SLM – Foundation - 1973
Inside SLM
Ireland’s first Sexual Liberation Movement started as an undercover meeting between ten Trinity College students in the final months of 1973. As part of a new series, Ethan Moser interviews the people behind the SLM.
In our last issue, we featured Edmund Lynch who started the SLM with nine other compatriots on the campus of Dublin’s Trinity College. One of those compatriots is Mary Dorcey.
Born in October 1950, Dorcey grew up in Dalkey before moving to Paris in the late 1960’s. While there, Dorcey discovered her blossoming sexuality through reading the French writer, Colette, and by going out to gay nightclubs. “Through one of my lecturers in Paris, I went to this wonderful gay nightclub, which was a huge event, something like 300 gay people in the room. Fantastic, beautiful, energetic figures, vital people, like you’d never seen in your life and certainly hadn’t seen in Dublin. I thought ‘these are the people for me’. So, that was what it meant for me. It was about excitement; it was about freedom. It was about redefining yourself,” Dorcey said in an interview with Edmund Lynch as part of the Irish LGBTI+ Oral History Project in 2013.