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Glasnevin Cemetery's Queer History Tour: ‘If you're here for the drama, you'll get it'
At the back of
Glasnevin Cemetery
, an unmarked grave hosts the remains of Jack Saul, the earliest-born person on the cemetery's new Queer History Tour and the character whose story the tour's guide, Anna Collins, most enjoys telling.
'He lived this crazy, scandalous, almost unimaginable life,' Collins says of Saul, the veteran of two 19th-century scandals.
This weekend, Collins will be giving the tour for the first time to coincide with
Dublin Pride
, and the expectation is that ticket buyers will be as chatty and curious as ever.
'I think if you're interested and passionate, people get swept up in it,' Collins tells me from the boardroom of the cemetery's museum building, which overlooks a vast sweep of headstones and monuments to Dublin's dead.
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Saul was born in 1857, while the most recent death featured on the tour occurred in 1995, and for Collins this breadth of time was part of the appeal of putting together the tour.
'A lot of the time queer history starts around the 1970s, because that's when the liberation movement kicked off properly. It's harder to do, but it was really nice to go back further and capture a sense of what it was like before there was this open civil rights movement.'
When so much of the research is recent, it can give 'the impression that this is all new'.
When I meet Collins – who uses they/them pronouns – on a rainy day in late May, they still have a few run-throughs to do, but their plan is to start the tour – which will last 90 minutes to two hours – with
the story of Thom McGinty, aka the Diceman
.
The Scottish-born actor and street artist – who acquired his nickname from a games shop, one of many he was hired to promote – became a well-known Dublin figure and part of the fabric of Grafton Street before he died of complications from Aids in 1995.
'He wasn't buried here, but he was cremated here, and then his ashes were scattered where he believed he was conceived in Co Wicklow, which I think gives you a sense of his personality.'
Anna Collins will be giving the Queer History Tour for the first time to coincide with Dublin Pride. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill
Collins (27) is too young to remember the Diceman, but he is one of the Dublin characters who attracts warm and fond reminiscences from visitors, they say. 'He's in people's living memory and it's nice to be able to carry that on.'
The tour then moves on to Davy Byrne (1860-1938), who opened his eponymous pub in 1889. Referenced in James Joyce's Ulysses, the pub is thought to have become something of a haven for gay men.
'I'm not going to say he was gay,' says Collins of Byrne, 'even though he's buried with his friend Thomas.'
During the walk, Collins also talks about what's not on the tour.
'I want to go into a few reasons why there are fewer contemporary lesbians on the tour and why there are no modern-day explicitly trans people on the tour, and then we're going to take a long walk over into the past,' they say.
These were idealistic people. They wanted a country that was founded on equality of sex and equality across class, and I think a lot of the time that gets forgotten
—
Anna Collins
'My hope is that when we're on that walk, people will look at the headstones and see that the cemetery is huge. I hope they see the vastness of it and it will kind of hit them just how many stories there are, and how what we're getting is just a hint of what existed.'
The 'long walk over into the past' is to reach the place where their tour favourite, Saul, aka Dublin Jack, is buried.
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Born into a working-class family in the Liberties, Saul 'spent a lot of time hanging around the Monto', Dublin's red-light district, before his own sex work saw him catapulted into upper-class circles in first Dublin and later London. A life of high-end parties, erotic literature and notoriety followed, with Saul linked to scandals in both cities.
At the end of an extraordinary life interacting with establishment figures and brothel-frequenting aristocrats, he died in Dublin in 1904 of tuberculosis, 'a really common illness at the time'.
The tragedy of the earlier stories, such as Saul's, is that we typically only know about them from reports of legal cases and commotions.
'It's kind of heartbreaking that this is how a lot of queer research happens – that it comes through scandal, through court cases, through really low moments in people's lives,' Collins says.
'A lot of the time, especially if you're more working class, you're not keeping diaries, you're not writing this down. And if you are, those diaries are probably getting lost – or as happens in some cases later on, the descendants burn any evidence. Even in more recent times, if you're talking about the Aids crisis, people's partners were prevented from coming to their funerals, and there was a lot of cover-up, a lot of tragedy.'
Still, even if it means looking 'between the lines', they try to find joy and moments of levity in the lives of the people who feature on the tour.
Collins, who is from Leitrim and first started working as a tour guide in Berlin, identifies as queer and likes the way this word 'acknowledges a nuance and a fluidity that exists within these things'. They have been working as a tour guide at Dublin Cemeteries Trust since January 2024 and also give Glasnevin's Irish History Tour and Women in History Tour.
The Queer History Tour was an initiative they were keen to pursue, with the existence of a similar tour at Kilmainham Gaol – which is sold out this Saturday – one of the catalysts for its introduction.
'We were kind of like, if Kilmainham is doing it, then surely we can do it.'
Tour-guiding can make a difference, Collins believes. 'I think people's minds are changed and their worldviews are shaped when they engage with history.'
Still, they are conscious of the potential backlash from people 'who think that queerness is new' or who might be resistant to the idea of Irish republican figures being gay.
Anna Collins, tour guide at Dublin Cemeteries Trust, stands in Glasnevin Cemetery's republican plot beside the grave of Elizabeth O'Farrell and Julia Grenan, who feature in the Queer History Tour. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill
The tour wends its way over to the republican plot, where Collins poses for photographs beside the grave of
Elizabeth O'Farrell
, the nurse and
Cumann na mBan
member who delivered news of the republicans' surrender in the 1916 Rising. She is interred alongside her 'lifelong friend'
Julia Grenan
, also known as Sheila.
The pair are now understood to have been a lesbian couple, as were fellow revolutionaries
Kathleen Lynn
and
Madeleine ffrench-Mullen
, and
Margaret Skinnider
and Nora O'Keeffe, with Collins citing the influential research of historian
Mary McAuliffe
.
Both ffrench-Mullen and Skinnider – the only female combatant wounded in 1916 – feature on the Glasnevin tour. Collins notes that the latter died in 1971, just two years before the Sexual Liberation Movement was founded at Trinity College Dublin.
'These were idealistic people. They wanted a country that was founded on equality of sex and equality across class, and I think a lot of the time that gets forgotten,' they say.
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'What I particularly enjoy about the republican plot is that you get to talk about the women as they lived, which was together. The nature of the cemetery is that you often talk about people as if they just existed as individuals, but when you're in the republican plot, you get to talk about how they met and the ideas they shared, and you really get a picture of them as this network of friends.'
As we discuss how these women led radical lives in dark, constrictive times, the sun shines through the drizzle and the view – stretching over to the National Botanic Gardens and the dome of Corpus Christi church in Drumcondra – is suddenly more verdant than grey.
'I love the cemetery in the rain, personally,' says Collins. 'Like if you're here for the drama, you'll get it.'
Tickets to Glasnevin Cemetery's Queer History Tour, which runs from June 20th to 22nd, can be purchased from the
Dublin Cemeteries Trust website
.
