DR EL REID-BUCKLEY
Dr El Reid-Buckley was surprised to be shortlisted for Person of the Year, having recently stepped back from community organising following grief, burnout and a willingness and desire to have other community members lead. Although they have often said, “I never really did anything except send some emails and fill out forms,” they told Sarah Creighton Keogh, “getting shortlisted (for a second time), I could see it in another, different light: that this work was meaningful enough to a significant amount of people.”
Image by Oisin Ralph.
While uncomfortable with “the cult of personality” that surrounds those labelled ‘activists’, El believes there is value in recognising the invisible labour sustaining communities, particularly when the work of queer women, trans people and femmes has so often been sidelined.
Their community work, academic research and creative practice share a belief that meaningful change requires more than reform. “I try to centre the goal of social transformation in all that I do,” they explain.
“Ultimately, at the core of my work is a queer-feminist ethics that aims to trouble all that troubles us, and help stoke the curiosity of others in the process.”
El is also wary of the language of activism itself, preferring to explore how culture, collective care and solidarity can demonstrate alternatives to existing systems.
This approach extends to queer visibility, and El questions the assumption that representation alone can dismantle inequality or guarantee material safety.
Their recent work on the LGBTQIA+ Tour of Collins Barracks demonstrated how narrow ideas of what constitutes queer life can be. When feedback questioned why sex work featured on the tour, El recognised how queer narratives remain confined by (hetero)normative assumptions.
“Of course I wasn’t going to not speak about sex workers! Every sex worker I know (and love) is gay!” they explain.
Their 2025 collaboration with Lyónn Wolf for EVA International, Ireland’s Biennial of Contemporary Art, similarly explores alternatives to gendered expectations. Grounded in slow, collaborative and non-extractive making, the work draws on their shared experience as “eldest daughters of dyke extraction”. El calls it “an escape plan, almost”, where “the burrowed exit is an archive of becoming”.
Imagining alternatives also means confronting exclusion within LGBTQ+ communities, and they explain that community leaders and members must be accountable for “how racist LGBTQIA+ spaces can be, how inaccessible they are for people with disabilities, or how where someone lives or what income they may have may prevent them from accessing a community space.”
El highlights people and collectives challenging these inequalities across Ireland, including Blezzing Dada, Pradeep Mahadeshwar, Oein DeBhairduin, Áine O’Hara and Tara Carroll of Chronic Collective, Aoife Hammond and Fionn Kidney at Common Knowledge, the Queer Sheds crew and Neuro Pride Ireland.
They also note artist Emma Hurson’s reminder to them that “we are all responsible for community, and supporting the care work that goes with it”.
For El, that responsibility extends far beyond LGBTQ+ identity. Queer liberation is inseparable from the struggles of marginalised communities facing racism, displacement, war and economic injustice.
“All of our liberation is therefore bound up with the liberation of the people of Palestine, Sudan, Congo, North of Ireland,” they say.
El also connects liberation with climate collapse, militarism and children’s liberation. Focusing too narrowly on what constitutes an LGBTQ+ issue, they argue, can obscure shared structures of oppression.
“It shouldn’t be an us versus them in the struggle against inequality,” they say, invoking beat poet Diane di Prima’s vision of collective resistance: “It will, as she says, take all of us shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down.”
Looking towards the next five years of queer life in Ireland, El wants communities to question who is missing from their spaces, whose labour is valued and which institutions they welcome into their celebrations, as they believe that such governing norms are often built around “homonationalist and liberal ideals, and how much of those are rooted in racist, white supremacist ways of thinking”. “I want us to consider that we could pay local artists rather than just booking some retired early 2000s acts at Pride celebrations,” they say. “I want a Pride without the gardaí, the army, and politicians of every orientation. I want snacks at the function. I want people to feel safe, appreciated, and that they should be there,” El says. “Most of all, I want us to dream.”
Beneath the sharp humour is a vision of queer culture built around community rather than institutional approval, and solidarity rather than selective inclusion. Their suggestion for where to begin? “If at the very least, I hope everyone becomes an active member of their local public library. It’s the last good free thing we’ve got.”