of the Irish prefer to look elsewhere for national heroes. Of course the question of Casement's alleged homosexuality had nothing whatsoever to do with the charge of treason for which he was hanged-but it did silence his defenders.

The trial was a farce from start to finish. Casement was guilty, by his own admission, of the same sort of treason against England as George Washington would likely have been punished for had he been unsuccessful. Casement's prosecutors, whose personal vindictiveness knew no bounds, had themselves earlier committed some of the same acts against the British government-and on a larger scale.

His reputation had been unassailable before the war. His career in the Foreign Office of England and Ireland, as he insistently phrased it-had been highlighted by his historic exposure of the monstrous condition of imperialist exploitation in the Congo and the upper Amazon. It was only when he came to America to raise funds for Irish Home rule (already recognized, but compromised by Parliament) that he became an enemy of the British government which hounded him to his death, and has to this day refused to allow decent burial to his bones or to his reputation, both of which are eaten with quicklime.

Is Casement perhaps, such a martyr as the homosexual movement is looking for? If he died one death for his "treason," Roger Casement has died a thousand deaths for his "homosexuality." But was he homosexual at all? This is open to considerable doubt, and the "Black Diaries" which are to be published shortly in the U.S. may not throw much light on the matter. In themselves, if they live up to their repute, the diaries will make astonishing, even shocking reading. But they can hardly contain much evidence as to their own genuineness. Men who have read them and who

knew Casement-disagree widely on whether they are or could have been an account of his own activities. The preponderance of evidence seems to indicate that they were not. The most likely explanation which has been advanced is that one or two pages of material in Casement's own handwriting were lifted from his old reports to the Foreign Office, and filled out with typed portions of the diary of one of the slave drivers Casement had exposed in the Putamayo Report, plus other purely fictional sections written by agents in Scotland Yard.

Casement seems to have died without knowing of the existence or at least of the exact nature of the diaries which the government was passing around to interested parties. The government has since refused to confirm or deny the very existence of the diaries, while still admitting their possession of them, on the grounds that it would be unfair to further blacken a dead man's name!

Whether or not the diaries were a record of Casement's own sexual activities, the question still remains of whether he was homosexual at all. This of course still has nothing to do with the question of whether Casement was a British traitor, an Irish hero or simply a Quixotic fool. Whatever his sexual inclination, and there is some evidence that he was tolerant but aloof on the subject, he was, nonetheless, more a martyr to the cause. of homosexuality than he was to the cause of Irish nationalism.

But again we come back to the original question: martyr or victim. Casement boldly stood trial for treason, freely admitting that as an Irishman, he had gone to England's enemy and sought help to gain Irish freedom. If this is treason, he said, then I proudly plead guilty.

He never knew that at the same time he was secretly being tried, in the corridors and in the posh clubs, as a homosexual.

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