William Douglas Ireland (March 31, 1946 – October 26, 2013) was an American journalist and blogger who wrote about politics, power, media, and LGBT issues. He was the U.S. correspondent for the French political-investigative weekly Bakchich, for which he also wrote a weekly column, and he was also the Contributing Editor for International Affairs of Gay City News. Scott Tucker has called him "not only a left-wing critic of sexual and political conformism among sectors of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender movements, but ... also one of the notable public intellectuals of the civil libertarian left."
Professional
An early member of the Dump Johnson movement, Ireland was recruited for the staff of the presidential campaign of the man who became the anti-war candidate of the Dump Johnson movement, Senator Eugene McCarthy, for whom Ireland coordinated the Mid-Atlantic region of states. Following the 1968 Democratic National Convention (at which he coordinated McCarthy's labor support and helped organize demonstrations by Convention delegates against police brutality targeting anti-war demonstrators) Ireland went to Long Island to help run the successful campaign for Congress by Allard Lowenstein, considered the principal founder of the Dump Johnson movement.
After a stint as a journalist on the New York Post, when it was still owned by Dorothy Schiff, and then on the Community News Service (a short-lived wire service providing news of the black, Latino, and other minority racial communities), he resigned to manage the successful 1970 anti-Vietnam war campaign for Congress by Bella Abzug, making her the first left radical to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives since Vito Marcantonio. He also managed Abzug's 1976 campaign for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senator from New York, which Abzug narrowly lost by 0.10 per cent of the vote to Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
In 1973, he was put on the payroll of the new New York City Off-Track Betting Corp., along with several others who were expected to join OTB Chairman Howard J. Samuels' expected run for governor of New York the following year. Ireland did end up working on the Samuels campaign, which lost the Democratic primary to then-Rep. Hugh Carey.
Ireland played a studio executive in Woody Allen's Stardust Memories.
Journalism
Having already worked briefly at the New York Post and Community News Service, Ireland returned full-time to journalism in 1977, becoming a political columnist for the SoHo Weekly News. 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." 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.
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. Ireland was an assiduous promoter in the United States of the work of the prolific young French philosopher Michel Onfray.
Ireland was a columnist for The Village Voice, The New York Observer New York magazine, 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." 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.