, haemophiliacs, heroin users and Haitians. 11 Although this idea was disproven in 1982, the notion that AIDS was a concern for only a small subset of the population remained pervasive and hampered the development of statutory health initiatives to address the condition, or reduce its propagation, into the 1990s. 12 In the United States, for instance, the Department of Health and Human Services took three years to produce an information booklet on the topic. On publication it was condemned for offering ‘less explicit information about AIDS and how to prevent it than Americans could get from their daily newspaper’. 13
Using materials from the Irish Queer Archive, an archival collection created by the National Gay Federation in Dublin, alongside activist memoirs, newspaper articles and programmes from the national broadcaster RTÉ (Raidió Teilifís Éireann), this article explores the role played by GHA during their four years of activism from 1985 to 1989. In doing so, it complicates existing research on gay activism in Ireland by revealing the extent to which this group was successful in changing attitudes to AIDS, the gay community and sexual health more broadly. Notwithstanding these successes, however, it equally shows how the groups struggled to shift the established approach to infectious diseases and how the group’s impact remained limited by their position within the voluntary sector. Viewed from this angle, the activities of GHA illustrate both the broader climate around AIDS and homosexuality in the years preceding legal decriminalisation in 1993, as well as charting some of the broader structural barriers that precluded the possibility of transformative change of Irish society during the late-twentieth century.
‘In the absence of any apparent programme’: 1980s Ireland
Writing to the Minister for Health in 1986, GHA activist Christopher Robson was blunt about the importance of his organisation. After he noted the Minister’s failure to reply to his previous letter, Robson described how ‘in the absence of any apparent programme or even printed information from your department we have expanded our own range of desperately needed services’ to address AIDS in Ireland. 14 Robson was not exaggerating, as GHA was notably active at a time when statutory responses to AIDS remained minimal. Indeed, the group was founded in 1985 at a point when, as Freedman acknowledged, no one ‘saw the need’ for an AIDS organisation in the state. By the mid-1980s, eleven people had died from the disease nationwide, of whom seven were identified as homosexual, while just thirty-seven gay people had been identified as ‘sero-positive’ under the newly introduced HTLV-III test. 15 In short, AIDS did not appear to represent a sizeable public health threat.
This statutory apathy, and the limited number of infections, are both understandable within the broader context of the mid-1980s. As Cormac Ó Gráda has noted, in this period ‘a gloomy assessment of Ireland’s economic prospects seemed warranted’ as economic stagnation and emigration remained prevalent. 16 This was visible in unemployment rates that continued to increase until they eventually reached a European high of twenty-one per cent in 1993. 17 This significant economic challenge was also reflected in an underfunded public health system, with a significant curtailment of funding throughout the decade. 18 In this environment, an already overstretched health system was unlikely to embark on a widespread programme to address a disease that heretofore had little discernible impact among the general public. On the other hand, the low prevalence of deaths from the disease was also attributable to this bleak economic climate. The activist Kieran Rose noted the effect of this bleak economic context on the gay community, describing how a Cork gay activist group was reduced ‘to a core of about four of the original members’ as participants were involved for short periods before their emigration from the state. 19 This meant that AIDS infections rates among the gay community in the state remained notably lower than international trends, with intravenous drug users making up 61 per cent of HIV diagnoses between 1985 and 1990. 20
The association of AIDS with marginalised groups, like the gay community or intravenous drug users, was also reflected in discussions across the wider media in 1985. In January, RTÉ News included a segment on the virus, which discussed the disease exclusively in terms of the gay communities in New York and San Francisco before noting the thousands of deaths due to the disease. The piece then concluded with the deaths of seven gay men in Ireland due to AIDS. Yet, there was little discernible sense of urgency, as the report did not explain how the disease was transmitted, how the risk of infection could be minimised, or offer any further sources of information about the virus. This understanding of AIDS as a foreign problem, and consequently of little relevance to Ireland, was also reflected within press coverage. A Sunday Independent column by the women’s rights journalist Mary Kenny from July 1985 discussed the disease as an exotic affliction of closeted Hollywood stars as, following Rock Hudson’s recent diagnosis, Kenny mused about which celebrity was next to announce their HIV infection. 21 Similar sentiments were expressed in both the Irish Independent and the Irish Press, with articles like ‘AIDS: The killer stalking Hollywood stars’ or ‘AIDS scare – Burt Reynolds denies it’. 22 This lack of public concern was exemplified in the public response to the first Late Late Show segment on AIDS in September 1985. During a wide-ranging discussion, host Gay Byrne mentioned the possibility that AIDS could become a concern in Ireland. The public indifference to this speculation was telling, as Byrne was widely criticised for attempting to provoke public fears, with the television critic of The Connacht Tribune criticising him for ‘trying a little too hard’ for the ‘shock, horror type item’. 23
Nonetheless, despite the absence of a sense of public urgency, GHA was founded in 1985, a product of the increasingly vocal gay community in Dublin city. This established community infrastructure for the gay community might seem surprising, particularly given the legislative provisions of the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act and the 1885 Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, both of which explicitly outlawed homosexual acts. However, by the mid-1970s these provisions had become virtually unenforceable in the courts due to the influence of activist groups like the Irish Gay Rights Movement (IGRM), who were themselves influenced by the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the United Kingdom. This group challenged cases where alleged homosexual acts had occurred and demonstrated the inherent difficulty in categorically proving that an act had actually happened. 24 This brought the conviction rate down over time, with a parallel drop in arrests. 25 These efforts meant that by the mid-1980s there were a range of gay advocacy groups in the state, including the IGRM as well as the Cork Irish Gay Rights Movement (1976), Liberation for Irish Lesbians (1978), the National Gay Federation (1979), the Cork Gay Collective (1978) and the Dublin Lesbian and Gay Mens Collective (1982). Patrick McDonagh has underlined the range of these organisations, in a country where homosexual acts remained in theory illegal, and how they helped to foster the sense of a gay community. 26 This was augmented by the establishment of social centres like the Phoenix Club in Dublin, the Hirschfeld Centre in Temple Bar and the Quay Co-Op in Cork. 27 Writing in 1985, journalist Rhona McSweeney highlighted the increasingly prominent gay community in the capital who ‘have now begun to reflect the times that are in it and adopt a higher profile’. 28 By the mid-1980s, this community infrastructure had created a range of gay-specific services in the city, including ‘community centres, information services, campaigning groups, workers cooperatives, magazines, discos, bars and saunas’. 29 As Richard Hoggart has noted groups can ‘gain some of their respect from their exclusiveness, from a sense of people [being] outside who are not “us”’. 30 The creation of this infrastructural network can be understood in the same way, as it helped to facilitate the creation of a communal identity, and would also play a key role in facilitating the emergence of GHA and its AIDS advocacy efforts.
Ironically, similar gay-specific services were increasingly viewed as a threat to public health internationally during the mid-1980s, condemned as locations that facilitated the spread of AIDS. In the United States, fear that gay bathhouses (saunas) were a danger prompted their closure in San Francisco, while multiple community services in the United Kingdom were subject to physical damage throughout the 1980s, the most visible being the arson attack on the Capital Gay newspaper in December 1987. 31 The presence of this infrastructural network was important to the development of AIDS services in both the United Kingdom and United States. Jeffrey Weeks explicitly linked the emergence of the Terrence Higgins Trust advocacy organisation to London’s established infrastructural network of ‘gay organising and campaigning experience’, while Steven Epstein noted how existing facilities helped the gay community to ‘mobilize to meet this new threat’ posed by AIDS in the United States. 32 Yet, these networks were arguably even more important to AIDS activism in Ireland, as GHA emerged in response to this international discourse rather than a national groundswell of concern about this epidemic disease.
Simon Watney noted how reporting on AIDS was ‘inexorably caught up in the larger discourse of retribution against gay men’ and argued that the press covered the issue in these terms throughout the early 1980s. 33 This retributive orientation in the press was significant in Ireland, as the National Gay Federation’s community centre maintained subscriptions to a wide variety of LGBT publications from across the Anglophone world, including Outrage (Australia), Trans-scribe (New Zealand), The Body Politic (Canada), Gay Noise (England), The Pink Glaswegian (Scotland) and Anything That Moves (United States). 34 This gave members an insight into the disproportionate impact AIDS was having on the gay community internationally, as Douglas Crimp has noted how the US gay press was ‘one of the very few services of up-to-date information on all aspects of AIDS’, in a country where approximately seventy-one per cent of new AIDS cases were among homosexuals in 1983. 35 Activist Izzy Kamikaze was typical when she described her awareness of the disease through the ‘yankee gay papers’ she read in the Hirschfeld Centre, while the prominent gay-rights activist David Norris described how he first learned about AIDS through the American LGBT magazine The Advocate. 36
These transnational connections, through services like the Hirschfeld centre, allowed an insight into international trends, as visitors could read articles about the impact of AIDS in other countries. An obvious example of this was the British LGBT activist Brian Kennedy’s scathing 1983 piece in the Australian magazine Outrage, where he warned of the need to mobilise against a disease that has been characterised by ‘ignorance, mystery and the fear of a sudden unexplained death’. 37 Over time, this came to influence the discourse within Irish gay publications. Initially, they were cautious about the disease and saw little need for alarm, as when a February 1983 edition of the NGF News warned that ‘AIDS is not in Ireland and many never be so’. However, over time anxiety concerning the disease became more overt, as the Irish gay community were aware of the disproportionate impact of the disease on the gay community internationally, who made up the vast majority of early AIDS deaths. The March/April 1985 edition of the NGF’s Out magazine, for instance, published an in-depth interview between the priest (and prominent AIDS advocate) Fr Bernard Lynch and an unnamed young man dying from the virus, an article that highlighted how gay people ‘were sick and dying and being ignored’ in the United States. 38 Out magazine then began to highlight the need for action in the face of this emergent public health threat. These links helped Irish gay activists to become aware of the potential implications of AIDS and to form an organisation that addressed the disease before it represented a prominent public health concern in Ireland. This approach mean that, in 1985, the gay community began to mobilise to address this potential public health threat, while the mainstream media continued to cover it in terms of celebrity deaths.
‘Small and necessary measures’: The Formation of GHA
In 1985, when AIDS deaths in Ireland remained in the single figures, international trends spurred the foundation of an organisation dedicated to AIDS activism. 39 This response, described by activist Christopher Robson as ‘perhaps the quickest of any gay community in the world’, was an attempt to address public health concerns regarding the virus before the disease mirrored the situation in countries like the United States, where the gay community continued to represent a sizeable proportion of overall AIDS deaths into the late 1980s. 40 Based in the Hirschfeld Centre in Temple Bar, the group drew their membership from a range of existing activist organisations, appearing an exception to the broader tension and infighting that was foregrounded by Maurice J. Casey. 41 Gaining an insight into the working relationships and core membership of GHA remains challenging, as the vast majority of the organisation’s files are non-discursive; identifying members only by their first name and keeping written reflection to the absolute minimum. GHA meeting minutes from June 1987, for instance, note the presence of people like ‘John’ and how ‘Donal will meet with the Eastern Health Board this week’. 42 Yet, this is arguably a reflection of the organisation itself, which emerged to address a seemingly existential disease for the gay community internationally.
Notwithstanding the gaps in sources, it is clear that the group was founded in January 1985 and planned a booklet on AIDS, which they began to distribute from May. 43 While the emergence of GHA can be attributed to their links with the international gay community, the group’s rapid development throughout 1985 owed a lot to their links with established gay community services in Ireland. It used an already established a distribution agreement with Easons, for instance, in which the retailer would offer a percentage of GHA’s materials at their outlets across the country. This mirrored the system already established between the booksellers and NGF’s Out magazine. 44 GHA also used the gay community’s infrastructure, like the Hirschfeld Centre in Dublin, as a space for educational seminars and established an AIDS telephone helpline, which was comparable to established phone services provided by the NGF, the Cork Gay Rights movement and Dublin Lesbian line. 45 GHA was clearly a descendant of these already established services, as the core group of activists replicated methods that had proven successful previously. By 1986, the group had even used the pre-existing relationship between the Hirschfeld Centre and the Department of Social Welfare to secure the services of one person under the ‘Special employment scheme’, who worked to produce informational materials but could remain in receipt of their Social Welfare payment. 46 While the group’s rapid emergence can be linked to their use of these antecedents, the organisation also availed of a broader range of international supports. Seminars in the Hirschfeld Centre, for example, drew from models established by the Shanti Project in San Francisco and the San Francisco AIDS project. 47 Edmund Lynch, one of the co-founders of the NGF’s Out Magazine, also used his role as a member of the secretariat of the International Gay Association to connect with figures in AIDS advocacy, over time this saw Out increasingly publish material from international sources like Canada’s gay magazine The Body Politic. Indeed, their international range was so pronounced that Páraic Kerrigan has argued that Out became a vehicle to ‘engage Irish gay readers in the developments being made in AIDS and HIV research’ globally. 48
The group’s initial efforts focused on education within the gay community itself. In epidemiological terms this focus made sense, as the number of Irish AIDS cases remained low in 1985 (with just eleven diagnoses), while the gay community continued to represent the majority of new diagnoses internationally. 49 In light of this, GHA’s first actions focused on education-based initiatives to prevent the LGBT community from contracting the virus in the first place, with the production of ‘cards on safer sex and posters for distribution in all gay venues.’ 50 The group then trained volunteers to hold educational seminars and to talk about safer sex practices in social spaces like nightclubs. 51 The organisation focused on these overtly preventative education measures, rather than looking at issues like healthcare treatment for those diagnosed with the disease, as GHA representative and prominent gay rights advocate Donal Sheehan acknowledged how ‘there’s no need for the sort of disaster that happened in America, we can protect ourselves now’. 52 This was a prophylactic effort, designed to address the issue before it began to align broader international trends. 53
The group began to distribute their own information materials on the syndrome from May 1985, with an initial print run for 15,000 information booklets and cards, partially subsidised by a grant of £700 from the Health Education Bureau. 54 The principal item produced was AIDS: Information Booklet. This imaginatively titled guide was written in consultation with a range of activists and clinicians, including consultant Dr Derek Freedman, the San Francisco AIDS Project, the Terrence Higgins Trust, the Gay Men’s Health Crisis Centre and the microbiology analysis unit based in University College Dublin. 55 The guide offered a range of advice on AIDS, which was clearly oriented towards preventative measures. 56 Discussing the risks associated with the virus and foregrounding the use of condoms during all sexual encounters, the initial guide was produced within the gay community and was clearly designed for their information. The guide’s foregrounding of condoms was supported by fortunate timing as, just that year, the 1985 Health (Family Planning) Act allowed for the purchase of condoms in pharmacies. 57 Yet, anonymous Department of Health officials had described the prohibition on condoms as largely symbolic by the mid-1980s, with one senior civil servant stating that ‘anyone with a grain of sense could get a condom’. 58 Regardless, GHA’s focus on practical prophylactic measures was considered so successful among activist groups that AIDS: Information Booklet became a popular model for activist publications internationally. 59
Exploring the development of voluntary AIDS-related services in the United Kingdom, Virginia Berridge defined the early to mid-1980s as a period of ‘incoherence, of absence of knowledge, of “groping in the dark”’. 60 There is a similar sense of confusion to the initial efforts in Ireland, as the presence of transnational links was crucial to an emerging awareness of the disease. Jeffrey Weeks has argued that the virus was inextricably linked to the gay community, an association that ‘has continued to form, the social and cultural response’ to AIDS. 61 In Ireland, this characterisation spurred a response from the Irish gay community, aware of the damage associated with the virus internationally. Indeed, notwithstanding the impact of emigration, evidence points to a longstanding awareness of the risk of AIDS within the state’s LGBT community. For one, HIV infections among those identified as gay or bisexual remained notably lower than international trends. In a 1991 sample of 2,574 participants who self-identified as either gay or bisexual, for instance, 188 (7.3 per cent) were positive. 62 When questioned about the Department of Health’s lack of information on the syndrome in 1985, the chief medical officer Dr James Walsh argued that activists groups were the most effective catalysts of public health information, positing that ‘gay people seem to know a lot about AIDS’ already. 63 Interviewed in 1994, general practitioner Dr Mary Murnaghan also noted the high level of awareness around sexual health issues among her gay patients, a cognisance that she attributed to earlier GHA campaigns, as ‘gay people have been connected with raising awareness around AIDS for years now and they are the front of the line when it comes to practicing safer sex’. 64 The significance of such efforts should not be underestimated. Not only do they show the scale of efforts by the Irish gay community, alongside its connection to a broader international discourse around the disease, but also demonstrate the willingness of the community to address a potential health issue in the absence of statutory action.
Beyond the Gay Community?
Despite the group’s aim of educating the gay community, GHA was increasingly called upon to inform wider Irish society about the risks associated with AIDS. This was indicative of the lack of statutory information available regarding the disease, but also shows GHA’s willingness to address a broader audience. This broader readership was clearly visible in the 1986 revision of the AIDS booklet, which addressed an audience broader than the Irish gay community; its stated aim being to inform the wider public about AIDS, a condition in which information was ‘widely scattered, difficult to find and much of it is of dubious accuracy’. 65 There was very little information on the condition of AIDS itself, instead the booklet noted succinctly how ‘people start to get ill, some people die’. The text also talks in less explicit terms about condoms than its 1985 predecessor. Instead, the majority of the text sought to dispel popular myths associated with the disease. Hence, it emphasised the representation of AIDS in the mainstream press and posited that ‘the only effective weapon we have in the fight against AIDS is accurate and detailed public health information’. 66 The booklet then focused on allaying public fears around the syndrome, highlighting how you cannot get AIDS from casual contact, before it listed a range of voluntary supports that were available across the country.
This contrasted with the initial booklet from 1985, which had been clearly targeted towards the LGBT community exclusively. GHA’s broader approach was a response to the public, as the group was increasingly viewed as the experts on AIDS. This can be seen in the fact that staff in the Health Education Bureau referred concerned members of the public to GHA for further information, as ‘they are the people who know the most about it’. 67 By May 1987, journalist Anne Marie Hourihan described how the vast majority of queries and requests for information to GHA’s AIDS helpline were now coming from heterosexual callers, who sought the help of this gay advocacy group because of a lack of alternative sources of information. 68 Dr James Walsh, Chief Medical Officer of the Department of Health, was repeatedly challenged about the lack of statutory documents on AIDS in multiple fora from 1985 onwards. 69 During an RTÉ News bulletin, he noted how the department was in the process of gathering information on AIDS, but justified their delay as it was a challenge ‘to know what kind of leaflet to produce’. 70 As the state continued to prevaricate, the role played by GHA became increasingly important in providing public information about a condition that was becoming increasingly common in the media. Alongside other Anglophone governments, the Irish Department of Health remained hesitant to take a lead role in AIDS education and instead preferred to fund voluntary efforts through organisations like the Health Education Bureau. By February 1986, activist Christopher Robson noted how the GHA’s AIDS: Information Booklet was now being requested by organisations and people across the country, which included ‘public libraries, social welfare offices, doctors, prison welfare offices and people working with intravenous drug users’. 71 This pointed to a broader public desire for information about the disease, but also highlights a growing tolerance towards the gay community more broadly, as public bodies were willing to stock information booklets with ‘Gay Health Action’ emblazoned on their covers in bold black letters.
The introduction of the HIV antibody test (the HTLV-III test) prompted GHA to distribute a second booklet from mid-1986, alongside an additional 10,000 ‘play safe’ safe sex information cards. 72 Over its four years of operation, activist Kieran Rose estimated that the group distributed more than half a million pieces of these AIDS-related materials, in a variety of forms including flyers, cards, booklets and posters. 73 By mid-1986, GHA had also expanded its range of information seminars. These had started in the Hirschfeld Centre as an informal forum in which to educate members of the gay community about safe sex and the dangers of AIDS, attendees could then transmit this information to others within informal settings like pubs and nightclubs. 74 Public interest ensured that these seminars soon expanded to include any interested party that wanted to learn more about the virus. This resulted in seminars that now included a range of professionals including ‘social workers, prison welfare officers, health workers, people working with IV drug users and relatives of the HTLV-III positive and drug users’. 75 Among this varied group, GHA began to engage extensively with drug users and their families, as the rate of HIV infection among intravenous drug users increased dramatically in the period 1985 to 1989, rising from one to three diagnoses a year to twenty-three a year by 1989. 76 Asked to comment on the information provided by GHA, an unnamed mother of a HIV positive drug user praised the group for actively addressing the issue of AIDS in Ireland, as she told Ann Marie Hourihan from The Irish Press how ‘The gay men have been great. They’ve been fantastic to us, very helpful’. 77
From 1986 onwards, GHA also began to assume an active advocacy role, working to shape media coverage of the condition in Ireland. One activist described how this included daily monitoring of all Irish coverage on AIDS, as ‘A file is kept on the reporting of AIDS and many articles have been successfully followed up’.
78
An example of this monitoring occurred in August 1987, when specific alterations were introduced to life assurance policies in the state. Following the granting of a £30,000 payment to the relatives of a deceased person with AIDS by an unnamed life assurance company, the industry agreed en masse to include a new question on all new life assurance questionnaires.
79
It asked: Have you ever received medical advice, counselling treatment or had a blood test in connection with an AIDS-related condition, or have you any reason to believe that you may be exposed to such a condition?
80
GHA played a prominent role in shaping the public discourse around AIDS, as their representatives appeared on all RTÉ radio and television programmes that discussed the syndrome during the period 1985–1989. Indeed, GHA representatives were often central to RTÉ’s coverage on this issue, providing information on international AIDS trends, safe sex practices and critiques of the state’s inaction. 86 This role for a ‘gay organisation’ was in itself significant, as GHA representatives occupied a position of expertise. Patrick McDonagh has highlighted how expectations around homosexuality continued to vary widely, with many expecting that ‘homosexuals were freaky and weird, without ever meeting, talking or seeing one’. 87 Yet, not only were GHA representatives positioned as expert advisors on this issue, they often appeared on some of the state’s most prominent television programmes as the reputable experts on AIDS. Deirdre Quinn has noted how programmes like Today Tonight functioned as a didactic vehicle for an Irish audience, as here ‘issues concerning Northern Ireland were aired, worker protests and unemployment could be discussed’. 88 Thus, the appearance of GHA as experts on this programme contributed to the broader challenge against stereotypes concerning homosexuals. The 1975 constitution of the IGRM listed ‘the promotion of [a] better understanding of homosexuality by the community at large, by education and example’, as one of their core goals. 89 GHA was one facet of this broader effort, as it presented the gay community as not only responsible, but knowledgeable and in a position to help inform the wider community about the risks associated with an emerging disease. It thus presented an image of the gay community as responsible in their behaviour and altruistic to the wider community. Activists frequently noted how AIDS was killing gay people internationally, but that this was now not a concern in Ireland due to the actions of GHA. Thus while AIDS was linked to homosexuality internationally, GHA representatives emphasised the low rate of seropositivity in Ireland and instead highlighted the responsible actions taken by the gay community to combat the condition across society as a whole.
In the absence of any statutory action, GHA were in an advantageous position to shape this public discourse concerning the condition and concerning sexual health more broadly. They accomplished this by conducting little discussion of the risk group model of AIDS, which emphasised how certain groups were particularly likely to develop the condition. Instead, they chose to focus on risk actions, enforcing the importance of safe sex practices and attempting to inhibit any media hysteria surrounding the virus. On an October 1985 episode of Today Tonight, Donal Sheehan and Kieran Rose foregrounded their discussion in terms of prophylactics, enforcing how ‘you can take some reasonable precautions’ to prevent infection. 90 Both discussed the context of AIDS in Ireland, with Sheehan noting how ‘there’s no need for the kind of panic we saw in the United States’, while Rose emphasised the early response of Ireland and how ‘We’re at an early stage yet, which is a great advantage.’ 91 In adopting this approach, GHA limited the public discussion of AIDS in terms of morality, in contrast to other states where the disease was commonly linked to marginalised groups with ‘deviant’ sexual practices, where AIDS ‘threatened heterosexuals with homosexual contamination’. 92 Instead, AIDS emerged due to an individual’s practices. Just like general health, sexual health was predicated on healthy behaviours like condom use. Examining activist representation on British television, David Miller and Peter Beharrell have emphasised the ‘unspoken assumption’ of authority that had become attached to Terrence Higgins Trust representatives by 1989. 93 In Ireland, the position of GHA representatives within the national media progressed at an even faster rate. They were not only presented as having information and authority, they were the authoritative source of information on AIDS from 1986 onwards. During a debate on The Late Late Show in May 1987, the actions of GHA were the only group praised by the expert panel, which included journalist Ann Marie Hourihan, Fr Paul Lavelle (Chairman of the Catholic Bishops’ Task Force on AIDS), Dr Derek Freedman and Dr Harry Crawley of the Health Education Bureau. All four emphasised the central role that GHA played in educating the broader public about the disease, with Hourihan emphasising GHA’s actions in the face of a Department of Health that had ‘fudged the issue completely’. 94 They were not presented as a strong voice within a marketplace of activists, but instead were the dominant voice of authority on AIDS-related issues in Ireland. Frequently preceding Department of Health officials on these television programmes, the organisation had become the dominant public education force. Their prominence can be seen in the support of Fr Paul Lavelle who, while liberal in approach, was still a Catholic priest, but was willing to endorse and support the work being carried out by an overtly gay activist organisation in the mid-1980s. 95
Conclusion
GHA was formally disbanded in 1989, its closure attributed to a combination of ‘official neglect…and the exhaustion of the activists’ involved by Kieran Rose. 96 In operation for just four years, the group’s impact can appear limited, characterised by the production of information materials and efforts to frame the discussion of AIDS in the broader media. Yet, the work of GHA activists had an impact on both the statutory response to the virus and in the wider public’s understanding of the gay community. On a practical level, GHA’s booklets became the foundation for the Department of Health’s subsequent AIDS materials throughout the 1990s, incorporating an emphasis on risk actions rather than risk groups, which replicated GHA’s argument that there was ‘no special connection between AIDS and being gay’. 97 The vacuum created by the lack of state information on AIDS required GHA to assume an increasingly prominent position in the media during the period 1985–1989, until activist Christopher Robson could reasonably claim that the organisation was acting as a national information service on the disease from February 1986. 98 This role allowed the organisation to directly engage with the press, radio and television concerning AIDS, helping to temper the prevailing climate of ‘sometimes hysterical anti-gay media coverage’ around the syndrome and to instead present ‘clear and accurate information on AIDS and related issues’. 99 Their actions also prompted systematic change in the provision of healthcare to the gay community in Ireland. In 1992, the Eastern Health Board established the Gay Men’s Health Project, a service dedicated to the health needs of the gay community. Diarmaid Ferriter has suggested that the foundation of this new service arose as a consequence of GHA’s work, as this form of targeted healthcare simply ‘would not have happened but for the efforts of [the] voluntary groups’ in raising awareness about AIDS during the late 1980s. 100 GHA can thus be credited with not only informing the general public about AIDS during their period of operation, but in contributing towards a shift to the manner in which healthcare was delivered to minority groups in the state.
The impact of GHA’s closure can also be seen across the broader landscape of AIDS organisations. While they may have been the first advocacy organisation concerned with the virus, their departure in 1989 left an obvious gap for their successors to fill, which was visible in the doubling of opening hours at the Dublin AIDS helpline within months of GHA’s closure. 101 This article has looked at the efforts of only one organisation, and there is a need for a comprehensive examination of the impact of AIDS in Ireland during the 1980s. Nonetheless, the role played by GHA points to both their prominence and efficacy as an advocacy organisation, both within the gay community and in wider society. Steven Epstein’s analysis of AIDS activism in the United States noted the way in which social movements and their activism have a ‘hidden efficacy’ that serves as a self-reflexive mirror on that activist group. 102 In the case of GHA, this reflection was undeniably positive, as their activism presented an image of the broader Irish gay community as ‘responsible, effective and caring’ in the face of the myriad of challenges associated with the virus. 103 It thus represented one front in the wider effort to renegotiate Irish sexual mores during the 1980s, as the broader gay community sought wider societal acceptance, a process that ultimately culminated in legal decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1993.
Footnotes
Acknowledgement
My thanks to Catherine Cox, who supervised the MA dissertation on which this article is based.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.