Roger Casement: Traitor, Martyr or Pervert

by

James Kepner, Jr.

As Gide says in Corydon, the homosexual cause has had many a victim but never a martyr. The Irish revolutionary movement had both victims and martyrs in abundance. However, one of the most notable of Erin's martyrs has been generally underplayed by his surviving co-patriots because of the insinuation of another and quite irrelevant element into the story. When Roger Casement came to be hanged by the British in 1916 for the treasonable act of fighting for Irish freedom while England was at war, voices raised for his defense were mostly hushed by the surreptitous circulation by the government of a shocking diary, purporting to be Casement's, and revealing an astonishingly promiscuous homosexual life.

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To this day many Irishmen stoutly insist that the diaries are a forgery, and there is very good ground for this belief. The entire history of the "Black Diaries" is filled with contradictions of a sort that only a Lewis Carroll could have invented. The men who claim to have discovered the diaries changed their testimony constantly as to the time and place and manner of discovery, the number of pages or volumes involved, and the years covered by the diary.

At any rate, the plot to besmirch Casement's reputation, while still keeping the diaries from publication or from the hands of any such persons as would be able to judge their authenticity, has been successful. Most

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