Today we #TakeBackPride for gay Irish author John Boyne. Boyne has published 20 novels and is the most translated Irish author ever. His novel The Heart's Invisible Furies is a breath-taking 70-year history of gay life in Ireland since 1945.
Boyne has been a vocal critic of the contemporary overuse of the word “queer.” In a recent article for The Telegraph he denounced straight people using the term to describe themselves and called it “performative, an attempt to make the person seem more interesting than they actually are. They are not ‘queer.’ They are simply normal people.”
Upon the release of his novel My Brother’s Name is Jessica in 2019, Boyne received countless messages of hate online by trans rights activists for “misgendering” one of the characters. He was the victim of cruel harassment by heterosexual “allies” accusing him of bigotry and transphobia. He has since been issued with multiple public apologies for this witch-hunt against him.
We stand with John and how he has fearlessly and continuously stood up for LGB people’s right to assert our same-sex attraction and to reject queer theory.
