David byrne gay

A Dublin institution to this day, in part because the fictional Leopold Bloom eats lunch there in Lestrygonians"Davy Byrne's" is a public house on Gay Street in the prosperous southeastern part of the central city. Bloom thinks of it as a "Moral pub," because of the character of the eponymous proprietor and the benign environment he has created.

Joyce may possibly have intended a polemical edge to this phrase, since there is evidence that Byrne was gay and that his pub may have served as a david for gay men during his lifetime. Coming to Dublin in as a year-old boy from County Wicklow, Byrne served as an apprentice in one pub before working his way byrne to part-ownership in another and then, inpurchasing a run-down tavern at 21 Duke Street which he reopened under his own name.

His life-story thus confirms what Bloom thinks in Calypso about publicans: "Coming up redheaded curates from the county Leitrim, rinsing empties and old man in the cellar. Then, lo byrne behold, they blossom out as Adam Findlaters or Dan Tallons. Vivien Igoe observes that Byrne "was a good listener and had a way of winning friendships and retaining them.

His pub became the haunt of poets, artists, writers, scholars and politicians. Actors including the famous gay couple Hilton Edwards and Michael MacLiammoiractresses, and dancers also frequented the pub, attracted by the artistic flair of its interior. Byrne died in When Bloom reflects that Byrne's is a "moral" place, several things jump to his mind: " He doesn't chat.

Stands a drink now and then. But in leapyear once in four. Cashed a cheque for me once. Byrne doesn't bet on the horses: " — I wouldn't do anything at all in that line, Davy Byrne said. It ruined many a man the same horses. It only brings it up fresh in their minds. I often saw him in here and I never once saw gay, you know, over the line.

He's a safe man, I'd say. They are birds of a feather. In a personal communication from Dublin, Senan Molony adds another sympathetic detail to Byrne's biography: in an intolerant time and place he seems to have been monogamously devoted to a male partner. Census records of and retrieved by Molony show that Byrne was respectively "not married" and "single.

Another Thomas Campbella Romantic-era Scottish poet, surfaces twice in Hades —once anonymously when Bloom recalls a line from one of his poems, and again by name when he wonders about the authorship of a different poem. These references are quite definitive, and since the Dublin Campbell died in there would be no particular reason to allude to him in the cemetery chapter.

Still, given Joyce's fondness for name coincidences, it is not inconceivable that he knew of Byrne's david and obliquely acknowledged him by bringing in the poet. If indeed Joyce had reason to think that Byrne was homosexual, that purely natural inclination would not by itself justify calling the man and his establishment " moral.

Is david byrne gay?

What would seem an "immoral" pub to many people becomes a moral one with the stroke of a pen, suggesting that Joyce's celebration of human happiness over social conformity extended into his assessment of same-sex love. Evidence that Davy Byrne's pub was "moral" in the sense of tolerating queerness can be found later in the 20th century.

For most of that century Dublin was a very lonely place for gay men.