Woman in the Making: Panti's Memoir (8 page)

W
E ARRIVED WITH NO EXPECTATIONS
, less money and not a single word of Japanese (beyond the shaky ability to count to ten we’d learned on the boat from Shanghai). It was like walking into a world specifically designed to be entirely alien. We had left behind a provincial, recession-battered country that looked determinedly backwards, where the Pope’s visit in 1979 was still regarded as some kind of national high point, where a young person’s ambition extended no further than the ferry to London, where sex between men was a criminal offence, divorce was unavailable, the sale of condoms required a doctor’s prescription, you couldn’t buy a beer in a nightclub, pregnant girls went away for a few months and came back without babies and priests could be famous just for being priests. And suddenly we were standing in the centre of a gleaming, futuristic, forward-looking, cash-rich, crowded, humid
megalopolis with moving pavements, where the toilets wiped your ass for you, department stores sold single, huge polished apples in fancy presentation boxes, and we had absolutely no responsibilities and only one aim:
to have a good time
.

We found a single room in a
gaijin
house (a ‘foreigner’ house) with five or six other young foreigners, all of whom were teaching English or hoping to. A creaking, traditional Japanese building with an outside toilet, it was squeezed precariously between newer ones on a commercial street. Our room, like the others, had a tiny sink, a single gas ring, a wardrobe, traditional
tatami
-mat flooring and, like a tired sitcom gag, a window that faced onto the neighbouring wall inches away. There was no air-conditioning and, in the intense summer humidity, I would soak a sheet in the tiny sink and sit on the floor wrapped in it, like a wet ghost.

I found a job fairly quickly, teaching English for a large chain of schools through which I managed to wangle a work visa, but Helen had trouble: getting a visa was more complicated if you weren’t a graduate, and she had dropped out of college. Eventually she took a job in a small town in the countryside and became my visiting country cousin for a year before she became a student herself, returned to Tokyo, and we moved into a decent apartment with our own toilet and air-conditioning.

The chain of English-language schools I worked for was a weird, vaguely cultish enterprise called Bi-Lingual,
owned by Ms Minami, a middle-aged Japanese woman who styled herself as a cross between Kate Bush and a Victorian doll. Ms Minami was well known in Japan, where successful businesswomen were a novelty, and she affected a public image of soft-focus girlish eccentricity. Her bizarre Baby Jane aesthetic was half-heartedly translated into the schools, which, although mostly situated in business districts beside railway stations or in nondescript office buildings, were all candy-striped wallpaper, lace trimmings, pink plastic tables and reproduction ‘period’ furniture. Even the school’s logo was a giant pink bow. It was a school designed by a child who’d eaten too much candyfloss at Disneyland.

But boring stuff, like work and visas (and food and sleep), was just an annoying distraction from my deadly serious mission to have fun. I quickly discovered and made a second home of Tokyo’s infamous gay district, Ni-chōme, a small warren of narrow streets crammed with tiny bars, a couple of which catered specifically to foreigners and the Japanese guys who liked them. For the first (but not the last) time in my life I was a fetish! I fell home drunk every morning and fell in love every night. I hoovered up dark-eyed, soft-lipped Japanese boys and marvelled at their spiky pubic hair. I climbed into bed with Korean waiters and woke up on futons with Israeli dancers, Canadian writers and a French hairdresser. A handsome big-dicked photographer took me back to his
stylish apartment and, to my mortification, during the night I drunkenly pissed his bed. I was young, fun and hungry for life, running around with my tongue out, like a puppy in a ball pen.

The Japanese have a very relaxed, uncomplicated attitude to sex – including gay sex – unencumbered by prudery or guilt. However, social conventions are very strong and ‘alternative’ lifestyles are frowned upon, so, while gay sex might not be a big deal in itself, living a gay life and rejecting the expected path of a steady job with a wife and two kids is a very big deal indeed. So, although the denizens of Ni-chōme were generally looked upon with a kind of indulgent amusement, they were, nevertheless, considered misfits, which tended to attract kindred spirits.

New Sazae was a small, dingy, one-room bar, bathed in the red glow of coloured light-bulbs up a flight of narrow stairs on the second floor of a small grey building. It wasn’t a gay bar so much as a
misfit
bar, whose clientele of punks, gangsters, artists, junkies, transvestites, nuts, prostitutes and runaways felt comfortable among its tatty stools and graffiti-scrawled walls, tucked away among the gays of Ni-chōme. It soon became my regular haunt for drinking bottles of beer and learning slang from ageing hair-oiled gangsters or making a fool of myself over some pretty tattooed rock-a-billy with a bored girlfriend. And overseeing this collection of friendly weirdoes and interesting oddballs was a sweet, skinny,
older leather queen, who knew everyone by name and treated everyone, whether prostitute or businessman, with the same easy maternal familiarity.

It was here, among the beer and the drugs and the stories, that I found a family of sorts. Tall, handsome, floppy-haired misfit Masa showed me how to make Japanese food and eventually ended up marrying my friend Sandy, a blonde English girl from the
gaijin
house. Crinkle-eyed, shuffling, long-haired misfit Kazua was never without his camera and always smiley-stoned. And sweet, funny misfit Hiroko, with her fringe always in her eyes, was already considered a dubious spinster in her late twenties. We’d stay up all night dancing and taking speed, then she’d potter off to her dull office job where her shamelessly unconventional lifestyle was cause for suspicion and gossip. Hiroko refused to bend to other people’s expectations.

There are, however, no expectations to bend to if you’re a gay twenty-two-year-old foreigner in Tokyo. I was free to be whomever and
whatever
I wanted to be. And it turned out that what I wanted to be was Panti.

In the spring of 1992 I met Angelo in a well-known bar popular with foreigners. A compact, doe-eyed Italian-American from Atlanta, he was on his first visit to Ni-chōme, having only recently arrived in Japan, and we became friends immediately, bonding over a shared sense of humour and similar taste in movies and fellas. It also turned out we had a shared interest in drag.

Angelo was a much more experienced queen than I. He had started doing drag in Atlanta, a city with a long and rich drag tradition, where his glamorous, big-haired, country-flavoured character Lurleen (all gingham check, frosted lipstick and saucy flirtations) hosted parties and lip-synced country ballads and quirky pop tracks. He was friendly with a scene of ambitious young American queens, who were then beginning to ride a new drag wave off the back of the club-kid phenomenon – queens like Lady Bunny, and another young queen who was then just about to cross over into the mainstream: RuPaul.

When I went to Tokyo I had no intention at all of doing drag, and assumed my brief, less-than-illustrious career as a badly painted mess was behind me. However, when Hallowe’en came around Angelo and I cobbled together a couple of silly nuns’ outfits, Helen dressed up as a priest, and the three of us spent a drunken night in a men-only bar. It was a fun night and it would perhaps have finished there, except that a club promoter we knew bumped into us and suggested we do a show at his next party – and, as we have already learned, I’m easily led.

With some difficulty in petite-sized Japan, we managed to pull some kind of look together (mine decidedly less polished than Lurleen’s), rehearsed a simple routine to an Abba number and turned up at the club with the track on a C60 cassette tape. Thinking I’d make a fresh start from the car crash art-drag I’d done in Dublin, I decided I needed a new drag name and, after spending
no time at all thinking about it, chose ‘Latitia’ after a pet sheep we’d had when we were kids. So, Lurleen and Latitia did their first gig. Thanks, no doubt, to generous amounts of alcohol and ecstasy, people seemed to enjoy it and we were asked back. Before long we were doing small shows regularly in a few different clubs and having a blast. Helen made us matching outfits out of Hello Kitty fabric and we cobbled together backing tracks on a clunky old boom box. We practised dance routines in our little apartment, customised cheap accessories, learned the words to
The Brady Bunch
songs and spent the little we earned on taxis and getting high.

However, it soon became apparent that the names Lurleen and Latitia weren’t working for us. Japanese people have great difficulty with the English letters
l
and
r
, finding them hard to pronounce or even differentiate between, so no one could remember our bloody names! We quickly decided we needed to come up with a ‘group’ name. Our
shtick
, our USP, was that we were foreign drag queens, so we decided we should pick a name that was
English but at the same time easy for Japanese people to understand and remember.

We also wanted something that sounded ‘cutesy’ to appeal to the
manga
aesthetic so popular in Japanese youth culture and among the club-kids. The name we came up with was CandiPanti. It seemed to fit all the requirements, plus ‘candy’ and ‘panty’ were words that the Japanese already used, having adopted them from English. Our intention was that CandiPanti would be our group name but that we would still be individually called Lurleen and Latitia. However, almost immediately people started to call Lurleen ‘Candi’ and me ‘Panti’. It became a nickname that stuck until eventually even I forgot I’d ever been called anything else.

As for the surname ‘Bliss’? One night after a gig, the club wanted me to fill out a payment form, which had a space for a family name. Until that moment, like Cher, I had never given a single thought to a surname so I put down the first thing that came into my head: Bliss. And for a short time thereafter I was ‘Latitia Bliss’, before poor old Latitia got entirely lost along the way and was usurped by a youthful Panti. (Clearly Latitia had never seen
All About Eve
.)

Panti isn’t a name I would have chosen deliberately – when people hear it for the first time, they think I chose ‘knickers’ as a stage name and imagine all sorts about me and my show. And sometimes in ‘polite company’, especially on TV or radio, I hear a momentary awkwardness around my name, as if it might be salacious. When I first came back from Japan and it seemed like it might be a problem I started to use ‘Pandora “Panti” Bliss’, to give the false impression that Panti was short for Pandora, which worked to a large extent. I am still often referred to in that way and I don’t disabuse anyone of the notion. I almost believe it myself at this stage. But, of course, it’s almost impossible to shake a nickname
and, anyway, in truth it’s not a nickname any more and hasn’t been for a long time. It’s my name. I’ve embraced it. And, on the bright side, people don’t forget it!

In those prehistoric early nineties, before YouTube and
RuPaul’s Drag Race
, the only way to learn basic drag skills was through trial and error and, hopefully, from more experienced queens who were willing to give you the benefit of that experience. In the drag world it’s an informal system known as ‘drag mothers’ where older queens pass on the tricks and secrets of the trade to favoured younger
gurls
. It’s a kind of apprenticeship, and a young queen without a drag mother to teach her and help her up the drag-scene ladder in platform heels is unlikely to get far. Nowadays, many of the transformative secrets of the drag queen, from make up to hip padding, can be gleaned from the thousands of instructional YouTube videos on the subject but even today nothing beats a word of advice from a drag mother or simply being able to watch her get ready.

In Dublin I had fumbled through entirely on my own. I had never even
seen
an actual drag show. As a kid I had occasionally watched Danny La Rue on
The Royal Variety Performance
, and I was aware of Mr Pussy, whom I’d once seen interviewed on the telly, but I’d never met a professional drag queen or been to a show. Unlike neighbouring Britain, with its working-men’s clubs and ‘end-of-the-pier’
entertainment, Ireland didn’t have a popular drag tradition. My interest in drag as an entertainment form was simply because it seemed to me to be the logical result of the combination of the kinds of things that interested me: dressing up, making things, performing, camp movies, extravagant costumes. I just wanted to be one of the glove-wearing, cinch-waisted glamorous women who flounced petulantly across my Sunday-afternoon TV or poured from my subconscious onto my schoolbooks because, although they often looked bored, they never looked boring.

So, doing drag with Lurleen was a fun new revelation to me. I never considered her to be a drag
mother
– after all, she was only a couple of years older than me and thought of drag as a fun sideline rather than a career – but I did think of her as a drag ‘older sister’ and I learned a lot of the basics from her, like what kind of foundation or stockings to wear, or how to stack multiple pairs of false eyelashes. She also strongly influenced my early drag aesthetic of frosted eye shadow, big country-girl hair and short skirts, and through her I was exposed to a high-gloss, nightclub-based American drag style, which was very different from the English ‘cock in a frock’, or the panto dame we were more familiar with at home.

But the biggest thing I learned from doing drag with Lurleen was how much
fun
it was! At home drag had essentially been a solitary activity (and not necessarily even much fun). I wasn’t part of any drag scene (there wasn’t one to speak of) and I didn’t have drag-queen friends to run around with, get drunk with and do silly
shows with. I had enjoyed it as a creative project, in the same way that I had enjoyed art projects in college, but it wasn’t
fun
. It wasn’t running, screaming, laughing, sweating, falling over, boy-kissing, waking-up-with-bruises, attention-grabbing, outrageous
fun
the way it was with Lurleen. We were partners in mischievous cross-dressed crime, and we were game for anything.