GLR July-August 2022

try Dance” (in A Noise from the Woodshed , 1989) examines one community’s reaction to two unaccompanied women attending a country dance together. Unable to understand their relationship, the men try to pick the women up. When the nature of their rela tionship becomes clear, the crowd grows increasingly hostile, particularly the men. This story points out the double challenge for the women when threatening the dominant male hierarchy and the community’s heterosexual assumptions. For men in Ireland, there was a similar lack of information about being gay and a dearth of literature on the topic. In 1994, Keith Ridgway’s short story “Graffiti” (in Quare Fellas ) ex plored topics such as cruising for sex in public bathrooms or “cottaging,” as well as the advent of the AIDS crisis. Early nov els, such as Desmond Hogan’s groundbreaking The Ikon Maker (1979), was one of the first to explore the rural Irish gay expe rience prior to the 1990s. Damian McNicoll’s A Son Called Gabriel (2004) explored the internalized homophobia of a gay youth due to his Catholic upbringing, and his refusal to follow the desires of his family to enter the priesthood. Eventually, he migrates to England. However, as Colm Tóibín has remarked: “For young gay men in Ireland in the 1960s and 70s, the priest hood seemed to offer the only way out.” Tóibín’s own novel, The Blackwater Lightship (1999), was one of the first to explore the impact of HIV andAIDS in Ireland. More recently, Anne En right’s novel, The Green Road (2016), and Hogan’s A Farewell to Prague (2013), also explored the AIDS crisis. Gay sexuality was criminalized in Ireland until 1993, but the country has made a remarkable turnaround since then, becoming

D ALE B OYER QUEER WHISPERS Gay and Lesbian Voices in Irish Fiction by José Carregal University College Dublin Press. 250 pages, $35. B EFORE 1970, words like “gay,” “lesbian,” and “bi sexual” virtually didn’t exist in Ireland. So states Mary Dorcey in her introduction to José Carregal’s Queer Whispers . Dorcey was one of the first openly lesbian writers in Ireland at that time, someone for whom not having a lan guage to describe her feelings was a big problem—one that was especially acute for women, who were disempowered both economically and socially. Added to this, the heteronor mative pressures of marriage, motherhood, and family life led women to retreat even more from the possibility of an alter native sexuality. Carregal reveals how, after the 1970s, feminism and gay lib eration were popularly perceived as a foreign influence and a threat to Ireland’s cultural identity. Dorcey’s short story “ACoun leave the world of the coastal town and its Chat n’ Chew. One of them, “The One-Second Sandwich,” dips into the narrator’s memory during a class to tell readers about her relationship with Ann, a childhood friend, whom she loves, hates, and envies all at once. Ann has it all: a horse, a beach house, a mother who watches her make her “one-second sandwich.” But then, toward the end of summer, tragedy strikes both families. Here nostal gia and reverie combine to produce one of the book’s most af fecting stories. Where the collection stumbles is when the narrator creates a character but fails to include that person’s voice in a mean ingful way. One example is “The Year of Mercy,” in which the narrator notices a mother and daughter hanging out with some guys at a parking lot she describes as “our town’s wrecking yard, our Motel 666.” After seeing the mother, Liz, a few times and witnessing an unnamed woman passed out on the bus, the narrator has what she presents as a revelation, which leads her to look up signs of meth use. In the end, it’s a story about the narrator’s assumptions and the queasy discomfort of someone in a position of privilege jumping to conclusions and judgments about another person’s life. We learn about the narrator’s anxi eties over making these assumptions and judgments but never really find out the truth about Liz or get a sense of her experi ence or point of view. In the end, Spell Heaven is a collection that attempts in each story to provide a vivid and evocative window into the world of working-class and newly middle-class people and the struggles they face. Each story has its memorable moments, but not all of them succeed. ____________________________________________________ Ruth Joffre is the author of the short story collection Night Beast . Isle of Storytellers

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