Woman in the Making: Panti's Memoir (25 page)
It had been arranged to film my Noble Call for YouTube, but as I put on my face in the mirror, I still thought that the only people who would ever hear it were the five hundred or so people in the auditorium that night, and perhaps a few hundred more might stumble across it later online. A few days earlier I had mentioned I was going to be giving a speech in the Abbey to filmmaker and photographer Conor Horgan. I have known Conor since he first photographed me for the Alternative Miss Ireland poster in 1996, and he did so for nearly every one over the next eighteen years. I like and trust Conor, so when he approached me a few years ago and asked if he could make a documentary around me, I agreed reluctantly. Despite what people might imagine, I’m actually quite a reserved person. Panti is the outgoing one. I’m also my mother’s child and she abhors anyone making a show of or getting ‘notions’ about themselves. The idea of someone following me, Rory, around with a camera fills me with dread.
However, it’s hard to say no to Conor so for the last few years he’s been turning up every now and then with a camera and a microphone. From the beginning I decided to take an entirely hands-off approach to his documentary – this was his project, nothing to do with
me, really – but whenever I’m doing anything that I think might be of interest to him, I let him know. When I mentioned the Abbey speech he was eager to shoot it. Conor, of course, had been absolutely thrilled when I stumbled into a media storm: before that I don’t think he was entirely sure what his documentary was really about, but now all his gay ships had come in on a tide of scandal. I think the filmmaker in him was probably secretly hoping I’d die in a very dramatic accident or something, and now, in a way, I had! He arranged to shoot my Noble Call with another friend, Caroline Campbell, a whip-smart lawyer and activist, who also makes short films and who’d been eagerly following the Pantigate drama.
Also very enthusiastic to have the speech filmed was Brian Barrington, the friend who’d recommended and introduced me to my solicitor, Andrew. Brian had kept in close touch with Andrew and me throughout, giving advice, making suggestions and dissecting each day’s developments. Brian is very savvy when it comes to the media and an enthusiastic devourer of blogs and online publications, so he was especially eager to get the speech filmed and posted online. He didn’t know what I was going to say, but he trusted I wouldn’t do a horrible job.
The night before the speech, he wondered in an email to me if giving the speech in drag was the best idea. He worried it might frighten the horses. It might be offputting to regular folk not used to seeing drag queens
every day. It might be confrontational – perhaps come between me and my message.
I was determined to do it in drag.
Partly because I had no choice – I was going to have to jump straight into a cab afterwards and rush back to Pantibar to my show. And partly because I knew I would be much more comfortable giving the speech as Panti. Standing on stages and talking to people is what Panti
does
. It’s what she’s good at, what she’s been doing for twenty-five years. Rory, on the other hand, would be much less comfortable.
But the real reason I was sure I should do it in drag was because I knew the drag would help me. I’d learned many years ago at that disastrous Christmas gig in Galway that a drag queen grabs people’s attention in a way that a guy in a shirt and trousers can’t ever hope to compete with. And I knew that, rather than get in the way of my message, drag would
amplify my voice
. It would help to get me heard above the cacophony. I knew what Brian meant, though: most of the audience in the theatre (or watching on computers at home) would probably not be familiar with drag queens, and when I first walked out they would be blinded by the drag. At first they wouldn’t be able to see past it, wouldn’t be able to
hear
past it. And they would come with a lot of preconceived notions about drag queens, what they do and what they are capable of. They would expect me to be brash and outrageous and silly. They would expect
me to be light. But I was aware of that and knew how to handle it. I would start off with a light preamble, let them get to know me a little, let them get used to the tone of my voice, my accent, my cadence, let them look all they needed to till they had answered their own questions about my hair, my makeup, my corset, my breasts. I’d give them a moment to get past that and settle. I’d give them a minute to relax, draw them in, and when they were ready, I’d tell them what I’d come to say.
When I was ready Phillip and another good friend called Ian came to pick me up, and we took a cab to the theatre. On the way, Phillip, who knows me well and has worked with me many times, archly asked, ‘So, did you write something?’ knowing full well it was possible I’d been lazy and decided to wing it.
‘Yes, Phillip,’ I replied, matching his archness. ‘I did write something. I think it’s pretty good too.’ Then, jokingly, I remarked that if I could wring a tear out of one of those emotional actress types I’d be happy.
Ian looked suddenly concerned. ‘You’re not going to do something
serious
, are you?’ He was clearly convinced that I was about to embarrass them all in front of five hundred people, on the stage of the national bloody theatre.
When we arrived, about fifteen minutes before the night’s performance was scheduled to end, Conor was there with his camera and someone from the Abbey greeted us. I left Phillip and Ian waiting in the lobby for the performance to finish so they could slip into the
auditorium, and I walked around the theatre to the stage door and went backstage where I waited in the wings till the cast had done their bows.
One of the actors introduced me. In a nice coincidence it was an actor I knew, a lovely guy, who had once borrowed a wig and shoes off me for a role he was playing. I never got them back.
‘Tonight,’ he said, ‘we are delighted to welcome to the stage Ireland’s most fabulous drag queen and famous activist, Panti.’
I walked out of the dark, the click of my heels sounding above the applause for this creature who had magically walked straight off the day’s front pages and onto the stage.
Hello. My name is Panti, and for the benefit of the visually impaired or the incredibly naïve, I am a drag queen. I am also a performer of sorts, and an accidental and occasional gay rights activist.
As you may have already gathered, I am also painfully middle class. My father was a country vet, I went to a nice school, and afterwards to that most middle class of institutions – an art college. And, although this may surprise some of you, I have always found gainful employment in my chosen field – gender discombobulation.
So the kind of grinding, abject poverty that we saw so powerfully on stage tonight is something that I can thankfully say I have no experience of.
But
I do know a little something about oppression. Or, at least, oppression is something that I can relate to. Now, I am not, of course, for a minute going to compare my situation to that of Dublin workers in 1913, but I do know what it feels like to be put in your place.
Have any of you ever been standing at a pedestrian crossing when a car goes by and in it are a bunch of lads, and they lean out the window as they go by and shout, ‘Fag!’ and throw a carton of milk at you? Oh, it doesn’t really hurt. I mean, after all, it’s just a wet carton and, in many ways, they’re right – I am a fag. So it doesn’t hurt, but it feels oppressive.
And when it really does hurt is afterwards. Because it’s afterwards that I wonder and worry and obsess – what was it about me? What did they see in me? What was it that gave me away? And I hate myself for wondering that. It feels oppressive, and the next time that I’m standing at a pedestrian crossing, I hate myself for it but I check myself to see what is it about me that gives the gay away. And I check myself to make sure that I’m not doing it this time.
Have you ever come home in the evening and turned on the television and there is a panel of people – nice people, respectable people, smart people, the kind of people who probably make
good neighbourly neighbours, the kind of people who write for newspapers – and they are all sitting around, and they are having a reasoned debate on the television. A reasoned debate about you. About what kind of a person you are, about whether or not you are capable of being a good parent, about whether you want to destroy marriage, about whether or not you are safe around children, about whether or not God herself thinks you are an abomination, about whether in fact you are ‘intrinsically disordered’. And even the nice TV presenter lady that you feel is like almost a friend because you see her being nice on TV all the time, even she thinks it’s perfectly OK that they are all having this reasoned debate about you, and about who you are, and what rights you ‘deserve’ or don’t deserve. And that feels oppressive.
Have you ever been on a crowded train with one of your best gay friends, and inside a tiny part of you is cringing because he is being so gay, and you find yourself trying to compensate for his gayness by butching up a little, or by trying to steer the conversation onto safer, ‘straighter’, territory? Now this is you, who have spent the last thirty-five years of your life trying to be the best gay possible, and yet there is still this small part of you that is embarrassed by his gayness.
And I hate myself for that, and that feels
oppressive. And when I am standing at a pedestrian bloody light I am checking myself.
Have you ever gone into your favourite neighbourhood café with the paper that you buy every day, and you open it up and inside is a five-hundred-word opinion, written by a nice, middle-class woman? The kind of woman who probably gives to charity, the kind of woman whom you would be totally happy to leave your children with. And she is arguing over five hundred words – so reasonably – about whether or not you should be treated less than everybody else. Arguing that you should be given fewer rights than everybody else. And when you read that, and then the woman at the next table gets up and excuses herself to squeeze by you and smiles at you and you smile back and nod and say, ‘No problem,’ and inside you wonder to yourself, Does she think that about me too? and that feels oppressive. And you go outside and you stand at the pedestrian crossing and you check yourself. And I hate myself for that.
Have you ever turned on the computer and you see videos of people who are just like you? In countries that are far away and countries that are not far away at all, they are being imprisoned and beaten and tortured and murdered and executed – because they are just like you.
And that feels oppressive.
Three
weeks ago I was on television and I said that I believed that people who actively campaign for gay people to be treated less or treated differently are, in my gay opinion, homophobic. Now, some people – people who actively campaign for gay people to be treated less under the law – took great exception to that characterisation, and they threatened legal action against me and RTÉ. Now, RTÉ in its wisdom decided incredibly quickly to hand over a huge sum of money to make it all go away. I haven’t been quite so lucky.
And for the last three weeks, I have been lectured to by heterosexual people about what homophobia is and who is allowed to identify it. Straight people have lined up – ministers, senators, barristers, journalists – have lined up to tell me what homophobia is and to tell me what I am allowed to feel oppressed by. People who have never experienced homophobia in their lives, people who have never checked themselves at a pedestrian crossing, have told me that unless I am being thrown into prison or herded onto a cattle train, then it is not homophobia, and that feels oppressive.
So now Irish gay people, we find ourselves in this ludicrous situation where we are not only not allowed to say publicly what we feel oppressed by, we’re not even allowed to think it because the very
definition, our definition, has been disallowed by our betters.
And for the last three weeks I have been denounced from the floor of the Oireachtas to newspaper columns, to the seething morass of internet commentary. Denounced for using ‘hate speech’ because I dared to use the word ‘homophobia’, and a jumped-up queer like me should know that the word ‘homophobia’ is no longer available to gay people. Which is a spectacular and neat Orwellian trick because now it turns out that gay people are not the victims of homophobia: homophobes are the victims of homophobia.
But let me just say that it’s not true, because I don’t hate you.
I do, it is true, believe that almost all of you are probably homophobes. But I’m a homophobe. It would be incredible if we weren’t! To grow up in a society that is overwhelmingly and stiflingly homophobic and to somehow escape unscathed would be miraculous. So I don’t hate you because you are homophobes. I actually admire you. I admire you because most of you are only a bit homophobic. And, to be honest, considering the circumstances, that is pretty good going.
But I do sometimes hate myself. I hate myself because I fucking check myself when standing at
pedestrian crossings. And sometimes I hate you for doing that to me.
But not right now. Right now, I like you very much for giving me a few moments of your time, and for that I thank you.
When I had finished it was impossible for me to know how it had been received. I felt like it had gone fine, but they were a nice polite theatre audience – they were unlikely to get up and walk out or start chatting among themselves. At the end they responded enthusiastically – there was even a standing ovation – but I was taking a bow with the full cast of the show on the night of their final performance so that was more than likely for them and their two-hour performance, not my ten-minute speech. I did notice that one of the actresses beside me seemed a little teary and was squeezing my hand hard, but she was taking a bow at the very end of a two-month run at the national theatre so it was a big night for her. And when the curtain came down and we walked offstage the other actors congratulated me and said nice things, but that’s what performers do.