Queer Uses of the Irish Past: Memory, Stigma, and Survival in Phillip McMahon's Once Before I Go

This article reads Phillip McMahon's Once Before I Go (2021) as a major intervention into Irish HIV/AIDS theatre and queer medical humanities. It examines how McMahon's play stages the Irish past through criminalization, Catholic moral regulation, public health silence, homonormative respectability, and displacement as the social, medical, and affective conditions that made Ireland difficult or uninhabitable for some queer and HIV-affected subjects. Taking Sara Ahmed's concept of queer use as its central theoretical lens, the article argues that Once Before I Go recovers the potential of histories, bodies, and forms of grief that Irish public culture had often left behind while it also refuses the Irish theatrical pattern in which AIDS death functions as punishment for queer excess or non-assimilation. Instead, through its nonlinear dramaturgy and memory, the play transforms AIDS grief into a resource for recognition, care, and survival. Bernard's sick body is not staged as waste or warning, but as a site of dignity, agency, and political claim-making. Daithí's survival exposes the limits of post-AIDS homonormativity and Jase's presence reframes AIDS memory through contemporary struggles over bodily autonomy and recognition. Finally, the article claims that McMahon's theatre makes the Irish past usable not by resolving it, but by keeping its unfinished demands in motion.