A lot of people search the web for information about Roger Casement, and some of them end up here on my blog to read about my finding a 1993 BBC Radio 4 documentary on him, to listen to it, and to read the Bootboy article I wrote about hearing it. So I thought I’d add two more essays of mine, for your reading pleasure, both of which were published in Diary of a Man.The first, Roger Casement and Cock, was written in May 1995:
We should see the contrast between the ecstatic slavering cocksucker and the urbane, idealistic politician, burning with compassion for the dispossessed and downtrodden. We should see that they are but two sides of the same man.
The second, Roger Casement’s Gaydar profile, was written in 2003:
The “struggle of the homosexual conscience” is not a generic thing, it is always individual, and has more in common with any man’s struggle with his desire nature than anything specifically to do with finding men or women horny. The fascinating thing about Casement is not that he had struggles with his sexuality, but that he wrote about them, in quite a dull-witted way. He was no Wilde. Why should he have been?