Irish Ayes 'Out In The World: Ireland's LGBTQ+ Diaspora'
"If we don't know ourselves, how shall we ever know anyone else?" is one of the quotes featured in the new exhibit at the GLBT History Museum, "Out In The World: Ireland's LGBTQ+ Diaspora." The exhibit formally convened on May 14 with introductory remarks from the Society's Interim Co-Executive Director Andrew Shaffer, California Senator Scott Wiener, Consul General of Ireland Robert O'Driscoll, and Irish Green Party politician Catherine Martin, who is Ireland's Minister for Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport, and Media, followed by a reception at the Castro's Blush Wine Bar."Across the generations, Irish LGBTQ people have emigrated and found opportunities to live and love abroad.
Yet this journey was rarely a simple transition from an oppressive island to a liberal wider world. Irish LGBTQ emigrants often faced prejudice abroad.
Home, once a place of shame and silence, could also become a welcoming site of return," reads the exhibition's description. Sponsored by EPIC, The Irish Emigration Museum, in partnership with the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, the panel-exhibit explores six themes: exclusion, community, love, defiance, solidarity, and return, by highlighting 12 individual stories from the extensive history of Ireland's LGBTQ diaspora.
The curator is Dr. Maurice J. Casey, the gay current Department of Foreign Affairs Historian-in-Residence at EPIC, who just completed his doctorate in History at the University of Oxford in 2020.
