Eugene is the story of a Belfast teenager, Kate, who discovers sex after the death of her brother Eugene.
It is the story of how she finds freedom by strategically becoming good (at home) in order to sustain being bad – ie sexually active on Belfast’s idiosyncratic gay scene of the time. Homosexuality was illegal in the religiously obsessed Northern Ireland of the 1970’s and the gay scene in Belfast included a club, The Chariot Rooms, which sat within the gated city centre, gated and guarded by the British Army. The club also housed subversives who risked their lives to have fun. Kate is one of these people. She is not gay but discovers that she has the guts to live the life that her brother Eugene wanted, but couldn’t sustain.
In Eugene the conflict in Belfast at war in the late 1970s is used as a heightened stage with which to play out the trinity of sexual, familial and obsessive interrelationships between Kate, Eugene and Dermott. Without Eugene’s death, Kate would not have been introduced to Dermott at his funeral.
Without the reckless journey through a city at war to find Dermott, the excitement of sex, in and around The Chariot Rooms, would not have been as dangerous or liberating as it is for Kate.