The History of Marriage Equality in Ireland - A Social Revolution Begins Book

RELEASE DATE - 19 OCTOBER 2021

The bachelor has long held an ambivalent, uncomfortable and even at times an unfriendly position in society. This book carefully considers the complicated relationships between the modern queer bachelor and interior design, material culture and aesthetics in Britain between 1885 and 1957.

These bachelors of a different sort created spaces that were centres of community, creativity and companionship, since long forgotten. The seven deadly sins of the modern bachelor (queerness, idolatry, askesis, decadence, the decorative, glamour, artifice) as the author has identified them, comprise a contested site freighted with contradiction and reveal in their respective ways the distinctly queer twinning of shame and resistance.

All the bachelors whose aesthetic lives comprise this book were men of the creative arts, whether as writers, collectors, playwrights, actors, designers, antiquarians, sculptors, painters, photographers and/or illustrators

The first book to explore queer sexualities and the modern interior beyond the urban bias of most scholarship, this book tackles a wide range of significant analyses of some of the period's best-known figures whose city and country interiors have largely gone unnoticed and unanalysed.

As a result it pays close attention to particular homes and domestic interiors of Lord Ronald Gower, Alfred Taylor, Oscar Wilde, Charles Shannon and Charles Ricketts, Edward Perry Warren and John Marshall, Sir Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, Noel Coward and Cecil Beaton.

Richly illustrated and written in a lively and accessible manner, Bachelors of a different sort is at once theoretically ambitious and rich in its use of archival and various historical sources.

'Sonja Tiernan's invaluable contribution to the history of social progress in Ireland recognises and celebrates the many unsung heroes who worked for long years to achieve the historic 2015 result.'
From the foreword by Senator Ivana Bacik

'How a revolution is chronicled is almost as important as the revolution itself, because without a clear and informed history, the lessons of the revolution are lost. Luckily for us and for future generations, the lessons of the history of marriage equality in Ireland are safe in the hands - and prose; and sharp mind - of Sonja Tiernan.'
Rory O'Neill (Panti Bliss)

'The steady if not always stirring story of legal reform and legislative process is one of the important themes threading Tiernan's history of Ireland's marriage movement. Indeed, despite that revolutionary subtitle, the strength of this book is not a portrait of social revolution but the author's careful and almost methodical representation of the movement and its legal and political contexts. [...] Now we can add Sonja Tiernan's careful and rich historical account to [the] little bookshelf of radical change.'
Estudios Irlandeses

'I have no doubt that this book will inspire future studies on the history of LGBTQ rights and activism in Ireland [...] I hope that future research will build on Tiernan's excellent work and utilise oral history to further illuminate the experiences of Irish LGBTQ men and women and activists.'
Women's History Association of Ireland