Through the personal narratives of four gay men coming of age during the 1970s, this paper questions the relevance of the modernist ‘coming-out’ story in Ireland. This story, so prevalent in British and North American studies documenting the history of the gay and lesbian movement there has remained largely untold in Ireland. This paper reveals a uniquely Irish ‘coming-out’ experience shaped by the schools, families and communities in which the men lived and whose stories cannot be adequately explained within a modernisation perspective so frequently used to explain social change in Ireland.
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