Sir Roger Casement; An Appreciation

A friend of mine* once wrote the line
'nations are male and need to be screwed'
in one of his more compressed poems.
He never explained how to sodomise
a nation state, or where it's arsehole is.
He wrote nothing about how countries
stunted consensual sexual relationships
between men via taboo, which then laid
the ground for misinformed legislation.

What he was pointing towards
was how we need to free ourselves
for sexually oppressive norms
and laws if we want to live well.

Nobody did this better than Sir Roger Casement,
first in the 1911 report to the British government
about the misrule of the Belgian King, Leopold,
in The Congo where rubber was extracted
from the land and exported where no money
went back to the locals, who were slaves,
on a scale that caused absolute poverty
and suffering among the native population.

Casement died at the hands of the British state.
In 1916 his name was forever linked to diaries
in which he wrote of that which could not be spoken
namely homosexual activity with the locals
in the outposts of the empire empire in which he served.

He put as much reciprocity and generosity 
into the temporary same sex sexual relations
that he was offered as he could give them.

When he got screwed by a local
it was not because he deserved it,
as revenge on his government's cruelty,
it was consensual local relations.

When others know nothing about the activity
it was because they did not care, rather than taboo,
just as his writing up the sexual activity in his diary
his to do in the privacy of his room and locker. 

His revenge on Empire was complete
when with his death he became the daddy**
of a modern free Ireland, just as to it's people
Ireland was 'Mother Ireland' a century before .

*fellow blogger and poet Anthony Weir

**In the 1990's the gay community developed a new stereotype
of the daddy or the bear. Older bearded gay men who liked men
of similar appearance, where there was often an inequality
to the long term attachments that were formed. But the trick
of the longevity in relationships became for the older one to repair
the lack of self esteem in the younger one, caused by poor male
parenting. The trick was for a more tender and respectful parity
to emerge between the two bearded men, one of whom would be
old enough to be the others father.