Woman in the Making: Panti's Memoir (11 page)

Still sitting on the bed, we heard my father’s car pull up outside. My mother stood up, straightened her skirt and said, ‘I’ll go out and tell your father.’ I sat nervously in the living room while my mother sat in the passenger seat of my father’s car and told him about his two exotic birds.

Some minutes later he walked in the door, looked at me and said, ‘Don’t you be worrying about what I think,’ then sat down for his lunch as if just being told by his wife that two of his three sons were gay was the least interesting thing that had happened all day.

In fact, he was
so
casual about it that, for a long time, I didn’t fully believe it. My father had always been a calm, laid-back kind of guy but it hardly seemed credible that a sixty-year-old Irish Catholic man born in the 1930s could have been so entirely unfazed to hear that a third of his six children were queer, even if he’d had his own suspicions. For a long time I assumed that my father, seeing that his wife was upset, had decided to
act
completely unbothered for her sake. His utterly calm acceptance of the situation was, I decided, fake, a
chivalrous façade designed to make it easier on his wife. However, in the years since I have asked him about it a few times and he has always insisted that he wasn’t faking it. He simply didn’t think it was anything to get upset over.

Of course now, in retrospect, I feel guilty for ever doubting him or worrying how he might react, but it’s impossible not to. He’s my father.

From that day my pre-war Irish Catholic father has never once betrayed any discomfort over his gay sons. Whether he’s meeting boyfriends or sitting through a drag show that’s much too loud, he does it all with the same vaguely bemused expression he has when the TV weather lady is wearing something he considers ‘silly’. (In general, my father doesn’t like anyone who appears on the telly but the poor posture and inappropriate fashion choices of lady weather presenters is his specialist subject: ‘Oh, there’s Slouchy again with her arms!’)

My mother, like most parents, took longer to be totally comfortable. It had taken me a couple of years to come to terms fully with who I was and be at ease in my own gay skin, and my mother needed the same time. She never said or did anything that made her discomfort explicit, but I was aware of it. It wasn’t easy for her to be totally at peace with having two gay sons. It was a difficult and painful journey for her, and for that I largely blame religion.

Religious people (including my mother) will always say how much comfort their faith brings them. They
remember how their faith comforted them in sadness, how their quiet conversations with God helped them through difficult times, and how the rituals of religion strengthened them in bereavement. But they never describe the times their faith caused them unnecessary hurt. They never remember that, even though their love for their gay sons was never in doubt for even a second, and accepting their gayness should have been entirely simple and uncomplicated, it wasn’t. It was not having gay sons that caused my mother pain, but having religion – and I have never forgiven religion for that.

A
S THE LETHARGY OF ILLNESS
started to lift, I needed to make some decisions. What was I going to do now? Japan definitely felt like a finished chapter, but Dublin – the only place in Ireland I could have imagined living – didn’t particularly appeal. After all, it was only a few years before that I had happily left behind its crumbling plaster and weird Lost World quality, where long-haired types with paisley shirts and guitars were still considered cool. Dublin was a town where nobody wanted to be Leigh Bowery and everyone wanted to be Bono. (Until some years later when Bono wanted to be Leigh Bowery for a while, but shortly after that everybody else stopped wanting to be Bono – it’s the natural Irish cycle of things.) I had a vague notion I might go to Paris, but first I thought I’d go to Dublin, see old friends and hang out with Niall and his boyfriend Frank for a while.

Niall and Frank lived in a small Victorian terraced
house by the canal, just off the South Circular Road. Inside, Frank had stripped it completely, removed walls and doors, poured concrete floors, then got rid of the staircase and landing. He replaced it with a single sheet of perforated steel bent into steps, entirely without railing or support of any kind, which looked beautiful as it traced the outline of a staircase through space, but it quivered and wobbled and hummed as you went up or down it, hands out to balance yourself. At night in the dark a trip to the first-floor toilet from the first-floor bedroom meant a hazardous trip across thin air on an invisible gangway. In Niall and Frank’s house drunk people slept on the ground floor.

For the next year or so I slept on the ground floor of Niall and Frank’s house.

Dublin was changing fast. It was the early years of the Celtic Tiger and the city had a confidence and vibrancy it had never had before. For the first time in generations young people weren’t leaving in their droves because they didn’t have to. Not only that but other young people were arriving. Homosexual acts between men had been decriminalised in 1993 so the gay scene was slowly emerging from the shadows and the gay community becoming more confident. The dance-music explosion hit Dublin and straight kids started taking ecstasy and hanging out with the gays, everybody high on chemically induced love. Changes to the alcohol licensing laws meant you could now go dancing and drink beer and spirits, and
new ‘designer’ clubs opened to cater to this new breed of dance-music clubbers. (Minsky’s was discovered by straight kids as dance music and ecstasy hit Dublin in the nineties and was now a mixed dance club called Shaft.) For the first time ever, Dublin seemed like it could be just as fun as anywhere else. Suddenly Dublin had possibilities.

At the time Frank was the artistic director for a fashion company and he gave me a ‘day job’ in its flagship store, Makullas, on Suffolk Street, where I sold jeans to the city’s new breed of clubbers and fashion kids, but my heart wasn’t in it. I wanted to find a way to make dressing up and having fun pay. I needed to start climbing the drag ladder but the problem was there wasn’t a drag ladder to climb. Dublin had no drag scene to get involved in. The gay scene pre-decriminalisation had been too small to support a professional drag one. There was Mr Pussy, of course, Ireland’s ‘leading misleading lady’ who had arrived in Ireland from London in the seventies and become a household name, touring the bars and clubs up and down the country. At that time in the mid-nineties he famously co-owned his own riotous Mr Pussy’s Café Deluxe with Bono, which became a late-night hangout and celebrity favourite where Pussy played bingo with the customers and late-night whiskey was sold in teapots.

But Pussy came from an English drag tradition of working-men’s clubs and saucy humour and had made a career out of playing to mainstream straight audiences – there was even a slight coyness around his sexuality
so as not to spook the punters – a world I knew nothing about and wasn’t interested in. I wanted to continue doing the kind of clubbing drag I had done in Tokyo, where the audience was gays and club-kids and I was mostly getting paid to be outrageous and fun.

Besides, Pussy was an industry of one. There were no other professional working queens. There were a few fun gays who occasionally put on a show at The George or other gay bars, but they were doing it for the laugh and a few quid in drinking money. I wanted to find a way to make dressing up pay my rent, not just my pocket money. However, without a drag-scene ladder to climb, it looked like I was going to have to build my own as I went.

First, I had to get
any
kind of drag job. I found out what seemed to be the fun,
happening
club nights, and I went to all of them in drag and made myself the most fun, memorable person in the room. It wasn’t hard – most of Dublin had never even seen a drag queen at that time. The most fun party at the time was a Monday-night party called Strictly Handbag at the Kitchen nightclub in Temple Bar, which attracted a very fun, mixed gay/straight crowd, which, as Monday-night clubbers usually do, took its fun seriously. For a few weeks I went every Monday and made myself the life and soul of the party, climbing on the bar, being fun and causing a commotion, and then I proposed to the promoter, Martin, that I would keep coming every week if he paid me. And, knowing a fun mess when he saw one, he did.

One small gig a week wasn’t going to pay my rent but it was a start, and it was a laugh. I would run around with a Polaroid camera and take pictures with people – which, in the days before digital cameras and phones in your pocket, people loved – or pin badges onto them. I would pretend to do horoscopes (something I knew
nothing
about), dress up for holidays, crawl drunkenly along the bar or sit in a sun-lounger, wearing a bathing suit, under the street light at the club door. Basically, I made a fool of myself professionally and I was good at it. Soon I was hostessing in other clubs, like Pod, then the hottest club in town.

Pod attracted a fashionable, mostly straight but very gay-friendly crowd. Ecstasy was the drug of choice and straight-bloke van drivers would be hugging their new best gay friend they’d just met on the dance floor. I was younger and cuter and got hit on all the time by straight guys and tranny-chasers. Though I would flirt back, I rarely entertained them. The tranny-chasers were not really interested in having sex with
me
– they were just interested in having sex with my hair and my makeup and my nylons. They didn’t really care if it was me under there or Dame Edna Everage! Occasionally though, one would come along who was so gorgeous that it would have been a gay crime
not
to sleep with him.

One evening a group of guys from a sports club were in and there was one among them from whom I immediately sensed a flirtation. He was movie-star
handsome, tall and muscular, and at one point, after complimenting me for the umpteenth time, he quietly slipped his phone number into my handbag, making sure his team-mates were none the wiser. I couldn’t believe my luck because he was totally, swoonsomely gorgeous and really sweet with it. The next day I called him and he invited me over to his place for dinner. I felt like I was going to the prom with the captain of the football team! I plucked and preened, dug out my sluttiest dress and wore two wigs for extra volume while Niall and Frank egged me on, then drove me to his building. (It turned out that he lived in a well-known apartment building in upmarket suburbia where a foreign ambassador had once shot himself, which I felt added a whole other layer of glamour to the occasion.)

Inside his place he was a real gentleman and treated me like the real lady he was so thrilled I actually wasn’t, complimenting my dress and serving me wine in large glasses (which made my hands look smaller). A bottle later we started making out and had sex. At one point I wished I hadn’t worn the second wig because as I fellated him the clips started to come undone and the second wig was flapping off his taut boxer’s belly, like seaweed in a storm. Of course, in common with so many of his kind, what he really wanted was for
me
to make a lady out of
him
but, when I’ve spent two hours getting ready, and I look like a lady and smell like a lady, I think it’s only fair that I should be the lady! Anyway, you try
keeping a straight face, kneeling behind a huge hunk of a man, your nylons around your ankles and him on all fours, crying, ‘You’re my lady! You’re my lady!’

When it came time for me to leave, he was suddenly concerned about being seen leaving his building with a huge transvestite so he asked me if I would change before he drove me home. In my innocence I agreed, which I now know to be a mistake, because most tranny-chasers don’t like to be confronted with the reality behind the special effects. When I emerged from his bathroom in a pair of his old jeans and a T-shirt, with a freshly scrubbed face, he was mortified. That was too gay for him.

Even before I had left Japan, Niall had started to use pictures and images of Panti in his work as a graphic designer, and now that Panti was living in his house and running around nightclubs with him, he started to use her more – and has continued to do so for more than twenty years. I’m going to say that Panti is Niall’s
muse
, because that suggests Panti’s active participation in the creative process, sparking Niall’s creativity, and therefore allows me to take some of the credit for some of Niall’s incredible work over the years. However, the truth is probably closer to Panti being a more passive participant, Niall’s ‘fully poseable life-size doll’, a shorthand symbol in his work for transgression and fun, a recurring motif. In truth it had little to do with me. I was just lucky that, for whatever reason, he liked to dress me up and make
pictures with me in them. What is absolutely true, though, is that the visual image of Panti over the years, the way people imagine her, is as much the result of Niall’s work as my own. She has been a collaborative project visually.

One of the first things Niall used Panti in was the posters for the 1995 Smirnoff Young Designer Awards, ‘The Exhilaration of Liberty’. He photographed me crawling around his concrete living-room floor in bra and knickers, then superimposed me crawling up Dublin’s iconic Liberty Hall, a drag Godzilla, curly red hair tumbling down my back. I played some small role at the awards themselves, and it was through this that I first met a tall, fashion-obsessed Trinity student called Enda McGrattan, who was producing the event. Enda would become a great friend, but would also later become Veda Beaux Reves, an iconic drag figure on the Irish gay scene, and one of my drag-partners-in-crime for many years.

At Christmas Niall and Frank decided to use Panti as the Christmas decoration for the big store Frank ran. Niall designed ads featuring Panti dressed as Santa and soon ‘Panti Claws’ could be seen all over the city on the sides of buses. On the outside of the store’s five-storey building, a giant twenty-foot-tall Panti loomed out over the street wearing white ice skates and a red fur-trimmed skating dress. The skirt was very short so pedestrians got an eyeful of Giant Panti’s black knickers, and one day a very angry woman stormed into the store to complain because she thought the black knickers were Panti’s bush!