Pride and prejudice : legalising compulsory heterosexuality in Boston and New York’s annual St Patrick Day parades

This article discusses the vicious territorial disputes surrounding the tradition of St Patrick’s Day Parades through the city streets of New York and Boston, USA. It documents the legal arguments mounted successfully to exclude Irish lesbian, gay and transgender participants from the march, exploring what ideologies of nation-space and public space underpin them. It argues that the progression through urban space of the marches enforces compulsory heterosexuality, through actual and semiotic exclusion. Irish-American nationalism can be read as illustrative of the heterosexualisation of nationalism. It was the unquestioned assumption that being homosexual is antithetical to being Irish that provided the fundamental premise from which it was logically and successfully argued in the US courts: that the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization is a violent, obscene enemy bent on the destruction of Irish ethnicity and Irish communities. By contrast, the article holds up the Parades in Cork and Dublin as designated inclusive and multicultural events, the nation-space of the Irish Republic ‘economically liberated’ and wishing to communicate modernity to its citizens.