Woman in the Making: Panti's Memoir (26 page)

I made my way around to the front of the theatre to meet Phillip and Ian, who said it was great, but that’s what friends do, and as we waited for a cab on the pavement in front of the theatre some of the audience approached me to say nice things, but that’s what people do. Then the cab pulled up, I jumped inside and went back to
Pantibar and threw myself into the show, spinning and sweating and telling silly stories for a lively Saturday-night bar crowd.

A few hours later in the wee hours of Sunday morning I got home, and while winding down before bed I turned on the computer and on Facebook I saw that someone had already posted a fuzzy video of my speech, filmed on a phone from the auditorium. The picture quality was poor, the sound was bad and the beginning of the speech was missing, yet it had already had a few hundred views, and by the time I woke up it had had a few thousand. I headed into town – it was the day of the protest against RTÉ’s payout – and people mentioned it to me. They’d seen the fuzzy video online already. My friends joked about which of them had been the ‘gay friend’ on the train in the speech. (It was Veda.) Panti was working in the bar in the early evening, playing records, and when I checked the video on my phone a couple of times, the views were still going up. By the time they were reaching seven or eight thousand I was amazed but beginning to think we might have missed our chance to put up our own better-quality video. After all, surely there weren’t many more than eight thousand people who’d want to watch it.

Conor called. He knew there was a video up already and he and Caroline had been trying to get theirs up all afternoon but there was a problem with the video shot by the second camera, and in the end, late on Sunday
evening they put up a single-camera clip. It was a simply shot video of a drag queen giving a serious ten-minute speech about homophobia, and ten minutes is an eternity in YouTube terms. No one was going to watch it. And whoever the weird eight thousand people were who’d already watched the fuzzy version, well, they’d already seen it anyway. I was glad it was up online because I was happy with what I’d said and how I’d said it but, as far as I was concerned, that was the end of that.

But it was far from the end of that. It was only the beginning. The video immediately started racking up thousands of views and in the days that followed it spread like wildfire. It was being posted to blogs and Facebook pages all around the world, and when celebrities like Stephen Fry, Graham Norton, RuPaul and Martina Navratilova (Martina Navratilova!) tweeted it and said lovely things about it to their millions of followers, it spread even faster. I started getting emails from the UK, the US and Australia, and then it was picked up by the mainstream media. I started hearing clips of it coming from radios in taxis and my TV, and it was broadcast on stations as far away as France and Canada.

People were talking about it as a great oration, and the respected
Irish Times
critic and columnist Fintan O’Toole went so far as to say it was ‘the most eloquent Irish speech since Daniel O’Connell was in his prime’. (I heard that Fintan was at my show some months later at the Galway International Arts Festival: having been assaulted by the
kind of salacious stories I tell in my shows, he may now be regretting his words.) And the media storm that I had thought couldn’t get any bigger exploded into a full-scale hurricane. Suddenly I was the hottest property in media, and every newspaper, every radio programme and every TV show wanted to talk to me.

And talk to them I did, because every interview was helping me to make noise and by now I was making a bloody racket. Foreign media started to come looking for me. I did satellite interviews with the BBC and Channel 4, I took part in a debate on BBC World, I did TV and print interviews for CNN, Reuters, the
Washington Post
, and one evening while I was eating cereal for dinner the phone rang and a voice said, ‘Hi, this is Maureen Dowd from
The New York Times
,’ and the racket just got louder.

The Archbishop of Dublin denounced homophobia and practically declared himself to be on ‘Team Panti’. Neil Tennant called because the Pet Shop Boys had put the speech to music and made a video to go with it. Whole TV shows were devoted to debating homophobia and one prime-time politics show played the entire ten-minute speech before a panel debated the scandal. The solicitor who was acting for Iona and Waters appeared on that show, looking rattled, and Andrew was aghast, thinking it unseemly for a solicitor to discuss his clients’ ongoing cases in public. The whole affair was debated in the Senate and raised in the European Parliament, and one bizarre afternoon I went out to RTÉ to be interviewed by Miriam
O’Callaghan (the ‘nice TV lady’ of the speech). After the recording we stood in the middle of the RTÉ newsroom, surrounded by the familiar faces of TV news reporters, and we all watched the live stream of the Dáil debate on ‘Pantigate’ (as it was now being called) on the newsroom television screens, as TDs denounced RTÉ, bandied my and Panti’s names about, and demanded answers from the minister. It was a slightly surreal experience.

It was also the first real inkling I got of how the perception of me had changed. I had been out to RTÉ many times before and no one would pay me a blind bit of notice, but this time was different. I was at the centre of a media storm, a storm that RTÉ was part of, and I had gained a new kind of celebrity. People came over to me and many of them wanted to let me know they supported me. The director of radio made a point to come down and meet me, and the receptionist hadn’t needed to ask me my name.

People started to stop me in the street. A middle-aged ‘regular Dub’ with a beer belly and a soccer jersey stopped me as I passed to shake my hand and tell me about his lesbian daughter, and while he was doing so, another man came up and asked if he could take a picture. An old lady at the milk fridge in Tesco turned to me and told me that ‘that shower’ didn’t represent her. A man with two kids on Parnell Square pointed at me and said to his kids, ‘That’s boy Panti.’ Everywhere I went people wanted to talk to me, shake my hand and
say, ‘Fair play to ya.’ A country mother came into the bar in a nice floral dress, looked around, walked up to me and said, ‘I have a gay son – he’s in Australia now – and I wanted to thank you. Can I give you a hug?’ She hugged me and walked back out.

I spoke to my parents, who’d watched the speech and were very proud. They’d starting hearing from relatives and old friends who said nice things. People don’t usually say nice things to my parents about their drag-queen son – and only a few days earlier my mother had been upset because she couldn’t ‘read the paper without seeing incorrect things about my son’.

Then people were shouting across the street that they were ‘Team Panti’ and signs were appearing in shop windows. There were T-shirts and bumper stickers and graffiti, and eventually we started selling T-shirts in the bar with the money going to the gay youth group. Orders flooded in from all over the world. A group of students ‘infiltrated’ the studio audience of a TV show, and every time the camera cut to the audience you’d see ‘Team Panti’ T-shirts. Being on ‘Team Panti’ became a way to say what kind of Ireland you wanted. It became a way to protest against an Ireland we had thought we had left behind but which had reared its ugly head again – a censorious, interfering, repressed, backward-looking Ireland. Being on ‘Team Panti’ was a way of saying you rejected the kind of Ireland that Iona
et al
were trying to drag us back to.

Of
course, I was well aware that in many ways it had little or nothing to do with me. I mean, there would never have been shop-window mannequins dressed in ‘Team Rory’ T-shirts. There would never have been bumper stickers or restaurant receipts with ‘Team Rory’ printed on them, because Rory is a real person with an ordinary person’s baggage. Rory has ex-boyfriends who are pissed off with him and a mother whose birthday he never remembers. But Panti has none of the messy baggage associated with being human. Panti doesn’t poop. So it was easy for people to turn her into a symbol, an avatar. An avatar for the kind of Ireland they wanted. The kind of Ireland that would choose a drag queen for a kind of figurehead.

As the video kept spreading I was fielding more and more calls from around the world, and the emails kept arriving. And the letters and the cards and the flowers. And they just kept on coming. Thousands of them. And they were from all over. From Dublin and Galway and Letterkenny and Mullingar, and from Frankfurt and Melbourne and Buenos Aires and Chicago. They were from twelve-year-old girls and fifty-year-old bus drivers, from lesbians in Denmark, grandmothers in Australia and straight guys in Scotland. From all kinds of people. Some were from gay people writing to thank me for articulating what they felt, and others from their parents or brothers or sisters or friends, but many were writing to tell me their stories because, in a way that
I could never have imagined, all these different people related in some way to what I had said. Gay people, straight people, women, people in wheelchairs, fat kids in school, teenagers with Asperger’s, and even a ginger-haired guy in London who was fed up having to check himself for being ginger! I even got a card that had fifty euro inside and a note that simply said, ‘for the wig fund’. To get them and read them (or as many as I could) was wonderful and inspiring and occasionally devastating.

And I was standing in the middle of all this, tired and stunned, trying to work out exactly what the hell had just happened. Trying to remember how all of this had even started and how this thing, which had begun so worryingly and so distressingly, had become so bizarre and exhilarating. And fun.

Why the video had spread so far and wide, why so many people had watched it, still confounds me. After all, it’s not exactly ‘click-bait’ material. It’s not a twenty-second clip of a puppy falling off a sofa or a drunk guy trying to get his pants on – the kind of thing you see passed around online and think it might give you a quick giggle, the kind of thing that can rack up millions of views because it takes nothing to watch fifteen seconds of a kitten getting stuck in a cereal box. It’s a ten-minute speech. About
homophobia
. Who the hell wants to watch that?

Of course I know from the response it got that it has a lot to do with what I said, and how I said it, and how
many people related to it in some way. But there were other factors. That it was Panti on screen played a big role. Many fewer people would have clicked on a ten-minute speech that they could see was delivered by a guy in a shirt. No matter what you think of drag queens, we get your attention. That it was a glamorous, brightly lit, blonde-haired queen standing in front of four handsome actors, who were in the shadows dressed as downtrodden workers, played a role. The visual was important. Not only was it visually interesting, but it also added to what I said. It underscored what I said. And that it was titled a ‘Noble Call’ played a role. It’s an evocative phrase and sets the video up to be taken seriously. It gives it a kind of gravitas before you’ve even clicked ‘play’. All these small, unplanned, coincidental factors played a part in turning a ten-minute oration on the gay experience by a drag queen with badly brushed hair into a whole that was much greater than its constituent parts.

And although the white-hot heat of attention that followed the speech has died down, the effect of those ten minutes and the scandal that prompted it lingers.

It changed how people see me. For my entire career I have struggled against people’s limited perception of drag queens, of what they are and can be, but that speech made people take me seriously. I wasn’t just a clown in a dress, I was an ‘orator’. I was ‘
controversial
drag queen Panti Bliss’. I was somebody not to be taken lightly. If anything, people take me
too
seriously now!
They want me to be the perfect gay all the time, as if I represent every gay. They want me to be inspiring, when previously the only thing I ever inspired anyone to do was be tested for an STI! Sometimes people take everything I say so seriously that they are primed to be offended. I recently upset the Bisexual Network of Ireland by making a joke about bisexuals. It was a silly joke but they were hurt because
Panti
had said it. Panti, the inspiring LGBT rights warrior.

‘Pantigate’ gave me a level of recognition, a kind of fame, I hadn’t had previously. Before Pantigate I was well known to the gay community, to clubbers, theatre types, media types, but almost overnight Panti became a household name. Now tabloids call wanting to know what an inspiring drag queen thinks of everything from Miley Cyrus to the Taoiseach’s performance. Gay Byrne wants to hear my thoughts on
The Meaning of Life
. People on the kinds of radio programmes my mother listens to don’t bother explaining who I am any more: they casually use my name and assume listeners know who I am.

And it pushed Rory into a spotlight I never wanted and am not entirely comfortable with. One of the great things about being a drag queen is being able to have a public persona entirely separate from the private one, and that suits me. However, in order to fight my corner during the whole débâcle, I needed to put Rory to the barricades too. I know that very quickly people will
forget who Rory is and what I look like, and that will suit me fine, but in the aftermath of Pantigate it was an adjustment, and it’s still odd to be standing at the hot deli counter paying for a jumbo sausage roll when a woman with a basket full of pumpkin seeds and rice crackers comes up to tell me how inspiring I am.

It’s just weird. The audiences that come to my shows have changed, too, and now I see people who would never previously have come to watch a drag queen in the theatre. When I was writing my last show I found myself being affected by people’s new expectations of me. I’d write a salacious joke, then find myself thinking, Panti can’t say that! I had to make a conscious decision to go ahead and do the joke. To be who I’ve always been. Part of the appeal of drag, a large part of the reason I was drawn to it, is its inherently transgressive nature. Its discombobulating nature. Its underground, outsider origins.