First, a clarification. Contrary to some rumours, the lengthy three-year gestation of The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name had nothing to do with nervousness within RTE about its subject. "We started trying to put this together in the summer of 1997, but it was always supposed to be a millennium piece," says the documentary's producer/ director Bill Hughes, who explains the long production process as being in part due to his own illness last year, when he had a cancer scare.
That such suspicions and conspiracy theories should surround a single programme demonstrates the continuing sensitivity surrounding the subject of lesbians and gay men in Ireland. After all, in the last few months we've had documentary series on almost every imaginable facet of Irish 20th century life as part of RTE's millennium programming policy. Most of them, though, have been largely uncontentious, assembling or reassessing narratives with which we are already familiar. Watching The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name, it's hard not to feel that several generations of hitherto unexplored human experience are being crammed into 53 minutes, and to wonder whether the subject would have been better served by a two-partner at least.
Hughes admits that his original idea was for a series on the history of gays and lesbians in 20th-century Ireland, which RTE turned down. "But I can't whinge about RTE. I was told that I could go ahead with a single programme on the subject. I sincerely hope that, on the back of this, other programmes will be made. Just trying to get a narrative out of all this material was quite a feat. I shot 31 hours of interviews, therefore I already have an archive that can be drawn on for future programmes." Originally conceived as a narrative tracing gay history "from vilification to vindication", from the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895 to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1993, the programme changed as Hughes also incorporated the experiences of the "triply invisible" lesbian experience.
The problem in such a history is that the stories of gay people, particularly in Ireland, have been invisible and largely unrecorded. As the documentary points out, the difference between the gay community and other social groups in Ireland is that there is no inter-generational history to draw upon. Gay people's stories died with them, and out of shame or embarrassment their families often worked to conceal the evidence.
"I had a very good experience of coming out to my own family," says Hughes, "Which was very unusual at the time (the early 1970s). But I'm certainly much happier to be out in the much more enlightened society we have now. It's now perfectly acceptable for a few openly gay guys to go out for an evening in Dublin, which you wouldn't have seen even a few years ago. But in rural Ireland, it's an impossible situation. The level of homophobia is extraordinary and the level of teenage gay suicides is still terrible." One of the more tantalising aspects of The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name is its description of the homosexual sub-cultures of Dublin in the middle of the last century, with an active scene around certain pubs, established meeting points for sexual encounters in pubic toilets across the city, and a social network of middle-class gay men. The most famous meeting place was The Catacombs, a quasi-legal shebeen on Fitzwilliam Place, frequented by literary figures such as the actively bisexual Brendan Behan. "Michael O'Sullivan makes a comment about Dublin in the 1950s being like Tangiers, which may surprise some people," says Hughes. "I think it's certainly true that the level of bisexuality in Ireland has always been huge. Some people may think that's wishful thinking, but I can tell you it's not!"
With the gradual emergence of lesbian and gay political consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s, the social scene in Dublin shifted to pubs such as Bartley Dunne's and places like the Hirschfeld Centre. Parallel to this was the growth of political activism, spurred by figures such as David Norris and Kieron Rose. The documentary charts such key moments as the 1982 murder of Declan Flynn in Fairview, and the protests which followed, along with the successful campaign to challenge prosecutions of gay men in the courts. While critical of the actions and behaviour of the Garda and of judges, The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name does not go into detail in examining the hypocrisy of the Irish establishment in its attitude towards homosexuality - for example, the many public figures who led secret and not-so-secret gay lives over the course of the 20th century. "Of course we could have done that," says Hughes. "But those elements would have been hijacked by the media and damaged the documentary as a whole. This is celebratory, it's not a whinge. It would be quite possible to devote, say, a whole programme to the workings of the judicial system, or the role of the Church, and hopefully that will happen. I don't feel that a topic as broad as sexuality over the course of an entire century can be covered in a single hour."
The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name is on RTE 1 on Tuesday at 10.05 p.m.