The following is the revised text of a forty minute length talk I gave on an Edward Carpenter Community retreat I attended in June 2025. Enjoy.
Sir Roger Casement is the most famous gay Irishman that most English people have barely heard of, though he is famous in Germany. His name is more likely to be recalled as the answer to a quiz question than for his role in attempting to change the course of Irish history. And yet to the Irish he is a pivotal figure-he signified both deep humanity and deep folly. He became famous for reasons that are similar to the reasons that made Edward Carpenter famous in his time.
Both Casement and Carpenter saw and acted for what they saw as justice ahead of their time, where what they did is difficult to extract from the times that they were part of. In his advocacy of non-state Socialism Carpenter acted well outside of Government circles, and apparently stayed clear of establishment threats until 1916. Casement ended up acting from within the establishment before acting outside of the establishment.
But first the background that made their homosexuality invisible. Before 1861 all homosexual acts, whatever the acts involved, were described as ‘sodomy’, which by the 1850s was one of six crimes where the state could still impose the death sentence on criminals who convicted of the crime for. Other capital crimes were murder, treason, espionage, arson in the royal docks, and piracy with violence. This list was down from a list that was at its peak in the eighteenth century included 220 capital crimes, many of them against property, as passed by those with the most property.
Homosexual behaviour, or ‘buggery’ as it was defined as, had been a Capital crime since 1533. In 1861 the law on homosexual acts changed from making such acts punishable by death to the punishment being imprisonment for between ten years and life. The further on the nineteenth century progressed the fewer the crimes were that anyone could be hanged for. One difficulty this presented for the government was that public hangings were ‘a popular entertainment’. That is hangings drew crowds and crowds had to be managed, sold food to, by street vendors, pickpockets at the events apprehended etc. The fewer the hangings, the more crowds gathered for other reasons - non-conformist preachers and parliamentary reform come to mind. For the government a crowd caught in some fever of collective projection of homophobia was a safe crowd. Homosexuality was visible, the law and courts and law made it so. But with the new law the government problem was how to manage homophobic crowds without the draw of the hangman with his gibbet and noose? From 1861 onward homophobic crowd who came to see a homosexual punished had to be managed in a different way. Instead of those convicted of homosexual acts attracting a crowd through them being hanged, they would instead attract a crowd through the publication date of the trail in advance of it happening and the would-be criminalised man punished by the crowds who would jeer and pelt rotten fruit and more wounding objects at the man en route to the trial, which was a foregone conclusion.
My feeling, and I can’t prove it, is that Edward Carpenter, Roger Casement, and many other men who were similarly privately inclined to same sex relationships would have known about these pre-emptive public punishments and would have read, and been told, about the grizzly details of the prisons that those who were convicted and locked away for homosexual behaviour for would be put in, which was the 'improvement' on Capital punishment. The new law also encouraged a new form of homophobic vigilantism and agent provocateur behaviour. There, supposedly ‘moral societies’ secretly set up alcohol based secretive same-sex sexual activities in secretive rumoured-about houses to get witnesses to observe homosexual or sexually suggestive behaviour which the organisation who set the house up knew would get the attendees arrested. There, with secure witnesses a court case was an open and shut case. The police would arrest the drunken fumblers lured into their immorality by the moral society who set up the house.
There was a strong social class bias in this activity, where the upper classes who bought the law for their own advantage made sure that the poor paid for the law in the time they served when the poor got trapped by laws written by clever mean whilst they were barely literate. Whilst literacy rates improved in English society, the dynamic of the most literate and wealthy writing laws that trapped men who were tempted by the idea same-sex relationships, unawares of the consequences continued until the 1950s. where it was exposed by the trial of British/Canadian journalist Peter Wildeblood who was arrested and imprisoned, and while in prison voluntarily taught fellow prisoners adult literacy.
Casement was born in Dublin in 1864, into a mixed Catholic-Protestant family who were downwardly mobile. His grandfather was a bankrupt shipping merchant. His father, also called Roger, was a sea captain and sometime soldier who died when young Roger was thirteen. After this the young Roger stayed for short periods of time in many different relatives’ houses, where the fear of draining his host family’s finances followed the young Roger around and surely left him unsettled for life. Aged sixteen he started work as a shipping clerk.
Polish/English author Joseph Conrad first met Casement in The Congo in 1890 when Casement was 26 years old and working for a front missionary/trade organisation that was secretly funded by King Leopold of Belgium. Conrad was piloting a Belgian ship when he met shipping clerk Casement. When Conrad first commented on Casement, Conrad described Casement as 'A positive piece of good luck' and wrote '[Casement] thinks, speaks, well, most intelligent and [is] very sympathetic' when both of them were well disposed towards the apparent aim of the mission, the wellbeing of the native, not knowing who funded it or why-when it was for the future exploitation of the natives of The Congo.
Later, after Casement's arrest and trial, Conrad had more critical thoughts: 'Already in Africa, I judged he was a man, properly speaking, of no mind at all. I don't mean stupid. I mean that he was all emotion.’. Casement's career started with him being a shipping clerk working in the office of a dock through working as a clerk for The Colonial Service up to him being transferred to the Foreign Office, where by 1901, aged 37, there he served as British consul in the eastern part of the French Congo. In 1903 whilst Casement served in the civil service the British government of the day tasked Casement to compile a report into the human rights situation in The Congo under rule of the King Leopold of Belgium, who saw The Congo as his personal fiefdom. This report is where the reported emotionalism of Casement became Casement's strength, rather than his weakness. The period of compiling the report through on-site investigations was also the time when Casement first noted in his diaries some of the casual sexual pickups and possible fantasies he had as a gay man. The homo-erotic sections of the diary are self identifying but opaque. From this distance in time from when he wrote them it is impossible to distinguish whether they writings referred to fantasies he'd had - larger penis size has been a standard fantasy among men who have had fantasies about same-sex sexual relationships probably since the stone age-or whether the events that were described, mostly random pick-ups of young men some of whom were poor and were given money in kind, happened as the description of them describes them.
When the government published the Casement report on The Congo, the report compiled a lot of King Leopold’s mistreatment of his slaves in The Congo up to 1911. The report was an immediate hit with the British political establishment and got Casement knighted for his service to Britain and Ireland. The people the report was unpopular with was the British Royal family who whilst knighting Casement had blood ties with King Leopold’s family they were keen to maintain.
Aged forty seven, Casement could retire and tour the world on the back of his fame. This he did. His reputation hid his homosexuality, but even if he were not famous other narratives would have availed themselves as cover for his homosexuality-the behaviour recorded in the diaries of which it is tempting with hindsight to see as a reaction to the stress that witnessing the distress of the Congo natives in the rubber plantations would have caused him. Stresses in themselves are one reason why diarists write diaries, the diarist need a place they can process and leave their thoughts when they have work to do that creates stress in them. And their thoughts turn to stress relief which become diary entries.
When Casement looked at the way that London and Parliament directed the affairs of Ireland as part of The British Empire, he could not avoid seeing similarities between the way King Leopold of Belgium and The Congo ran The Congo. If the social inequality in Ireland was less absolute and less brutal than the inequality in The Congo, then the comparative inequality still left him itching to do something with his position, of being ‘a knight’, no less.
Come World War I and both politics and civil life are convulsed by change. Carpenter, a writer who's writings were known to be written in both German and English, was caught out by the patriotic paranoia that was spread by the popular press. And when patriotic paranoia became the focus of certain people with unorthodox domestic arrangements hid by unconvincing explanations, that was what put Carpenter even more in the cross-hairs of a patriotic’ press looking for targets. It was that pressure that made him abandon his home Millthorpe in 1916, and move south. Casement felt frustrated by how Parliament had, with a world war interrupting the Parliamentary deliberations on greater autonomy for Ireland, let change in Ireland trickle to nothing.
My contention is that for a few men in those times homosexuality could have been a means to a relationship that was worked-at, and provided mutual material and emotional support. Carpenter was one of them. There part of the support included keeping records of daily life in such companionship. But such people had to be quiet and keep any record they kept of that life secure against a dirt seeking sensationalist press looking for homosexual scapegoats to sell newspapers with.
Carpenter and Casement were both career bachelors. Both knew what had happened to Oscar Wilde, a married man and a bisexual who was caught by a law that allowed him no loophole of ‘privacy’ for his ‘open marriage’, who was exposed in court. Carpenter could move house, and cut short/absorb the losses of losing the local fame and community he had in Millthorpe. His books and pamphlets would still sell.
Casement had no such safe but disruptive plan B for himself or for Ireland, to claim its relative autonomy from England with, with England’s agreement. And since Casement’s homosexual behaviour was probably ‘reactive’, and his character was what we now call ‘straight acting’ - his homosexual behaviour as recorded in the diaries amid the stress of recording the distress of the natives of the Congo, his homosexuality was a hidden Achilles’ Heel for him. At best ‘a hidden Achilles’ heel’ was how homosexuality might have been empathetically understood. That such homosexuality had to be hidden, because of the homophobic reaction that revealing homosexuality generated was a painful paradox it took much later law reform to unpick, and the paradox is still here in the 2020s.
I won’t go into the botched Irish rebellion of Easter 1916 that Casement and others planned here. But that it was botched was part of why he was arrested. His arrest led to the discovery of his diaries where he recorded his homosexual thoughts. When Casement was put on trial it was not just him on trial, it was the claim of the Ireland he wanted being put on trial. When in the 1880s another Irish campaigner, Charles Stewart Parnell, had stood in support of ‘home rule for Ireland’, his stand was later cut from under him by the public exposure of his relationship with Kitty O’Shea, the long-separated wife of another MP of his own party.
The same would happen in a different way to Casement. When prominent figures wanted to support Casement and his view of Ireland at his trail, shadowy government figures told them about Casement's Achilles heel, the homosexual content in the diaries. Casement got little of the support in court that he could have had.
Casement was hanged for treason in 1916, and the whiff of sulphur in the question ‘were the homosexual parts of Casement’s ‘Black Diaries’ real or forged by the British state?’ remains to this day, albeit somewhat faded by time. Casement was known to be charismatic. He must have been very straight acting and convincing to have climbed the way he did from a childhood imperilled by lower middle class financial instability through to being knighted: that straight acting that even now looking for evidence of his homosexuality is like looking for a ghost.
Malcolm Walker June 2025
Footnotes
German “Roger Casement Execution” bronze 1916 Medal by Karl Goetz. (Sold at auction on 26 March 2024). The 1351 law of King Edward III was invoked by his barrister as a defence against high treason for Casement, who finally addressed his speech from the dock also to the Irish people.
Roger Casement
Biography https://www.dib.ie/biography/casement-sir-roger-david-a1532
Film https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-the-trial-of-sir-roger-casement-1960-online
Complete diaries on kindle @ £9.99
https://amazon.co.uk/dp/B0D4B99ZFG/
Casement’s self portrait, poems some photographs and Irish interests
https://www3.smo.uhi.ac.uk/oduibhin/bgilmore/furthernotes.htm
Edward Carpenter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Carpenter
Oscar Wilde
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde
Peter Wildeblood
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Wildeblood
Joseph Conrad
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Conrad
King Leopold
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_II_of_Belgium
Charles Stewart Parnell
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Stewart_Parnell
The 4th edition of Roger Casement: The Complete Black Diaries with a study of his background, sexuality, and Irish political life (Belfast Press) has now been published. It comes only in an Amazon Kindle eBook version, available for £9.99 at: https://amazon.co.uk/dp/B0D4B99ZFG/
Note the word ‘Complete’ in the title, as all four journals are now here in full. The eBook has, for the first time, unabridged versions of the 1903 and 1910 Diaries and the 1911 Cash Ledger, and all of the never-otherwise-published, highly sexual 1911 Diary over which London threatened an obscenity prosecution.
This extensive book provides all the diaries and supporting text with explanations for their many characters while giving a context for Casement whose significance and seminal role in the political development of separatist Ireland has been masked by the debates over his homosexuality and the diaries; explicit content. An Advanced Liberal in British terms, Casement’s effective humanitarian role in official investigations in the Congo and Peru is outlined in specific chapters as is his Ulster family in Ballymena and Ballycastle. His part in the pre-1916 development of Republicanism in the north and later in Dublin is uniquely detailed.
His two named boyfriends, the betrayer and fraudster Adler Christensen, and the respectable Millar Gordon from Co Antrim, plus his key mentor, the Belfast solicitor and antiquarian F.J. Bigger, merit separate chapters. There are now over a hundred photographs in this edition with some images of actual diary pages.
The 3rd paperback edition remains available on Amazon. This should be the final definitive version of the diaries but the diary authenticity dispute continues unrelentingly as per the first review, visible at the bottom of the Amazon page link: https://amazon.co.uk/dp/B0D4B99ZFG/
Jeff Dudgeon (author)
Jeffrey Dudgeon is a pioneering gay activist in Belfast, who successfully prosecuted the UK government at the European Human Right’s Court in Strasbourg. Please watch https://vimeo.com/637486105 for the Council of Europe’s video on the 40 th anniversary of the case of ‘Dudgeon v. the United Kingdom’
Please watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxhe7WCqhtw for Jeff Dudgeon’s lecture hosted by The Linen Hall Library, ‘Dudgeon vs United Kingdom.
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