2. ECLIPSE

Roger Casement - “Like Virginity, once lost …”
The use of handwritten manuscript fragments of Casement for the invented phrase “Like Virginity, once lost …” refers to the controversial discussion about authenticity and ‘proof of guilt’ of Casement’s Black Diaries. The phrase itself conjoins his homosexual preference (the cause for discredit and eventually for his execution) with his human rights activities in Africa and South America.

Notes on Roger Casement
Sir Roger David Casement (1864-1916) was a poet, a revolutionary, an anti-slavery campaigner, and an Irish separatist.
A British diplomat by profession, Casement‘s witnessing of atrocities in Africa and South America from 1903 to 1910 led him to anti-Imperialist opinions and turned him into one of the first human rights activists. In the consequence he became famous for his fight against slavery and human rights abuses particularly in the Congo and Peru. From 1914 on Casement also played an important role in the preparation of Ireland's Easter Rising revolt in 1916. He was executed for high treason in London on 3 August 1916.
Despite the political circumstances that he was a human rights campaigner and an Irish revolutionary, interest in Casement has focused ever since on five diaries now preserved in the Public Record Office at Kew, England: the White Diaries describing the atrocities in Africa and Peru, and the Black Diaries – containing pornographic sections of his homosexuality. Excerpts from the Black Diaries were circulated by Scotland Yard at the time of trial to discourage appeals for clemency. These handwritten notes showed Casement to have been a promiscuous homosexual. The controversy whether the Diaries were forged to dicredit Casement has raged for more than eighty years, while homosexuality and Irish separatism have become matters of far less anxious argument. In particular, it became a matter of literary debate with writers as different as W.B.Yeats and David Rabkin getting in on the act.

Roger Casement Biography
Roger Casement was born in Kingstown, now Dun Laoghaire, County Dublin, in 1864.
In the 1890s Casement joined the British consular service, and in 1903 was ordered to report on allegations of atrocities against natives in the Belgian Congo in Africa. Casement's report confirmed that rubber production there was organised on the basis of forced labour accompanied by horrendous punishments and mutilations of the population. Casement gained an international reputation for his humanitarian efforts in the Congo, and in 1910 he was further directed by the British Foreign Office to investigate charges of ill-treatment of natives in the Putumayo region of Peru, again an area of rubber production. Once more Casement's report lucidly exposed the 'murder, violation and constant flogging' to which natives were subjected by agents of a rubber company, and the report's publication in 1912 created an international sensation. Casement was knighted for his services in 1911 and retired from the consular service in 1912.
Despite being a servant of the Crown, Casement had for many years held strong views in favour of Irish independence from British rule. He joined the nationalist Irish Volunteers on their foundation in 1913, and on the outbreak of World War I in 1914 he supported Britain's enemy Germany, in the hope that it would assist the achievement of Irish independence. Casement travelled to Germany in 1914, where he endeavoured to secure significant military aid and to persuade Irish prisoners of war to desert the British Army for an Irish Brigade. Disappointed in his efforts in Germany, Casement sent messages back to Ireland endeavouring to deter nationalist leaders from a planned armed rising, which however went ahead at Easter 1916. Casement himself returned from Germany by submarine, and having landed at Banna Strand, County Kerry, he was arrested by police and taken to London on 24 April. Placed on trial for high treason at the Old Bailey, he was convicted and sentenced to death. In the time honoured tradition of condemned Irish patriots, Casement delivered a speech from the dock to justify himself, in which he declared, 'Self-government is our right, a thing born in us at birth, a thing no more to be doled out to us or withheld from us by another people than the right to life itself, than the right to feel the sun or smell the flowers, or to love our kind'. Following an unsuccessful appeal, Casement was hanged at Pentonville Prison on 3 August 1916.
Because of the international respect in which he was held, influential people, particularly in America, came forward to appeal for clemency for Casement. To discourage such appeals on his behalf and to further discredit Casement the British claimed to have discovered at some point a series of diaries, which in their accounts of frequent sexual contacts with males showed Casement to have been a promiscuous homosexual. On account of their pornographic content, these were termed the 'Black Diaries', and were distinguished from the 'White Diaries' where Casement supposedly omitted sexual references and recorded only details of his humanitarian work and private business. The British ensured that extracts from the Black Diaries were shown to those appealing on Casement's behalf, and given the horror with which homosexuality was then viewed, sympathy for him dried up and his execution proceeded unhindered. The circulation of copies of the diaries was masterminded by Reginald 'Blinker' Hall, director of Naval Intelligence, whose accomplishments included the promotion of the forged Zinoviev letter in 1924.
In the years following Casement’s execution, the existence of the Black Diaries was officially denied by the British, and suspicions grew that they might in fact have been forged by British Intelligence and Scotland Yard in order to blacken Casement's character. In 1959 Peter Singleton Gates, a British journalist who had received a leaked copy of the Black Diaries, published them in Paris in collaboration with Maurice Girodias. In the same year the British began to allow scholars to examine the handwriting in the Black Diaries in the Public Record Office in London. Leading biographers of Casement now tended to accept the authenticity of the Black Diaries, but in Ireland a number of individuals kept alive the theory that they were forgeries, and the matter was periodically aired in the letters pages of the Irish Times and elsewhere. Unfortunately, some of Casement's defenders proceeded on the rather simplistic basis that a true Irish Nationalist could not be a homosexual.