Woman in the Making: Panti's Memoir (18 page)

For the most part, the typical drag queen plies her trade in the noisy, well-lubricated environs of bars and nightclubs to patrons who may not have come to see the show
per se
: it’s just an incidental part of their big night out. This means that, unlike most performers, the drag queen has to fight for their attention over the booze, the flirting, the banter and the gay dramas. In these circumstances, the drag queen needs to be bigger than other performers, grabbing your attention with her hair, her sequins, her high kicks, and the big
sound
cheaply afforded to her by the classic lip sync. It’s all very well to pull out your harmonica at nine p.m. in front of an audience of harmonica enthusiasts who’ve come to hear
you play, but if you’re going to step onto a small stage at one a.m. in a crowded nightclub full of drunk gays, half of whom have no idea who you are and nearly all of whom are annoyed that your show is interrupting their bedroom-perfected routine to the new Beyoncé single, you’d better not pull out a harmonica or you’ll be beaten to death with it. Even a few good jokes probably won’t win over this crowd because invariably the sound will be terrible, half the club can’t see the stage, and you’re being lit by a slowly revolving disco ball. There are five hundred homosexuals full of Jägermeister and Red Bull and each one is looking at you with a raised eyebrow and a face that says, ‘This better be good, Bitch,’ and what you need is big hair and even bigger sound, but seeing as the club is only paying you in drink tickets and a beer-sodden fifty, you’re hardly going to be turning up with a horn section. So, you turn up with your
cassette/cd/
iPod with an up-tempo much-loved pop hit on it and you emote the crap out of it till the sweat is pouring down your waterproof face.

Of course, the lip-sync is a much-maligned and misunderstood form, and you’ll sometimes hear people dismissively opine that ‘anyone can do that’, which you’ll know is patently absurd if you’ve been to many amateur drag shows! Some of those girls never get the hang of it.

However, while the classic gay bar lip-sync will stand a queen in good stead and can keep her off the streets,
it can also be limiting, and if a queen wants to progress she’s going to have to diversify and develop other talents.

I was first drawn to the larger-than-life visual and theatrical elements of drag simply because they were colourful and fun. But, in a way, they also gave me permission to break out of the rigid rules of gender expression our culture imposes. We live in a culture where gender expression is so enthusiastically policed that most men wouldn’t dream of wearing pink trousers and would be the subject of ridicule if they did. (Even though before the 1940s pink was considered a ‘strong’ masculine colour for boys and blue more appropriate for girls. Our current association of pink with all things ‘girly’ and feminine is entirely arbitrary and entirely modern.)

At its most surface level, drag is simply a theatrical device, a visual exaggeration or extravagance that amplifies the performer but, like most cultures, our culture decided that females would be the peacocks and gave them the tools to exaggerate their appearance theatrically – makeup, hairspray, sequins, heels, colourful costumes – while these things were frowned upon when employed by men and considered feminine, dandyish or foppish. Makeup covers flaws but, more importantly, it makes our eyes more prominent, our lashes more fluttery, our mouths more pouty, our brows more arched, our cheekbones sharper. And this serves to exaggerate and amplify our emotions. We become
open books, with every fleeting feeling readable. Painted, we become emotional big screens, telegraphing the slightest batting of the lashes, the tiniest quiver of the lip. Ironically, many women think of their makeup as a mask they hide behind, when in fact it’s the very opposite – it exposes you. And in our culture, emotions are women’s preserve. Men are supposed to repress emotion at all costs, to slouch stoically, to not care, to remain cool, to never react. But this means that males tend to be visually boring in a theatrical setting – even heterosexual male performers often end up feminising their appearance in order to be more visually interesting: glam rock stars, Spandex-clad big-haired metal bands, hip-hop’s fur-and-jewellery-dripping ‘pimps’. Indeed, the very act of stage performing – the exaggerated facial expressions, the expansive gestures, the expression of emotion – is thought of as feminine and not the preserve of the stoic, expressionless male. Even our language constantly reinforces these notions. The word ‘histrionic’ (which means ‘relating to actors’ and also ‘excessively emotional’) is almost entirely used to describe women. When it is used to describe a man it is loaded with implied ‘feminine’ insult – he’s acting like a woman, not like a real man.

But, of course, drag is about more than that – it plays with notions of gender and identity. It constantly asks questions about what gender is. Is gender just performed? Is it real at all? Does it matter? Does how we
present our gender affect how others react to us? What exactly is the gender presented by the drag performer? Is it a third gender? A non-gender? In my own case I wouldn’t describe what I do as ‘female impersonation’ (as some drag performers do, especially those who specialise in celebrity impersonation) because although I am using the signifiers of ‘female’ I am not actually trying to convince anyone I am female. I am presenting a character that is neither male nor female, neither one nor the other, but rather something else entirely. And there’s power in being something else entirely.

Of course there’s a clownish element too. The drag queen as caricature, as larger-than-life cartoon, as court jester, as colourful fool, who is allowed to say from behind her mask of lashes and powder, hair and corsetry, what the regular peasant would be beheaded for. She is allowed to speak to power and occasionally prick it with a sharpened stiletto. Even in small ways, I am allowed to say in drag things I could never get away with out of drag. As Panti I can rib an audience member about what they’re wearing, or poke fun at their taste or home town in a way that would seem mean and rude coming from Rory in a shirt. But (almost) everyone understands the court-jester role played by the drag queen and, anyway, it’s difficult to take offence from a cartoon. Just as Bugs Bunny is allowed to smash Elmer Fudd over the head with a frying pan, so the larger-than-life drag queen may wield the metaphorical skillet.

Yet even in our relatively relaxed times, drag remains one of the last great taboos – you are a traitor to your gender. Cross-dressing still retains the power to disturb and discombobulate. The seemingly simple act of a male putting on the designated apparel of a female remains remarkably powerful. In many cultures people who don’t sit easily in one gender or the other are ascribed magical qualities, deriving their power from containing the spirit of both male and female. In primitive cultures the local witch doctor is often a little light in his loafers, and amplifies his feminine qualities with costume and paint. In Native American tribes male ‘two-spirits’ were respected (and sometimes feared) and were fundamental to tribal life. In India the
hijra
are marginalised, outcast and feared. Western culture would prefer us all to sit squarely in the gender box we were put into at birth and never budge, and even today, not doing so retains the power to upset people. Indeed, not sticking rigidly to our culture’s arbitrary gender-specific rules of dressing and expressing yourself is to risk opprobrium, confusion, outrage and worse. It can be dangerous out there for people who don’t play gender nice.

Once, a student who was studying fashion at the National College of Art and Design asked me and some other queens to model her handbags at the annual graduation show. We agreed, and it was a hoot. The audience of proud family members and assorted fashion types whooped and cheered as we pranced and bounced
down the runway, a silly, outsized and colourful break from the parade of skinny, serious models. At the end of the show the students would present bouquets of flowers to their college tutors and asked us queens if we would do it on their behalf. However, the tutor to whom I was meant to give flowers didn’t appear onstage when her name was called, so backstage, as the audience outside were gathering their coats and preparing to leave, the students asked me if I would go out into the auditorium and present the flowers to her at her seat. I said, ‘Sure!’ and tottered out to find her. She was a large woman in her fifties, wearing her grey hair in a bouffant, and a big purple kaftan. I teetered over to her, tapped her on the shoulder and beamed at her. ‘These are for you!’

In front of all the proud parents, younger brothers and sisters of the students, she turned, looked at me proffering the flowers and screamed, ‘FUCK OFF! I’M A FULL-BLOWN WOMAN AND I’VE NEVER BEEN SO INSULTED IN MY LIFE!’

Which, to be honest, seemed unlikely to me, considering her charming personality. Still, my mere presence was enough to set off in her an apoplexy of rage. Though this was a woman who was clearly very sensitive to gender issues, a fact that was belied by her own phrasing – using the language of disease to describe her own womanhood: ‘I’m a
full-blown
woman’, as if being a woman was akin to having AIDS.

Cross-dressing puts you on the lower rungs of the
social ladder. Interestingly, a man dressed as a woman stands lower down that ladder than a woman dressed as a man. That, of course, is
partly
because women have long appropriated many of the accoutrements of male dressing – trousers, jackets, suits – but also because they are still perceived to be the weaker sex. Therefore, in a weird way, a woman dressed as a man is somehow seen as having empowered herself, while a man dressed as a woman is somehow seen to have weakened or demeaned himself.

One effect of this, though, is that when people see me standing around in public dressed as a lady, they feel they can tell me anything because they are sure that I, in my frock and makeup, won’t judge them (which shows how little they know about me!). Total strangers will come up to me in a bar and tell me the most intimate details of their lives. They’ll tell me, a complete stranger, things they may never have told another soul because they are confident that I, the crazy drag queen, can’t possibly judge them. They tell me all sorts of things: about the time they slept with their cousin, or peed themselves in the changing room in Arnotts, or when another girl fingered them on a school trip to Kenmare.

You learn a lot in drag.

A
S THE NEW MILLENNIUM PROGRESSED
, Panti continued to pay my bills. Countless thousands of times I sat in front of a mirror and spent the next two hours painting a new larger-than-life face onto my ordinary workaday one. And in dressing rooms and toilets, tents and hotel rooms, I wriggled into tights, squeezed into corsets, clambered into shoes and ducked into wigs before tottering onto stages and dance floors, catwalks and sets. I did shows at clubs, gay bars, festivals and Gay Prides up and down the country. I promoted my own club nights and collaborated with other queens and promoters. I wrote agony-aunt columns, emceed fashion shows, hosted awards shows, did bit parts in TV shows and small movies, and I annually hosted the Alternative Miss Ireland and Dublin Pride. I broke heels and bruised ribs and sweated and worked, and it was enjoyable for a long time.

But as I moved through my thirties I was getting bored. I started to feel I needed to do other things, push myself. I was beginning to be frustrated that my ‘career’ – such as it chaotically was, if you could call it a ‘career’ at all – was stalled at this level. Noisy shows in noisy bars, the add-on entertainment. I knew I was capable of more than fun lip-syncs and a few gags. I wanted to say more, do more, communicate more, but I couldn’t, hemmed in as I was by nightclub stages, twenty-minute sets, and the demands of Saturday-night revellers. Now, don’t get me wrong! I love doing my club act. I can still lose myself in my favourite lip-syncs and there’s nothing like the boisterous, electric energy of a late-night crowd and boozed-up hecklers, but I wanted to be able to do other things
too
. Subtler things, more nuanced things. I felt I was butting up against the outer limits of what was possible where I was, and I would have to move sideways first if I was to move on.

I already had a sense of where I wanted to go – I wanted to tell stories. My stories. I would be a storyteller, a drag
seanchaí
. It was an element of my club act anyway – stand-up, monologue – and years of emceeing events and making speeches at Prides and Alternative Miss Irelands had given me some kind of template. I had already done a small experiment in a fully spoken word show by writing an ‘illustrated performance lecture’ about the history of drag (which itself grew out of the opening monologues I used to do at Gristle, the early-evening
cabaret before our H.A.M. club), which I performed a couple of times. It wasn’t until I met Phillip McMahon, though, that Panti moved into the theatre.

Phillip is a theatre guy – he grew up in Dublin Youth Theatre and did a stint as an actor before becoming a playwright and one half of the production company
thisispopbaby
– but I met him through the clubbing scene. By then he already had a couple of plays under his belt and was emerging as one of a new breed of Irish playwrights influenced by club culture. So Phillip, equally at home in the theatre or a festival tent with a bunch of drag queens, wasn’t frightened off by a glitter-and-grease-painted queen with a big mouth. Phillip thought,
Let’s put her in a theatre
. He suggested we make a small show for the Dublin International Gay Theatre Festival: I would write it, he would direct it, and his production partner Jenny would produce it.

That first show was really an experiment. We would try some things, see what worked, what didn’t, see how Panti best translated to the very different atmosphere of the theatre.
In These Shoes
, based around the women who had supposedly influenced Panti, was delivered in the form of a drag-school lesson and it ran at the tiny New Theatre in Temple Bar for a week. It was a small, gag-heavy, light show but it found an audience, was well received, and we ended up piling into a van and taking a road trip to Galway to do it there too.