Banning Books is Stupid, So Keep Writing

Adapted from the Conclusion of Love in the Lav: A Social Biography of Same-Sex Desire in Ireland, 1922-1972

In the 2025 United States, federal, state, and local governments are banning books about LGBTQ people, forcing libraries to pull books off shelves, restricting access in the name of “protecting children.” They’re not the first short-sighted set of moral-panic-inducing officials to try and use censorship to control the population. From early on in its independence, the Irish government banned books with information about birth control, abortion, and same-sex desire. Books, newspapers, and magazines were flagged for “immorality,” and deemed unsuitable for the Irish population to read. The government, heavily informed by the Irish Catholic hierarchy’s ideas about morality, thought they could stop people from controlling their fertility, accessing abortions, or having same-sex relationships if people didn’t have that information. They were, of course, wrong on all count. In some cases, the policies of restriction even encouraged Irish authors to push at the boundaries and write about what was banned.

In his debut novel, Irish writer John Broderick, Jr. caused a splash. The Pilgrimage chronicles a toxic sex triangle between Julia Glyn, her bedridden (and most definitely queer) husband Michael, and their kind of good looking but really mean butler, Stephen Lydon. The book, published in 1963, was immediately put on the banned book list by the Irish Board of Censors, ostensibly because of its depictions of adultery and homosexuality. Just as shocking to the mostly Catholic censors, however, was the ending: in which Michael, unrepentant sinner and queer man, goes on a pilgrimage to have his illness miraculously cured, and, on the final page, (spoiler alert) he is cured. The conclusion was as blasphemous as the sexual indiscretions of the novel.

An assortment of John Broderick’s books. Image taken by author.

Broderick would go on to write another eleven novels, publishing throughout the 1960s and 1970s. None are particularly compelling or polished. Some are actually quite bad. Though one author generously described Broderick as “one of the significant voices of 20th-century Irish literature,” I don’t think many would agree. The Pilgrimage is by far his most polished, best-written work, clearly having undergone rounds of feedback and revision. For the rest of his career, Broderick wrote what he wanted, sent it out, let editors’ comments molder on his desk without looking them over, then sent it back, unedited. Sometimes publishers, maybe hoping to ride the wave of the acclaim he received for The Pilgrimage, would publish that sloppy, unpolished book. Oftentimes they’d pass, and he’d have to look for another publisher.

Broderick struggled with alcohol abuse for his entire life, and seemed to interviewers (and to me) to be exceedingly lonely. But he was also one of Ireland’s first writers to feature straight-forwardly queer (oxymoron!) characters. In half of his twelve (again, not very good) novels, there are self-identifying “homosexual” characters, including protagonists, antagonists, and side characters. By the rest of Irish literary standards, Broderick wrote into life a full Gay Men’s Choir. And he did so knowingly, welcoming the challenge of the moralizing, conservative Board of Censors. John Broderick—a prickly, snarky, sometimes rude, lonely, not-particularly-successful writer—spent his career writing books he knew would be banned. 

John Broderick, Jr. was born in 1924, not long after the founding of the Irish Free State. He would be his parents’ only child. According to biographer Madeline Kingston, John was close with his mother, even after she remarried. When he finished school without taking the Leaving Certificate, he and his mother traveled together and attended parties, the theater, and society events, from Athlone to Dublin to Paris. Their thriving bakery allowed the otherwise middle-class Brodericks to play at midland aristocracy. The Brodericks bought and lived in properties with grand names like The Willows and The Moorings. John got to live for a time in Paris, where he met and became close friends with Julien Greene, and rubbed elbows with a number of the twentieth century's great—and mostly gay—writers who found community in Paris, including Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, James Baldwin, and Ernest Hemmingway. The Broderick bakery employed a considerable percentage of Athlone’s residents, giving their family a sort of “Big House” aristocratic cultural capital, despite their middling Catholic reality. Most importantly, their class and status in Athlone insulted John from more severe backlash with each censorable novel.

During Broderick’s lifetime, the United States, United Kingdom, and most European states were grappling with the idea that same-sex desire was a defining characteristic of a kind of person—a sexuality. In some ways, the Irish state was (distantly) involved in that conversation too. Judges commented on the problem of “men like you” with a kind of casual acknowledgement that the men having sex with other men were not quite “normal.” But sexology, psychology, and sexuality studies were explicitly targeted and hindered by the activities of the Board of Censors. Librarians and doctors had to write requests to be able to import books like Havelock Ellis’ Studies in the Psychology of Sex or Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis. Ordinary people were flat out denied personal access to those kinds of texts, as well as novels like Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness, queer pulp, and the novels with “homosexual” protagonists of Irish authors like John Broderick. Libraries that did have copies were instructed to keep them in a restricted section.

Like the self-appointed thought police organizations like Moms for Liberty, Irish moralizing was not limited to the people who made up the official board. Regular Irish citizens brought “offensive” publications to the attention of the Board of Censors. There are hundreds of letters in the National Archives from grannies, housewives, and self-congratulatory business men who either sought out or stumbled upon material in bookshops and newsstands that they felt contravened the censorship laws. Pretty frequently the Board agreed, and issued the required paperwork to ban those publications.

Broderick knew, of course, that having “homosexual” characters in The Pilgrimage would result in its banning. The same had happened to Kate O’Brien’s Land of Spices two decades earlier, and that for just a single sentence in the entire book. In addition to Michael Glyn and Stephen Lydon’s characters in the The Pilgrimage, Broderick included a number of out-of-place vignettes about Tommy Baggot, a “known homosexual” who lives in Dublin with another young man. (I like to think these are autobiographical; when Broderick was young, he did an apprenticeship at a bakery in Dublin, and I often wonder if that was the best year of his life.) The likelihood of banning didn’t seem particularly troubling to him. In 1961 he told an interviewer that “[n]obody now takes the Censorship Board seriously—at worst it is an irritating exhibition of public hypocrisy.” Knowing the likely consequences, he went ahead with his story and characters as written.

John Broderick’s life work rejected Ireland’s denial of home-grown same-sex desire through the characters in his novels. His controversial discussions of homosexuality did not fare well in Ireland. “Only three favorable reviews in Ireland in 20 years!” he told the Westmeath Independence in 1981. “But it is fatal to be praised in this country in your lifetime; it means that you are considered ‘harmless’.” He described the negative receipt of his books as a sort of badge of honor in his later years. When his debut novel was banned by the Board of Censorship for “immoral themes,” Broderick didn’t appeal or challenge the decision. He disapproved of the censors, but decided that trying to reason with people “as stupid and narrow-minded” as the Board of Censors was fruitless, and so did not bother.

Broderick was right. He was, by many accounts, a prickly man who refused to edit his books and drank himself to death. His writing isn’t beautiful or transformative or award-winning (probably because he refused to edit). He wrote from a position of privilege; he admitted that if his family hadn’t been one of the largest employers of the midlands, he likely would have met a great deal of trouble for what he wrote. John McGahern, whose second novel The Dark is rightfully acclaimed in Irish literature, was sacked from his teaching job after The Dark was banned by the censors. Broderick wrote to be provocative; he knew that queer characters and awkward sex scenes would put him on the censor’s list and would make it hard to publish through an Irish publisher. Knowing that he would likely be silenced, he wrote anyway. I don’t know that we need to venerate John Broderick for many things—probably not even much of the content of his novels—but I’m thankful he wrote what he wasn’t supposed to, and that he called out the censors and the absurdity of censoring knowledge and art. He knew that banning books was stupid, so he kept writing. We should too.

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Averill Earls is an Associate Professor of History, and the executive producer of Dig: A History Podcast. She is the author of Love in the Lav: A Social Biography of Same-Sex Desire in Ireland, 1922-1972, and the co-author of Spiritualism’s Place: Reformers, Seekers, and Seances in Lily Dale. Most notably she won a white ribbon for her ginger honey cookies at last year’s Minnesota State Fair. 

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