On May 23rd, 2015 the people of Ireland made history by becoming the first country in the world to introduce marriage equality by popular vote. The joyous scenes from Dublin Castle and across Ireland, as the historic vote was declared, made headlines across the globe. But more than anything else, the vote was about changing the 'real lives' of the largest minority in Ireland: the LGBT community. Charlie Bird, inspired by the extraordinary Yes Equality campaign, travelled the length and breadth of Ireland to record first-hand the moving life stories of over fifty people who were deeply affected by the marriage equality vote. These are the true stories from ordinary LGBT people who have lived in the shadow of inequality and oppression for decades. A Day in May is a poignant record of their lives - of the pain, terror, confusion and sometimes the laughter - all of these emotions are beautifully captured by Charlie Bird. Stunning portrait photography complement the voices on paper to powerful effect amplifying the life affirming impact of that day in May 2015 when Ireland said yes to marriage equality. *** "The ordinary men and women who tell their remarkably eloquent stories create a fascinating tapestry of voices and experiences that epitomizes the phrase 'the personal is political.' As Colm Toibin writes in his introduction, each gay testimony 'moves our lives from shadow into substance.' A Day in May is an uplifting, enlightening and powerful collection." --Kevin Howell, Shelf Awareness, Social Science, July 1, 2016 *** "...moving anthology of firsthand testimonies from members of Ireland's LGBT community. Highly recommended!" --Midwest Book Review, Wisconsin Bookwatch: September 2016, The LGBT Studies Shelf [Subject: Marriage Equality, Politics, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies]

In Being Gay in Ireland: Resisting Stigma in the Evolving Present, Gerard Rodgers argues that existing theory and research on the lives of gay men often exhibits a social weightlessness such that self-beliefs are frequently decoupled from an analysis of society. History and conventions inform and shape gay men’s self-beliefs, yet psychology as a discipline rarely dialogues with historical or political scholarship. Rodgers corrects this oversight with a critical analysis of the decades of socio-political struggle in Ireland and elsewhere. Rodgers captures the lives of gay men who are situated in varied contexts and who all, despite their different situations, possess self-beliefs that are shaped by wider historical traditions and evolving social change. Rodgers argues that the nuances and particulars of self-beliefs are significantly affected by wider historical traditions and evolving social and political changes. Through his reconstruction, Rodgers provides practitioners of applied psychological and therapeutic disciplines with an in-depth picture of how historical context and social justice successes have interacted with gay men’s self-beliefs, with a particular focus on how prosocial resistances against prejudice have incrementally eroded historical standards of gay stigma.

Named Book of the Month Club's Book of the Year, 2017 Selected one of New York Times Readers’ Favorite Books of 2017 Winner of the 2018 Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award From the beloved New York Times bestselling author of The Boy In the Striped Pajamas, a sweeping, heartfelt saga about the course of one man's life, beginning and ending in post-war Ireland Cyril Avery is not a real Avery -- or at least, that's what his adoptive parents tell him. And he never will be. But if he isn't a real Avery, then who is he? Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun, Cyril is adrift in the world, anchored only tenuously by his heartfelt friendship with the infinitely more glamourous and dangerous Julian Woodbead. At the mercy of fortune and coincidence, he will spend a lifetime coming to know himself and where he came from - and over his many years, will struggle to discover an identity, a home, a country, and much more. In this, Boyne's most transcendent work to date, we are shown the story of Ireland from the 1940s to today through the eyes of one ordinary man. The Heart's Invisible Furies is a novel to make you laugh and cry while reminding us all of the redemptive power of the human spirit.

Named for the ironic coincidence of the Irish baby boom of the 1970s, which peaked nine months to the day after Pope John Paul II’s historic visit to Dublin, The Pope’s Children is both a celebration and bitingly funny portrait of the first generation of the Celtic Tiger—the beneficiaries of the economic miracle that propelled Ireland from centuries of deprivation into a nation that now enjoys one of the highest living standards in the world.

Two young men, Jim, the naive, scholarly son of a Dublin shopkeeper, and Doyler, a rough working boy, struggle with issues of political, religious, and sexual identity in the year leading up to the Easter uprising of 1916.

This book traces the turbulent history of queer visibility in the Irish media to explore the processes by which a regionally based media system shaped queer identities within a highly conservative and religious population. The book details the emergence of an LGBTQ rights movement in Ireland and charts how this burgeoning movement utilised the media for the liberatory potential of advancing LGBTQ rights. However, mainstream media institutions also exploited queer identities for economic purposes, which, coupled with the eruption of the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s, disrupted the mainstreaming goals of queer visibility. Drawing on industrial, societal and production culture determinants, the author identifies the shifting contours of queer visibility in the Irish media, uncovering the longstanding relationship between LGBTQ organising and the Irish media. This book is suitable for students and scholars in gender studies, media studies, cultural studies and LGBTQ studies.

This collection is a testament to the lives of gay women and men in Ireland over the past few decades. Some talk about fear and pain, lives that are maimed emotionally and psychologically, decisions postponed, secrecy and shame. They talk about the s