Bealtaine 2022: Queer Spaces, Queer Utopias
This event is part of Flikkers – Come As You Were is the Age & Opportunity Bealtaine Festival Commission for 2022 supported by the Arts Council and Dublin City Council. A series of events remembering and celebrating the Flikkers Disco era at the Hirschfeld Centre and the generation who were there. Flikkers invites older LGBTQ+ people to dance and celebrate this seminal period of social and cultural activism.
Chaired by Hannah Tiernan researcher, writer, visual artist and Assistant Editor GCN. Contributors include: David Carroll – Irish Research Council PhD Scholar, Queering the Groove; Orla Egan founder of Loafers Discotheque Cork, and Cork LGBT Archive; Prof. Maurice Devlin Head of Dept. of Applied Sociology, Maynooth (former Flikkers DJ); Luiz Wellington, a member of the Dublin Gay Men’s Choir and Eileen Leah, Lecturer, TCD (formerly the Shamcocks, Drag King group). The panel discussed the importance of vibrant spaces such as Flikkers and other community-led social spaces within the history of LGBTQ+ activism and socialisation. To quote Maurice Devlin, from the publication Fabulous Flikkers 2002, ‘Exuberance in the face of oppression is profoundly political!’
Bookending the discussion was a screening of Caroline Campbell’s film Our Love is History (2013), which revisits the politics of the Hirschfeld Centre disco, and Orla Egan’s archive film I’m Here, I’m Home, I’m Happy.
Photos: Tony Kinlan
