Queering Pride: Walking Towards a Queer Future in Ireland

Abstract

The Queer History Walking Tour is an annually recurring event during Dublin’s official Pride festivities. Created and led by the ‘Godfather of Gay,’ Tonie Walsh, the walks seek to extend stories from the Irish Queer Archive (IQA) into the everyday fabric of the city, contributing to a processual queering of Irish heteronormative histories. As an activist form of public pedagogy, the walking tour encourages a relational understanding of queer cultural heritage through mobile, embodied, and emotional interactions. This paper argues that the walking tour works as an anarchive that contributes to a growing, intersectional understanding of LGBTQ+ experiences and queer futures, facilitated by peripatetic practices. In response to pervasive cis-male homonormativity at Pride, Dr Mary McAuliffe, a queer feminist woman, is the latest tour guide who includes historical stories of lesbian women, trans people, and gay men. Through engaging with this diversity of historical experiences, guides signal and support anti-capitalist events organised to critique the corporatisation of Pride and current attitudes towards LGBTQ+ people in Ireland. Trans Pride and Alternative Pride highlight the ongoing physical and structural violence done to LGBTQ+ people through giving voice to intersectional experiences. They connect LGBTQ+ struggles across different timespaces through engaging with Pride as a protest and marching to significant historical sites on meaningful days in LGBTQ+ history. Walking together to significant places, telling stories, and educating one another at these events works to queer Pride by challenging capitalism and its norms,
revealing a trajectory that invites us to imagine and participate in an intersectional future of being queer in Ireland.