Lesbian — History — Dublin
Feature
In the second instalment of her series diving into the history of Dublin’s queer bars from 1973 to 1993, Hana Flamm turns attention towards JJ Smyth’s, which became a hotspot for the city’s lesbians. Image courtesy of Irish Queer Archive/National Library of Ireland.
From 1973 to 1993, Dublin hosted a number of gay pubs, bars, and clubs. Plenty of lesbians helped build, participated in, and enjoyed mixed-gender queer spaces, such as the Viking or the National Gay Federation (NGF) and Irish Gay Rights Movement (IGRM)’s community centres. However, many grew frustrated with the misogyny they encountered from men in charge and wanted a dedicated space for women to meet other women. In the early 1980s, one pub became the hotspot for Dublin lesbians.
Some lesbians did frequent the city’s early gay bars, such as Bartley Dunne’s, Rice’s, and the Viking. In Edmund Lynch’s documentary, A Different Country, Terri Blanche recalled that around 10 lesbian women frequented Bartley Dunne’s in the mid-1970s. In an oral history interview, Jennifer similarly remembered a small number of lesbians sitting at three or four tables by the front bay window. Jennifer, travelling from Belfast in the late 1970s to seek out queer spaces, first found Rice’s pub. She and her friends discovered it when they asked people at the Dandelion Market, a vintage market where St Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre is now, where to find a gay bar.
Even in gay political organisations, lesbians faced challenges securing consistent time and space for their events. From 1974, lesbians contributed to the Irish Gay Rights Movement’s events, protests, and the opening of the organisation’s community centre, the Phoenix Club on Parnell Square. Terri Blanche, activist and a founder of Dublin Lesbian Line, attempted to run Thursday night discos for women, but many men objected to being barred from the club for the night.
While some lesbians joined the IGRM or NGF, many devoted their advocacy efforts to feminist organisations in the 1970s. The safety of announcing that one was a feminist, rather than a dyke, was one possible influence on lesbians’ decision to join women’s organisations such as the Irish Women’s Liberation Group and the more radical Irishwomen United (IWU). Additionally, the law decriminalising homosexuality only acknowledged men having sex with men. Women’s homosexuality was effectively invisible due to not being explicitly criminal. Ailbhe Smyth, for example, came out as a lesbian later in life because she hadn’t known it was an option—the topic was never broached.
Joni Crone recounts in a new anthology on Irish feminism, After the Train: Irishwomen United and a Network of Change, that she met other Irish lesbians largely through IWU meetings, where they would discuss how to change Irish society through feminist and socialist politics. After the meetings, some women would head to Nesbitts Pub, all ordering pints (which was frowned upon for women at the time), talking and “whooping with laughter”. By 1977, Joni and her partner, Ruth, hosted their first women-only disco in the basement of Tailors’ Hall in The Liberties. The bar owner would only offer a Monday night, likely doubting the profitability of an all-women’s disco.
As Crone wrote in a 1988 article, ‘Lesbian Feminism in Ireland’, the bar owner would not allow, and newspapers would not publish, advertisements for ‘lesbian’ or even ‘women only’ discos, so she and Ruth personally invited each of the 61 lesbians they knew “in Ireland at that time”. Crone called the feminists, and Ruth invited “the bar dykes and dart players”.
65 lesbians showed up at the first disco. Joni Crone recalled that “everyone was amazed because none of us had ever seen so many dykes in one place before”, especially on a Monday night.
The next year, a group of Irish lesbians, including Crone, organised Liberation for Irish Lesbians (LIL) to operate telephone services, discussion groups, and lesbian socials out of the NGF’s Hirschfeld Centre. In the same way Terri Blanche struggled to secure weekly space due to some gay men’s outrage at sharing the Phoenix Club, LIL too was only granted Thursday nights and faced the ire of male members at ‘giving up’ the club for a night. One of the Hirschfeld’s sympathetic members offered to ask his brother, the owner of a local pub, if the bar might host LIL’s discos on Saturday nights, so dykes from outside of Dublin could party and spend the night. The owner of JJ Smyth’s (today, the Thomas Moore Inn at 12 Aungier Street) agreed and allowed LIL to advertise in mainstream magazines, including In Dublin and Hot Press. Crone and Ruth’s Saturday night lesbian discos on the upper floor of JJ Smyth’s initially attracted about 25 attendees in 1981, but quickly expanded.
By 1986, JJ Smyth’s hosted two weekly women’s nights: Thursdays and Saturdays. Thursday nights boasted live music, with two all-women bands alternating weeks. An early Dublin gay publication, OUT magazine, highlighted one of the bands that played at JJ’s called Major to Minor. The band described its style as a “mixture of jazz, country and blues with a soupcon of funk”. A preliminary Google search reveals that two of the original Major to Minor members are still playing as a duo today, perhaps a testament to the strength of friendships and relationships formed in and around spaces dedicated to women.
While Ruth took money at the door and kept an eye out for any issues, Joni Crone DJ’d on Saturday nights, mixing reggae, Motown, pop chart hits, and female singers like Tina Turner, Annie Lennox, and Gloria Gaynor, as well as American lesbian tunes from Olivia Records. Gráinne, a Dublin lesbian, remembered going to JJ’s “probably weekly [with her first girlfriend]… [it] would have been our place to go to dance and just be with other women and make friends and drink and do all the things you want to do when you’re in your early 20s”. Holding the coveted Saturday night spot for a women’s disco was an enormous upgrade from the previous Mondays or Thursdays that other bars and gay organisations had grudgingly granted Crone and Ruth.
Lesbians from around the island travelled to Dublin for Saturday nights at JJ’s, spending the night on friends’ couches, in cheap accommodations, or even in new lovers’ beds. A group of Belfast women rented a minibus to drive down to the ‘Free State’ for nights out in the capital city. Jennifer was a taxi driver by trade, so she was used to driving in and out of Belfast city.
She and about 14 other lesbians, and occasionally some straight women friends, would each offer £10 to rent the bus over various weekends throughout the 1980s. As Jennifer drove the approximate two hours, the group of increasingly rowdy lesbians downed alcohol and blared music, quieting only when they reached the border check between the North and the Republic. These groups of women included both Protestants and Catholics, Loyalists and Nationalists. Jennifer relayed how some of the girls needed plasters to cover tattoos, perhaps associated with paramilitary organisations, joking that the tattoos would be plastered over and the girls would also be well plastered by the time they got to Dublin!
JJ Smyth’s upstairs lounge offered plenty of tables to sit and socialise, but some dykes preferred to dance. In Threads: Stories of Northern Lesbian Lives in the 1970’s and 1980’s, Antonia recounted that she and her friends would stand at the bar, rather than sit, because it made it easier to meet women ordering drinks, hopefully leading to a dance. Gráinne fondly remembered the parties in people’s houses after Joni Crone played her last song and the pub closed. Antonia corroborated the fun of the afterparties, “often at Lisa’s in Dalkey or Henrietta Street. If you went along, every cross section of humanity would be there and everyone had their party piece”. Lesbians of all ages and walks of life came to JJ’s and the afterparties, providing women the opportunity to explore their shared and diverging experiences with one another. Gráinne was reminded of her privilege when engaging with older lesbians on the scene, recognising the difference that even 10 years could make. She said that “some of these women were married. They’d lost their children because they had come out as lesbian. So after they had had a few drinks, some of these women would be telling very sad stories… I remember being really moved by this” and feeling “so glad I’m ‘this’ now, not 10 years ago… even though Ireland was very closeted”.
For lesbians, the era of finding each other through feminist groups, gay organisations, and the early discos facilitated “euphoria and manic fun… When we thought the world could be changed utterly by 20 lesbian feminists and some gay men wreaking havoc on Dublin… We discovered ourselves to be new, extraordinary, exhilarated beings… We had a lot of wild parties and a lot of wild protests and workshops and conferences”, according to lesbian poet Mary Dorcey in Lesbian and Gay Visions of Ireland. Dublin’s gay spaces enabled young women to explore and create a world that could be possible for themselves. Although many women ‘on the scene’ chose the safer heteronormative path of marrying men, witnessing and experiencing a queer social world allowed some to forge lesbian routes of existence.
As the gay and lesbian scenes expanded, their DIY discos in the Hirschfeld Centre, Phoenix Club, and JJ Smyth’s demonstrated the commercial viability—and demand—for queer club nights. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, members of the LGBTQ+ social scene embraced their DJs and rave energy, building nightclubs that rivalled those in New York and London. Tune into the next and final article of this series focusing on Dublin’s vibrant, sometimes raunchy, queer club scene starting in the late 1980s!