In Being Gay in Ireland: Resisting Stigma in the Evolving Present, Gerard Rodgers argues that existing theory and research on the lives of gay men often exhibits a social weightlessness such that self-beliefs are frequently decoupled from an analysis of society. History and conventions inform and shape gay men's self-beliefs, yet psychology as a discipline rarely dialogues with historical or political scholarship. Rodgers corrects this oversight with a critical analysis of the decades of socio-political struggle in Ireland and elsewhere. Rodgers captures the lives of gay men who are situated in varied contexts and who all, despite their different situations, possess self-beliefs that are shaped by wider historical traditions and evolving social change. Rodgers argues that the nuances and particulars of self-beliefs are significantly affected by wider historical traditions and evolving social and political changes. Through his reconstruction, Rodgers provides practitioners of applied psychological and therapeutic disciplines with an in-depth picture of how historical context and social justice successes have interacted with gay men's self-beliefs, with a particular focus on how prosocial resistances against prejudice have incrementally eroded historical standards of gay stigma.

This is both a memoir of childhood trauma and a searing work of social criticism. Through his own experience of clerical abuse and his struggle with the system that allowed it to happen, the author documents an important period of social change in Ireland. The aim of the study is to situate tough personal experiences in lifeworld contexts for the purpose of changing powerful beliefs and practices. The author contends that psychological disciplines seldom interface with regional histories in a convincing way. The book is critical of dominant ideologies which reinforce acquiescence and exaggerate the power to act in the face of multilevel disempowerment. The author also maintains that old ways of knowing are still replicated in the structure of dominant psychological frameworks. A constancy principle of micro-regulation engenders mindful quietude and/or robust notions of psychological invulnerability. This truncated worldview comes at too high a cost. The book will be of interest to historians, social commentators, psychologists and critical theorists, as well as those in the field of trauma, addiction and psychiatry.