Woman in the Making: Panti's Memoir (17 page)

So, I went home to Mayo, about a year after my diagnosis, and waited till my parents and I were alone in their living room, the TV on, no one really watching it. My mother’s brown bread and half-pot of cooling tea on the little ‘tea table’ in the middle of the room, my dad making a
whooshing
sound as he pushed back in his recliner to raise the leg rest, my mother adjusting the angle of her head to bring the crossword clue into focus, a snuffling dog farting on the sofa beside me. It was ordinary and comfortable and nice.

‘I have something I need to tell you.’

I had come prepared, with rehearsed simple explanations of treatments, drugs and terminology on the tip of my tongue: CD4 counts and viral loads and combination therapy. An upbeat and positive assessment of how my treatment was going, the great results I was seeing, and a determinedly optimistic and rose-tinted explanation of the wonderful new drugs and exciting new research. And my parents sat there and listened and, not for the first time in my life, they amazed me. My mother cried a little but they were calm and thoughtful and steady. They asked questions and kissed me and told me they loved me and went to bed, and I stayed on the sofa with the smelly dog and cried. I cried for the
mess I was in, I cried for what I’d done to my parents, and I cried for how lucky I was to have them.

Sixteen years later
everything
has changed. I didn’t know it at the time but I was lucky to be diagnosed when I was, on the very cusp of new, effective HIV treatments. I now have a chronic manageable
condition
. I take one small pill a day and I get on with my life. I visit the clinic a couple of times a year: they take some blood to check everything is still fine, I chat with the doctor, see if I can charm my way into a couple of sleeping tablets for a long flight I’ll be taking soon, joke with one of the addicts about his swanky watch, and steal the nose off a little boy to keep him occupied while his mother is in getting her bloods done. I’m there so rarely now I don’t know half the doctors any more and I struggle to remember my patient number. Even the clinic has changed, moved to a different building, the chaos replaced with an almost dull orderliness, appointments and small queues bum-shuffling along plastic chairs. The
weight
has gone out of the place. The heaviness of sickness has lifted, and death has gone back to other parts of the hospital.

The staff still work hard but now they complain about the ordinary annoyances of ordinary workdays: the roster, somebody’s poor time-keeping, mixed-up labels. And no one tries to get you to apply for a blanket allowance.

Not that everything is perfect. There is still a lot of stigma around being HIV positive. Things may have changed dramatically when it comes to treatment, but people are still afraid. Even people who really should know better, like the gay community, are afraid. It makes dating difficult. Fraught. Sometimes hurtful. Everyone dates online now and it’s common to see guys online describe themselves as ‘clean’ and say they are only interested in dating other ‘clean’ men. ‘Clean’ is a euphemism for HIV negative, and by implication, of course, HIV-positive people are ‘unclean’. Many HIV-positive guys decide to bypass all that and only date other positive men.

I have settled on a three-date rule. If you tell him straight away, before he’s had a chance to get to know you, the chances are he’ll cut his losses and suddenly become really busy – too busy for that second date. But if you leave it too long, there’s a good chance he’ll be angry or upset that you didn’t tell him sooner. So, I tell him on the third date and it’s never easy. It’s impossible to know how people will react. Some will bluntly say they can’t handle that and you never see them again. Some will say it’s fine, they understand, they have an HIV-positive friend, no problem, they’ll call you tomorrow … and you never see them again. And some will pleasantly surprise you. Of course, when you are Panti and every gay in the country knows you, some say, ‘I already knew. I was wondering when you’d tell me.’

When I was first diagnosed with HIV it was almost all I could think of. It filled my days, was inescapable. Now I rarely even think about it. In many ways it’s like the small tattoo I got just by my shoulder when I was eighteen and tipsy. I can’t see it and never think of it. I can go for six months and not even remember I have a tattoo until tattoos come up in conversation or someone mentions it when I take my shirt off at the beach, or catches sight of it when Panti is wearing a low-cut dress. And when it does come up in conversation I struggle to remember which side it’s on. I don’t think of myself as a tattooed person. It’s a small part of me that doesn’t impinge on my daily life.

Living with HIV now is similar. I don’t think about it. I don’t think of myself as
someone with HIV
. I’m not sick. I’m healthy and strong and expect to live as long as anyone else. I take my daily pill on autopilot, like I make my morning coffee or brush my teeth. I take that pill lightly, yet that pill is magic. It has returned me to life, to normal, ordinary, just-like-everybody-else life. It has even made me non-infectious, which, although it makes little practical difference, is psychologically important to me. When you have a communicable condition, an infectious disease, you feel marked, untouchable. Tainted. I don’t feel like that any more. Even if I’m occasionally still treated like it.

That pill does something else for me. It removes people’s pity. I always hated people’s pity. The significant
look you’d get when you told someone. I never wanted anyone’s pity. I occasionally wanted understanding, compassion, even sympathy at times, but I never wanted pity. Pity takes the power away from the pitied, leaves them weak and defenceless, and I never felt powerless or defenceless. There were times when I felt tired, fed up, hard done by, angry, frustrated, sad, but never powerless. I always felt, despite all evidence to the contrary, that I’d be OK. That I was magic. And believing that
made
me OK.

I don’t mean that I imagine I could have
believed
my way to health without treatment. I don’t mean I think all you need to beat HIV is the power of positive thinking. You won’t catch me reading
The Secret
or going to faith healers or growing my own wheatgrass. I’ll take the drugs, thank you very much. But I refused to believe that that little asshole HIV was going to beat me, and that made me
feel
better. It helped me take the medications when they were hard to take. It helped me to continue taking them when I wanted to stop. It helped me to go to work and make plans. It helped me to go dancing and kiss boys and make AIDS jokes and laugh at this horrible thing. It took the power away from this crappy little virus and gave it back to me. I was
magic
. I always told the doctors, ‘I’m magic,’ and magic people don’t get sick and die from a tiny fucking virus. Magic people survive.

And it turns out I was right. I
am
fucking magic.

I
HAVE MANY THINGS TO
thank the Alternative Miss Ireland for – many great friends, many great times – but one thing it gave me that I suspect I might never have got any other way was other drag queens. It gave me drag-queen friends to scheme with, and perform with, laugh, drink and fight with. Queens to borrow clothes from, compare makeup with, and discover new press-on nails with. To ‘kiki’ with. To be drag queens with.

The Alternative Miss Ireland was in large part responsible for ushering in a drag explosion in Ireland, for sowing the seeds of the vibrant and crowded drag scene we have in Dublin today.

Shirley Temple Bar, Veda, and Katherine Lynch were the first to take the opportunity presented by winning the Alternative Miss Ireland and parlay it into successful, lengthy careers by working their asses off.
All three developed their own long-running shows, and in turn gave opportunities to other queens (most of them also past AMI contestants) by having them on as guest performers. Soon other clubs wanted a drag show, PR agencies wanted queens to liven up events, and the drag scene started to blossom. Younger queens wanted to be a part of it and older queens who had done the odd show on an amateur basis were encouraged to take it more seriously. And soon that ‘first wave’ of queens was bringing up its own drag daughters and a second wave followed, with Davina Devine, Victoria Secret, April Showers, Imperia Queen of Spain, and then a third wave, and there was Bunny O’Hare and Regina George and Blathnaid McGee and Phil T. Gorgeous, then a fourth and a fifth, till nowadays you can’t swing a nylon wig on Dame Street without taking out a bunch of baby drags.

My working life in drag had started more by accident than design. I fell through a career, simply going from one gig to the next, until eventually I didn’t know any other way to make a living. I never
planned
to be a drag queen: I was just trying to have fun and pay my rent. I always imagined that the next gig would be my last and soon I’d have to get a ‘proper’ job.

Today, if you’re a young gay boy with a Lady Gaga obsession and a show-off attitude, you look at people like me and Veda and Davina, and you see us having fun (and it’s a drag queen’s job always to look like she’s having fun, whether she is or not!) and paying our bills
(
Mostly. OK, sometimes. Jeeze! You’ll get it next week!
) and you think, I want to do that. I could do that. Being a drag queen has become a legitimate career choice! And a more and more popular one. And why wouldn’t it? Younger drag queens get paid to do what younger gay boys have to pay to do: go out, get drunk, be the life and soul of the party, and make a fool of themselves. A lot of people think that sounds like the perfect job for them.

Of course, it’s not as easy as it looks – nothing ever is. For one thing, the opportunities are limited. Even in the biggest city there are only so many gay clubs, so many cabarets, so many street corners, and in a small city like Dublin, it’s even harder. And you’d better be a grafter because there will always be more jobs for computer programmers and checkout operators than for drag queens and when you
do
get them, they’ll pay horribly and you’ll spend most of those few euro on tights and lashes and a taxi home at three a.m. And there won’t be a boss checking what time you started learning a new number or a manager looking over your shoulder making sure you’re working on choreography or writing a few gags, so you’d better be a self-starter. And the few gigs there are you’re going to have to earn because every other baby drag wants that gig too so you’d better be at least as good as them. And you’d better be able to get along with people and work with people because you’re going to need to collaborate with people: with other queens on shows, choreography and numbers, with
DJs, venue managers and a bored sound man, who once worked with Blur and now he’s standing there looking at you in some crappy basement club wondering where it all went wrong.

And you’d better be respectful and fun because the one thing you need most is a drag mother. A drag mother will pass on her wisdom and her makeup tips, show you how to get some volume in that wig, how to ‘beat’ your face, how to contour for bone structure, how and where to pad, how to stand to create shape, how to stack lashes, find shoes, apply nails, glue wigs, walk in heels, create cleavage, use a mic, land a joke, deal with hecklers, pee in a corset. She’ll let you watch and learn, encourage you, give out to you, and give you gigs. A drag mother can open doors for you, but no queen is going to adopt you if you have an attitude. It’s the cute, sweet puppies that get taken home from the rescue centre first.

And once a baby drag gets her large foot in the door she needs to work out what kind of queen she is, and that can take a while because there are all sorts of queens. There are comedy queens, lip-sync queens, singing queens, arty queens, clown queens, dancing queens, cabaret queens, music queens, ukulele-playing queens, ‘end-of-the-pier’ queens, DJ queens, and any other kind of queen you can imagine. There are queens who look utterly convincing as women and pride themselves on it, and there are queens who rub glitter into their moustache and wear Minnie Mouse ears. And there
are good ones and bad ones and awful ones and mind-blowingly brilliant ones. Of course, the average punter hasn’t seen many drag shows so they imagine that every drag queen is just like the one they saw that time they were on holiday in Lanzarote: crude jokes, a Dolly Parton lip-sync with balloon tits, and finish off with a chorus of ‘I Am What I Am’. Now don’t get me wrong! I can get on board with crude jokes, balloon tits and sending me and my sunburn home with a chorus of ‘I Am What I Am’, but the problem is when people imagine that that’s
all
drag can be.

I was keenly aware of the limited perception of what a drag queen can be when I first started writing and performing ‘legitimate’ theatre shows and I knew some people were thinking,
Why would I go to the theatre to see a drag queen? I already saw one in Lanzarote
.

Most young queens first dress up – maybe for a laugh at Hallowe’en – because it looks fun (it is) but some discover something they hadn’t expected: drag gets them attention. And it’s
good
attention. For a lot of these effeminate gay boys, school was not a bed of roses. When other teenagers turned their attention on them it was usually unwanted and unwelcome and ended with a shove or a wallop or sniggers and pointing, and someone shouting, ‘Fag!’ However, the moment they put on a wig and a frock they become the centre of a different kind of attention. People take her picture, and cheer her on through her number, and even if she looks
a mess, everyone says, ‘Girl, you look fabulous!’ And it changes her. Out of drag she’s still the quiet, invisible gay boy, but in drag she’s someone else entirely – behind the armour of the makeup she’s sassy and funny and loud and fun, and she’s the life and soul of the party.

Depending on their act, queens can be found everywhere from theatres to art galleries to corporate functions. Shirley Temple Bar and I once did a gig in the day ward of a geriatric hospital. We’d been asked to do it by a Filipino friend who was a nurse there, and felt we couldn’t refuse. We did numbers in front of the TV (using a boom box for sound) to an audience of frail elderly folk with oxygen masks, dozing in wheelchairs and beds. Neither they nor we had any idea what was going on.