Doug Ireland

Having already worked briefly at the New York Post[3] and Community News Service, Ireland returned full-time to journalism in 1977, becoming a political columnist for the SoHo Weekly News.[2] In an obituary, Micah Sifry wrote that "It was said that he could have been the 'next Jimmy Breslin,' but I think Dougie was too pure about his politics to ingratiate himself with enough people to win that label."[6] Among his notable articles was a 1978 expose, daring for the time, of violence against gay men in the Ramble, known as a cruising area in Central Park in New York City.[7]

He lived for ten years in France, writing on European politics and culture for various publications, including English language Paris city magazine, Paris Passion magazine; and he continued to write frequently about French and European politics and foreign affairs.[8] Ireland was an assiduous promoter in the United States of the work of the prolific young French philosopher Michel Onfray.[9]

Ireland was a columnist for The Village Voice, The New York Observer New York magazine,[3] and the Paris daily Libération, among other publications. He was also a contributing editor of POZ, the monthly for the HIV-positive community, of the magazine In These Times, and the French satirical news website Bakchich. In the late 1990s, he was a contributor to The Nation. Sifry, a colleague of his at the time, wrote that "I think one of my most trying experiences as a young editor was being in the middle of his push to publish a damning indictment" of then-President Bill Clinton, and the editors' "discomfort with his ferocity and willingness to infer the worst from a mixed bag of solid facts and not-so-solid surmises."[6] However, Sifry added that Ireland "was more right than not ... in the grand sense."

From mid-2005, Ireland was the Contributing Editor for International Affairs of Gay City News, the largest LGBT weekly newspaper in New York City and in the U.S.[2]

Ireland's reporting on Iran in the several years after 2005 drew harsh rebuttals from a number of Iranian activists,[10] as well as from Scott Long, director of the LGBT Rights Program at Human Rights Watch. They charged that Ireland and Gay City News generally were uncritical in relying on sources who maintained that two young men hanged in Mashhad, Iran in mid-2005 –– after being convicted of raping an underage boy at a time when they themselves were underage –– had in fact been involved in consensual sex. Long and some other human rights advocates criticized activists and reporters, including Ireland and controversial British campaigner Peter Tatchell, saying they were engaging in unwarranted speculation about the motives for the case.[2][11]

Ireland continued to produce articles claiming a pattern of "anti-gay" executions in Iran. However, no professional human rights organization ever endorsed these claims, or identified any recent case of persons sentenced to death for consensual homosexual conduct in Iran. Long and others became increasingly critical, charging that Ireland and others were making claims without evidence, and imputing a Western gay identity to Iranians coming from a very different cultural experience. The conflict between Long on one side and Ireland and Tatchell on the other side was at times vitriolic and led to a 2010 episode in which Human Rights Watch and Long apologized in writing to Tatchell. However, Long remained a critic of Ireland to the end, faulting him for relying excessively on single sources in his reporting,[12] for intolerance toward Islam[13] and for failing to understand complex international situations. In particular, Long claimed that Ireland had unduly promoted the career of the flamboyant Russian activist Nikolai Alekseev while ignoring other Russian groups. Alekseev had a record of erratic behavior and supporting far right-wing causes, and later engaged in anti-Semitic outbursts.[2][14] Scott Tucker writes that "In his reports on the Russian gay movement, and especially of gay activist Nikolai Alexeyev, I found [Ireland] less reliable.... When he became increasingly confined by illness, he could not pretend to be a truly investigative journalist."[4]

A severe critic from the left of President Bill Clinton's presidency, Ireland for three years wrote a syndicated Clinton Watch column.[17] He wrote extensively in opposition to President George H. W. Bush's Gulf War, as well as President George W. Bush's Iraq War and War in Afghanistan.[2]

At an early age, Ireland was part of the early 1960s American New Left. He was a member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and was elected to its National Council in 1963 at the age of 17. He also spent a year on the SDS national staff, as Assistant National Secretary, in 1963–64. Ireland dropped out of SDS in 1966 to devote his time to electoral organizing against the Vietnam War. As a staff member of the New Jersey Industrial Union Council AFL-CIO and the United Auto Workers Region 9-A, in 1967 he helped to organize the National Labor Leadership Assembly for Peace to oppose the Vietnam War.[2][5]

He was involved in the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) and Gay Liberation Front (GLF).[2]