‘I want to be to Ireland what Walt Whitman was to America’: Esotericism and Queer Sexuality in an Irish Social Circle, 1890s–1920s

Abstract This article traces a transnational current of thinking on sexuality that flowed through Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In particular, it focuses on Irish people and people in Ireland who were acquainted with sexual reform movements, especially those interested in queer sexuality and invested in esoteric beliefs. The article reveals a disparate though interlinked circle of activists, artists and intellectuals, who used their encounters with the ideas of sexual reformers – and sometimes personal and romantic relationships with the reformers themselves – to re-imagine what society and sexuality could look like, in Ireland and elsewhere.