Woman in the Making: Panti's Memoir (6 page)

All along the gays had been hiding right under my nose but I just hadn’t known where to look. How many times had I passed this club, Hooray Henry’s, tucked into the corner of the Powerscourt Townhouse Centre, not knowing that at night it was full of exuberant, drunk gays with faded denims, frosted tips and Hi-NRG 12 inches?

And that night, while Hazell Dean continued ‘Searchin’ (Lookin’ For Love)’, an older hairdresser with bleached hair gave up the search and settled on awkward sex with me.

Pre-decriminalisation, Irish gays existed in a shadowy twilight world of their own devising. The laws that criminalised sex between men weren’t generally enforced – there weren’t gangs of gardaí sweeping through Bewley’s on a Saturday afternoon throwing queens and half-finished éclairs into police vans – but the legal and social uncertainty pushed the gay community underground, after dark and behind closed doors.

Today the lines between the gay and straight worlds have blurred. Their edges have bled into each other. Gok Wan is in your mother’s living room, hen parties are in the local gay bar, rainbow-flag-draped leather queens shimmy down O’Connell Street every June and, according to the internet, Pat Butcher is going out with Hyacinth Bouquet.

But in the Dublin of 1986, becoming an
actively gay
gay, a proper cast-iron gay, a sexually active gay with purposeful erections and Grace Jones, you had to turn your back on the heterosexual daytime world you’d known until now and agree to enter a new underground gay world, which somehow managed to exist hidden in plain sight of the everyday world that surrounded it – an everyday world that suddenly seemed to me to be dull and dreary and grey. Like Harry Potter’s first letter from Hogwarts, that night in Hooray Henry’s revealed to me a previously secret world. I was wide-eyed Harry Poofter, discovering the hidden magical world of Witchcraft and Faggotry, while only feet away the straight muggles caught the night bus home to their grey muggle lives, unaware that in the basements below their feet the gays were building a new world out of disco and poppers.

And I
loved
it.

My underground den of iniquity of choice was Minsky’s. I would spend the evening with my art-school flatmates in Dún Laoghaire, then catch the last bus into town, nervous, excited, taut like a bow string. Tucked off salubrious St Stephen’s Green, Minsky’s was the ground floor and basement of a large Georgian townhouse in an imposing terrace that had long ago been converted into the offices of dentists and accountants. Up the steps and behind the large Georgian door, a riotous queen in a makeshift cloakroom under the grand staircase would take your money and your coat, before you were
ushered through to the ground-floor bar with a wave of a decidedly unashamed, defiantly limp wrist. Inside was a rather grand Georgian parlour with moulded ceilings, expensively upholstered furniture, side tables, carpet and gilt frames, while two leather queens and Anne Doyle propped up the bar. Gays of every hue stood around chatting and good-naturedly slagging each other, checking out the new arrivals while drinking glasses of wine or Campari and orange.

Not a beer or a spirit in sight: before the licensing laws were changed in the early nineties, Dublin’s nightclubs were technically ‘restaurants’. That meant that in order to stay within the law, late-night drinking and dancing establishments had to serve food – which usually meant that at one a.m. a desultory (and possibly dangerous) chicken curry would be brought out, or a few baskets of chips and cocktail sausages passed around. It also meant that they could serve only wine – so even the butchest, moustachioed, denim and plaid-covered ‘clone’ would be daintily sipping a nice sweet Riesling or a dry sherry.

But the real action was downstairs.

A narrow staircase led to a small, dark basement where swirling lights, mirrors and a hard-working smoke machine made a compact, loud dance floor seem bigger than it was. And on that dance floor men would be
dancing
. And I mean
proper
dancing. Feeling the rhythm, the beat, the emotional arc of the music and allowing their bodies to move in response to it. You know … actual
dancing
.

In 1986, straight Irish men didn’t dance. Oh, sure, at weddings the men would eventually be so polluted drunk that they’d stumble and flail around to ‘Eye Of The Tiger’. And, yes, teenage boys with bird’s-nest hair would close their eyes and nod their heads to The Cure, and working-class boys with denim jackets would tap cigarette ash and jerk a foot in time to Thin Lizzy, but they didn’t actually dance. Before the arrival of ecstasy and dance music, straight Irish guys didn’t dance for fear of looking gay. Expressing yourself in any way was considered suspect and gay, and even the only two legitimate forms of artistic expression allowed to straight men – writing and acting – were allowed only if combined with a prodigious drink problem and syphilis. But in Minsky’s the men danced. They twirled and slid and shuffled and swayed and dipped and shimmied and popped and got down. They spread their arms and spun each other, clapped and did silly synchronised moves, laughed and whooped and rushed onto the floor to demand ‘How Will I Know’ by that gorgeous Whitney Houston girl.

And in Minsky’s it was perfectly OK to like that song by the sweet, fresh-faced Whitney Houston. Outside it was not OK to like Whitney Houston. Outside, Irish muggle boys were only allowed to like U2 and Hothouse Flowers and AC/DC and Madness, and maybe a
little
David Bowie because he got a pass on the gay stuff because of all the drugs but, still, you can’t like Bowie
too much ’cos it’d be poncy. While the rest of Europe was embracing synthesisers and New Romantics and makeup and big hair and Bronski Beat and even Madonna, Dublin remained suspicious of all that. Oh, sure, there were pockets of New Romantics hanging around town, but for the most part Dublin remained stubbornly a hippie rock town where music journalists had long curly hair and testicles. But behind the Georgian door of Minsky’s (and the handful of other gay clubs) we didn’t give a crap about U2 or Status Quo. Rock music represented everything that excluded us. Every uncomfortable teenage disco. Every suspicion that I wasn’t ‘regular’ enough, every uncomfortable silence when I’d been asked if I’d seen ‘the match’ last night. On the dance floor of Minsky’s we danced and sweated and took poppers to ‘Diana’, Eurythmics, Ashford & Simpson, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Kool & The Gang, Chaka Khan, Deniece Williams, and Pointer Sisters special imports.

There was sex, too, of course. If you weren’t dancing you were cruising – leaning oh-so-casually against the wall, cradling your tepid glass, your eyes smarting from cigarette smoke and Giorgio For Men, scanning the room with studied nonchalance, rigorously avoiding eye contact with the creepy old fella to the left (you didn’t want to encourage him) while hoping (in vain) that the hot dark-haired guy in the white denim jacket, who, someone once told you, was a ‘part-time’ model, might notice you and give you the return glance that let
you know you were in with a shot. If you were lucky you might catch the eye of some guy with a moustache and a bedsit on the South Circular Road, but even if he lived at home with his mammy or his wife you could always go to the ladies’ toilet for a quick fumble and a clumsy snog. There wasn’t much call for a ladies’ toilet in Minsky’s so an enterprising queen had usually removed the light bulb.

Past the toilets was the door out to a back laneway, which, in those days before the smoking ban, was used in the summer months for cruising and making out – to everyone’s mischievous delight, because the lane was overlooked by the offices of Opus Dei.

Excitingly, here in the gay demi-monde, all the things that marked me out as weird or different in the regular straight world didn’t matter at all. In fact, everything that was ‘wrong’ about me out there wasn’t just OK here in Minsky’s, it was ‘right’ – it just made me an even better gay. Knowing all the words to ‘Wham! Rap’ didn’t make me a poncy faggot, it made me a fun faggot! Having a strong opinion on the Madonna vs Cyndi Lauper debate wasn’t suspiciously gay, it was
de rigueur
. (The gays even used French in casual conversation!) No one in Minsky’s was ever going to ask me whether I’d seen the match last night, and if they did I’d have gone looking for Derry the owner to tell him I thought maybe one of the Opus Dei people was in on a spying mission. Of course the gays had – and still have – their own hang-ups
about masculinity, but they mostly concern whether or not they want to sleep with you or introduce you to their parents, and on the dance floor at Minsky’s I was free to be me without fear or favour.

The community I had discovered under the mirrorball was a much more democratic society than the daytime world outside. Or, at least, the hierarchies the gays had developed were entirely different from those outside. They were custom-made – of the gays, by the gays, for the gays, one ‘gaytion’ under Olivia Newton-John. Outside, people were socially sorted by seemingly random attributes. Being good at sports, especially field sports, conferred sometimes stratospheric status on men in the regular world, even though it seemed unlikely that an ability to play football well was ever going to save a baby from a burning skyscraper. Owning particular kinds of cars was respected. I am always terrified that one day I will witness a horrible crime and see the perpetrator drive off in the getaway car. When the police ask me what kind of car it was, all I’ll be able to mumble is that it was the same colour as those cute shorts I got in Sitges three years ago. In the heterosexual world, on the other side of Minsky’s Georgian door, being Bono was something, whereas on the homosexual side of Minsky’s door the only member of U2 who even came
close
to mattering was Larry, the hot one.

Being hot counted for a lot. If you were hot, no one cared whether you drove a Ferrari or cycled a bicycle – a
Ferrari wasn’t going to fuck you all night long, then ask you for its bus fare home in the morning. The scene had its hot stars – the sexy moustachioed ‘clone’ or the snake-hipped blond ‘twink’ – but all gay life was represented and the democracy of hotness, combined with the small scene, meant that the social demarcations that existed outside were blurred or erased altogether. Barristers hung out with electricians, who dated professors, who fucked taxi drivers, who had affairs with rent boys, who lent money to students, who woke up with an architect, who caught his farmer in the ladies’ toilet with that solicitor who once helped him out for free when he had that bother with the TV licence when he was a poor student. That social free-for-all is one of the great joys of a gay scene. Walk into any straight bar in any city and the patrons will all be roughly the same: roughly the same age, roughly the same social background, with roughly the same accent and roughly the same interests. In a gay bar, Darndale and Dalkey are chewing the face off each other and you can get legal advice or a plumber in the ladies’ toilet.

I met Gerry and Dennis in Minsky’s. They were a handsome couple, Gerry a TV writer and Dennis an architect, and I fancied both of them. They were good to me, and we would drive out to the edge of the city to see the motorways being built – I thought it was the height of sophistication. Gerry wrote for the hottest show on TV at the time.
Nighthawks
was ground-breaking and
hugely popular, part chat show, part soap opera, part sketch show, and when I first started doing drag, Gerry wrote a series of sketches about Sean the Transvestite Farmer. I would get into drag in the RTÉ studios and then we would drive out to a large farm near Maynooth.

We didn’t want to spook the farmer who owned the place so we would film on days when he was at the mart. Only his confused-looking sons would be there when we spilled out of the car to film in sequins and blond curls. The sketches involved me prancing through fields of sheep lip-syncing to Dusty Springfield’s ‘You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me’ in gold lamé, or strolling through giant sheds full of thousands of gobble-gobbling turkeys with a wistful look in my eye, or polishing the exhaust of my tractor in gold wellington boots, while a voiceover (by the recognisable voice of RTÉ’s then agricultural reporter) would dully intone about the effects of European agricultural policy on farmers like Sean. They weren’t ever going to win any comedy awards but they were good, stupid fun.

Years later, when I returned to Dublin from Japan in the mid-nineties, one of the first things I did was attend Gerry’s funeral. It was a nice day and a fitting service for a fun, kind, smart guy like Gerry, but his timing was terrible. Gerry was one of the last people I knew who died before HIV treatments started to improve.

B
ACK IN ART SCHOOL
I drew and painted and printed, but mostly I just hung out. I lived with friends in grim, mouldy basement flats and drank cheap booze, and when I had to, I made mediocre work. In the summers I would go to France, work on a maize farm (where I had sex in a tent with a girl for the first time, a loud and determined older girl from Leeds, while my friend Liam had sex with her friend in the tent next door) and sell ice creams on the beach.

My straight college friends were art students and therefore thrilled to have a gay friend until they remembered how annoying I was. Occasionally they would come with me to Minsky’s, enjoying their dips into this cologne-drenched gay secret society. And I became good friends with Niall, the school’s other gay, who, it turned out, had an older boyfriend who managed an arty gay nightclub in town called Sides.

Sides was the difference between a ‘niteclub’ and
clubbing
. Whereas Minsky’s was the gay cousin of Dublin’s Leeson Street establishments – local, fun, boozy, upholstered, the Nolan Sisters – Sides was clubbing in the new mould: house music, strobe lights, big sound system, stripped-back dance floor and new drugs, the descendant of Studio 54 and The Blitz. Niall would spend endless hours designing and making intricate fliers for glitter and staple-gun parties like the ‘Andy Warhol Obituary Party’ where our friend Wendy did cookery demonstrations that involved shoving things into a microwave and seeing if they exploded. People dressed up – they made costumes and poured paint on themselves, boys wore makeup and put glue in their hair, and one night there was a silly drag party called the Alternative Miss Ireland. It helped to be beautiful at Sides (it helps to be beautiful everywhere) but at Sides for the first time I saw that people could also
make
themselves beautiful. And if they couldn’t quite achieve beauty, well, they could certainly achieve
interesting
–