Why Roger Casement Still Haunts Us
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Roger Casement was born near Dublin in 1864. His mother, Catholic by conversion, and his Protestant father died a few years apart and the four orphaned Casement children went to live with relatives in Northern Ireland. Roger left school at sixteen when a relative offered him a clerk’s job in a shipping company in England. He began traveling to Africa as a purser on company boats. Eventually, as a result of his knowledge of Africa, he was sent to various countries as consul by the British government. He was named to King Leopold’s Congo in 1903. He was tasked with investigating the rubber industry, which was rumored to be abusing native workers. His graphic and shocking report of 1904 stirred public opinion and led to Leopold giving up the Congo as a private fiefdom. In 1906, Casement was sent to Brazil, where his final appointment was to Rio. In 1910, the British government sent him to the Putumayo region (shared between Peru and Colombia) to investigate, once again, reports of abuse of native rubber workers. His 1911 report documented a culture of vicious brutality used against native workers. He was knighted later in the year for his work.

Casement, in trips back to Ireland, was a generous contributor to local cultural institutions and the teaching of Gaelic. He was a fervent believer in Ireland’s independence from England and joined Sinn Fein in 1905. He retired from his consular career in 1913 and traveled to Germany in late 1914 in hopes of negotiating the release of Irish POWs who would promise to return home to fight against the English in their homeland. This was a failure, as was the small-arms shipment destined for Ireland that he arranged. He landed on the west coast of Ireland via German submarine in April 1916. He was quickly arrested by the British and spirited away to London to stand trial for treason. He was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging. Because of Casement’s stature as a humanitarian (as well as the acknowledged weakness of the British case against him), there was considerable popular pressure to set aside the death penalty. To counter this, agents of the Crown made copies of pages of the “Black Diaries” and circulated them among his supporters; demands for clemency soon faded away. When pages were shown to King George V, he withdrew Casement’s knighthood. Casement was hanged at Pentonville Prison and his body was thrown into quicklime. Finally, in 1965, after repeated requests through the years from the Irish government, his remains were repatriated. He was given a state funeral and buried with full military honors in the republican section of Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.

 

The ‘Black Diaries’

When Colm Tóibín wrote in The New York Review of Books (May 27, 2004) of the difficulty heterosexuals would have in understanding the “Black Diaries,” he was probably thinking of the tendency to confuse behavior and identity. Roger Casement’s identity, emotionally and sexually, was entirely homosexual. However, he grew up in a country where the penalty for homosexuality until the 1830s was death by hanging. During the later Victorian period, since there was a long list of topics that were never spoken of in polite company, gay men like Roger Casement were able to lead relatively happy lives so long as absolute secrecy was maintained. The social context was still quite hostile; defiant homosexuals such as Oscar Wilde were not tolerated. By the end of the 19th century, gay men who could afford it sometimes chose to reside part of the year on the Continent to avoid the social hostility and legal jeopardy they faced in England. In addition to explaining the secrecy of Casement’s private life, I hope to show a perfectly coherent link between both areas of his life and explain the co-existence of the humanitarian and the closeted homosexual.

Roger Casement dutifully documented his official government work, but he also kept a separate set of diaries for expenses, ordinary daily activities—and his sex life. These “Black Diaries” of 1903 and 1910 yield some interesting details about the latter topic. In the 1903 (Congo) diary, there are 36 entries I have characterized as “cruising but no contact.” There are, for the same year, what appear to be 25 “completed sexual acts.” In the 1910 (Putumayo) diary, there are 39 entries under “Cruising but No Contact” and 42 “Completed Sexual Acts.” To clarify the first term, “Cruising but No Contact” covers a spectrum of circumstances: 1) simply admiring handsome men (“beautiful types”); 2) noticing men who are displaying, purposely or not, an erection (undergarments being rare); 3) frequenting a cruising area but being unsuccessful at finding a sexual partner.

The 1903 diary reveals that in just over forty percent of the completed sex acts, he gave the other man money, whereas in the 1910 diary it is 75 percent. Interestingly, in only two cases noted by Sir Roger did the other man ask for money up front. Was this, then, atypical? Were most of these encounters just two men wanting to have sex, with Casement, feeling himself to be the more prosperous one, giving the other some money? Certainly in the largest, most modern cities, Casement would have encountered men making their living that way, but free sex was also apparently common too. This question is unanswerable with the information the diaries provide. The greater amount of sexual activity in the 1910 diary probably reflects the larger, more sophisticated character of the cities of South America.

When Casement was engaged in his investigations—traveling jungle rivers to reach remote rubber collection camps, observing the treatment of native bearers, weighing them and their loads, documenting flogging scars, burns and amputations, giving food to the starving, sending the ill to the hospital, sending smaller children home, freeing natives who were imprisoned for simply trying to leave, investigating murders of natives, taking down testimony, recopying it at night—he was extremely focused on his mission for the indigenous people (“poor souls”). His sexual activity was mainly concentrated in larger cities: London, Dublin, Belfast, Rio, Belém, and ports of call on the trips back to his station or home. It is quite clear from the diaries that night (and even day) cruising in the main squares and parks of cities was a common worldwide phenomenon, and that it was easy to find restless men who were looking for sex.

 

Reaction to the Diaries

The “Black Diaries” were held prisoner for many decades by the British government, as threats of obscenity charges were made whenever anyone asked to publish them. Even more recently, they have come under attack, with charges of sex tourism and pedophilia being leveled. In my opinion, neither charge is supported. An unbiased reading of the 1903 and 1910 diaries makes it clear that Casement was not traveling to exotic places to hire local sex workers. The contemporary context (a hostile one) of his sexual orientation denied him any relationship except for secret, passing, or intermittent ones, no matter where he was. In large cities, he easily found the places where gay men were seeking each other out.

As for pedophilia, an article by Cóilin Owens in The Irish Literary Supplement (March 22, 2004) contains an excerpt from the 1911 diary (Nov. 9-12) that Owens attempts to use to prove this charge, but which ends up proving the opposite. Here Casement describes arranging two outings to see whether José (in his late teens, learning English from Casement) might also have homosexual feelings (which indicates he does not wish to impose himself on an unwilling partner). Having come to the conclusion that José does have such feelings, he invites him home, but then decides against pursuing a relationship, probably due to the realization that doing so would burden him with a level of responsibility he could not honor.

There are two other encounters that factor into any accusation of pedophilia. He met two young boys who were cruising: “Albert, 15 1/2 years old” in London on July 15, 1910, and “a Caboclo boy, 16 or 17” in Pará, Brazil, on August 8th of the same year. If these two boys were cruising to make a living, this is certainly an indictment of the societies they lived in. Or possibly, they were precociously self-aware and were beginning their sexual lives. Either way, Casement was not the sort of person to inflict any sort of distress upon them. The boys seem to have been part of the cruising scene. To take these three examples, as some have done, and attempt to conflate them with the recent scandals in the Catholic Church shows prejudice rather than analytical thinking. Also, many of the diary entries are cryptic, coded, or sketchy. To attempt to pin down what actually happened, never mind the psychological and social dynamics of these encounters, would entail filling in great spaces with prejudice.

I do suspect, on the other hand, that Roger Casement may well have had a mild case of OCD, which would be a tremendous advantage to a clerk or to an investigator. On boat trips, he would estimate the distance to be covered each day and check it against the actual distance traveled. He also registered his impatience at every minute lost due to the inefficiency of the boat’s crew. And when he set down the time some event occurred, it was never “around three,” but “at 2:58.” And then there is Sir Roger’s obsession with estimating the length of every erect penis he could spy.

Part of his daily work was to count flogging scars and record the weight of rubber carriers and the loads they carried. Yet this detail-oriented person had a very empathetic heart, and even when he “wanted awfully,” he was not capable of being predatory or overbearing toward others. In the Congo and especially the Putomayo, his work environment was hostile. He was being watched by local officials and industry thugs who would have been only too happy to discredit him by catching him in a scandalous situation. That never happened.

In an assessment of Casement’s character, Brian Inglis, in his excellent and well-researched biography (1973’s Roger Casement), alludes to his strong reaction to Sir Hector MacDonald’s suicide. MacDonald, in order to avoid being tried for homosexual acts, killed himself, which greatly saddened Casement. In no fewer than three separate entries in April of 1903 he expressed his feelings. Inglis goes on to imply that the ever-present danger of prosecution and the constant need for secrecy led Casement to have a “compartmentalized” or “split” personality. My conclusion is quite the opposite. While Casement’s life was certainly compartmentalized, I would argue that the basic qualities of his character—his courage, his open-hearted empathy, his steadfastness of purpose—made him a great humanitarian, a patriot in the cause of Irish independence, and a gay man with sexual friendships in many countries. There’s no doubt but that this social context caused him stress, but he quickly learned the rules and successfully played the game of life in two different worlds.

 

The Diaries Brought to Light

The “Black Diaries” weren’t available to the public until 1959, when Peter Singleton-Gates and Maurice Girodias published the 1903 and 1910 diaries. The book has an ingenious layout: the left-hand pages contain the Congo and Putomayo Reports (which won Casement much fame and admiration), while the right-hand pages contain the entries of the “Black Diaries.” This arrangement emphasizes the simultaneity of the two lives of Roger Casement, the secret and the public. The 1911 Diary was included in Jeffrey Dudgeon’s 2002 study of the diaries and various aspects of Casement’s life. Unfortunately, this book is out of print and unavailable.

Another interesting source is René MacColl’s 1957 book, Roger Casement; A New Judgment. It is well researched and shows an unexpected sympathy for its subject (taking into account the vocabulary of the time). It is interesting that the 2004 Owens article shows considerable pushback on the subject of Casement’s sex life, whereas MacColl seems more objective: “I share with other ‘normal’ persons a lack of understanding of what makes perverts behave in the way that they do. … But because I do not understand this particular form of sexual gratification, I do not necessarily condemn out of hand all of its practitioners as monsters. And so, although I am certain that Roger Casement was a pervert, it makes as little difference to me, in assessing his place in history, as if he had possessed a club foot.” This author realized that in an earlier era it was quite possible for humanitarianism and homosexuality to co-exist in a single individual without contradiction.

The question remains, why did Casement feel the need to keep sexual diaries at all? Why create compromising documents whose discovery could pose great peril? In general, diary-keeping was extremely popular at the time as a cultural and social activity, and documenting facts and events would come naturally to a clerk or an investigating government official. As to why he kept sexual diaries, there are clues. In the “Putomayo Diary,” there is an instance where, after having recorded the day’s activities, Casement consults the previous year’s diary to see what he was doing on the same date last year. On October 29, 1910, he finds that, the year before, he had gone to see a friend and they had had sex. The evocation of this pleasant memory has important implications. He clearly accepts his sexual orientation completely and, on a difficult trip through the jungle, finds solace in this. He clearly loved his life, his friends, and recalling the pleasant moments of the past.

As part of his research, MacColl interviewed in 1954 a senator of the Irish Dáil whose uncle, Francis J. Bigger, had been a friend of Casement’s. The senator’s uncle had been storing a trunk for Casement and, after the latter’s execution, he opened it. He found additional diaries detailing Casement’s sex life and letters from men with whom Casement had had a sexual friendship. Naturally, Bigger did what any friend at the time would have done: he burned everything. What a misfortune for modern scholars who would certainly have loved to research a detailed, self-documented gay life of the period.

 

The Trial and Its Aftermath

As Casement’s trial drew near, sympathy for his cause began to grow in the populace, especially among the Irish and in America, where Casement had gone to raise support for Irish independence. At this critical moment, the police found the “Black Diaries” among Casement’s effects. Certain pages were copied and circulated by agents of the Crown to discourage support for amnesty or at least setting the death penalty aside. Except for a few cultural luminaries, the support dried up and the execution went forward.

Although Casement’s attorneys were not up to the task of defending him effectively, he took the stand as a condemned prisoner to give a final speech in the dock. It is a famous oration in Irish history, printed and circulated, because it was not a plea for his life, but an exercise in genteel defiance. Casement reminded the court that they were not his peers, since he was Irish, asking reasonably how England could possibly expect loyalty, when loyalty is based on love, not fear or force. The tenor is thoughtful, courteous, from one gentleman to another.

In speaking of the Irish situation, he stated: “Self-government is our right, a thing born in us at birth; a thing no more to be doled out to us or withheld from us by another people than the right to life itself—than the right to feel the sun or smell the flowers or to love our kind.” Coming from the mouth of a gay man, these words have an obvious subtext. They also connect the personal with the political and claim the whole spectrum of liberty as basic to all humanity. It’s true that the quote above is in general language, but the cause of Ireland was uppermost in his mind.

Roger Casement will continue to haunt us simply because he was the victim of an injustice that cannot be undone. How that injustice is perceived and felt depends on one’s political identity. For Irish patriots, this famous humanitarian, who somewhat naïvely fought on the diplomatic level for the freedom of Ireland, ran afoul of a 14th-century English law, and was convicted on a technicality. For gay people who know his story, he was all of that, and also a self-accepting gay man who led a private life not unlike that of some contemporary gay or, indeed, straight men. Contemporary prejudice frightened away supporters who knew him to be a worthy man.

Some social historians may criticize my use of the word “gay” to characterize Casement as being an anachronism. True enough, but the term comes easily when speaking of a man who was as obviously self-accepting as he was. No scholar I have read has suggested that Casement ever pursued a romantic relationship with a woman for emotional, professional, or social reasons. During his times in London and Liverpool as a young man, he probably came into contact with the secret gay world of the time, where he would find friendship, love, and satisfaction throughout his life.

This secret life allowed for considerable, if intermittent, physical satisfaction, but because of his parallel identity as a diplomat, the opportunity for deep emotional attachment was restricted. This was especially true in the foreign countries where he served, where he would have felt the strongest pressure to maintain his public persona and his credibility as a human rights advocate. There was one long-time friend to whom he returned often when in Ireland, Millar Gordon, but Gordon had his own life and attachments. One sometimes realizes in reading the “Black Diaries” that there is genuine affection between Casement and certain of his lovers. Gifts of flowers, joy at reuniting, dates made and kept, nights spent together—all are signs of an affection whose permanence was limited by worldly considerations. In a few entries in the diaries, there is a tone of melodrama, suggesting strong feelings, such as when he announces he’s saying a final good-bye to a lover—that they will never see each other again.

Every gay person, including Casement, must marshal the courage to seize the freedom to exercise their sexual self-determination. One struggles to live out one’s sexual maturity, one’s emotional adulthood. In the “Calamus” poems of Whitman, for example, the “dear love of comrades” takes place under the friendly sun and clear air of Democracy. Casement’s evolution from his own sexual self-determination to a recognition of the rights of all peoples—including, finally, his own countrymen—is the key to the coherence of his two lives.

Roger Casement sacrificed his health to combat the brutality of the rubber industry in the Congo and the Putumayo region; he endangered his life to help his country to achieve independence. By all accounts, Sir Roger showed tremendous courage and serenity in facing death. When the Irish government was finally allowed to reclaim his remains, his country returned in kind the love and loyalty he bore her. In a sense, we gay people are his country too, and we owe him no less.