Woman in the Making: Panti's Memoir (7 page)

‘
I like your hair.’

‘Thanks. I made it out of flour and Monster Munch.’

‘You lost a bit at the back.’

‘I know. A seagull grabbed it when I got off the bus.’

After my first year in art school I had decided to eschew fine art for design, and I enjoyed it, even though my work was generally pedestrian. However, by the time I finished my third year, with only one more to go, I
realised I didn’t want to be a graphic designer. In fact, the thought of spending the rest of my life at a drawing table, illustrating cereal boxes for men in suits, filled me with dread. But I had to do just one more year and then I’d at least have my piece of paper to show for my time there. Something for my parents. Now I had to decide what I would do with that final year. What big project would I spend the year working on that would be assessed and judged, and would decide whether or not I was an art-school graduate or an art-school failure? I had no idea but I had the whole summer to think about it.

Before Ryanair came along the only people who flew off this island were expensive racehorses and landed gentry with monocles so, like everyone else, I took the ferry, then the train, and turned up in Chelsea to stay with my older brother Lorcan, who at the time worked for a famous and moneyed contemporary art gallery.

That first night Lorcan threw a party. In the kitchen I came across a large, imposing Australian, who was wearing a ridiculous wig and a tweed jacket that appeared to have tiny swastikas embroidered all over it. He was holding forth loudly in a good-humoured argument over his sartorial choices, defending the offending jacket on the basis that the swastika was, after all, a Hindu symbol meaning ‘wellbeing’ and other people’s ignorance was none of his business.

That was Leigh Bowery. As an art student in the 1980s, I was already aware of Leigh Bowery. He was a club
legend and performance artist, who had made a name for himself as a living work of art, a Clubland flesh-and-blood sculpture, a towering voluptuous installation of skin and costume that moved with surprising grace through crowded rooms of startled clubbers or puzzled gallery patrons. His astonishing costumes, which seemed to push his very human flesh into impossible, unsettling, inhuman shapes, set a standard for which every club kid with ping-pong balls stuck to his face has been striving ever since.

For Leigh, his body wasn’t an end, it was a beginning; a medium of transformation, an opportunity. With paint and fabric, movement and performance, he pushed against the boundaries of his own form, his own biology – and
transformed
himself.

In Leigh I began to see all sorts of new possibilities. He was a doughy kid from a tiny town in the asshole of Australia, yet here he was, the startling epicentre of cool London, the most fabulous creature in a scene full of fabulous creatures where what you decided to be was more important than who you were expected to be.
1
For the first time in my life I realised that I didn’t have to be defined by Ballinrobe, County Mayo: I could define
myself
. I was the master of my own destiny! Life was for creating, not consuming! Convention was for wimps! And being gay, far from being a burden or a limitation, was a
gift
because it freed me from a wearying weight of expectation. I was queer Rory and there was no
character arc for queer Rory. Queers weren’t expected to settle down with a nice woman, we weren’t expected to get steady, reliable jobs and raise steady, reliable kids. I wasn’t expected to be anyone’s godfather in case I burst into flames or to join the local Tidy Towns committee or volunteer to steward at the Community Games because I’d only make everyone else uncomfortable.

All that was expected of me was to look nice and not kill anyone.

For the rest of the summer I would turn up at gay clubs, wide-eyed with the possibilities, and this huge, magnificent creature would greet me with a squeal and encourage me to get into as much trouble as possible. The next morning, after dancing all night, kissing boys and ending up on the night bus, I’d turn up tired but grinning to my summer job as a waiter in a small fish restaurant on Drury Lane.

The manager there was an outrageous English queen with long black hair that hung in a flatiron ponytail down his back. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge and perfect recall of classic camp movies. On quiet days and between servings he would entertain me (and himself) by acting out the plot and best scenes from his favourites. One day I might be working with Elizabeth Taylor in
Suddenly Last Summer
, shrieking, ‘They devoured him!’ or polishing spoons with Joan Crawford in
Johnny Guitar
, and the next I’m trying to set tables and keep up with the barbed remarks of
The Women
. Later, when I saw these
movies, I’d often be disappointed because they had been so much better in his telling.

Once a year he and his boyfriend would drag up to go to an annual party. Months beforehand the photo album of previous years was taken out and pored over before the movie reference was chosen for that year’s production. For weeks beforehand the costumes were being made, the accessories sorted and the makeup perfected, and for one night my fun, sweet restaurant manager was whatever immaculate and perfect screen goddess he wanted to be. It turned out that you could be from Croydon and still be Barbara Stanwyck.

All that summer of 1989, at the end of the restaurant’s street, the Theatre Royal Drury Lane was a hive of activity as they prepared to open a brand new musical that autumn called
Miss Saigon
. Cast and crew would come in, and much of the talk was about technical difficulties they were having with a helicopter that was supposed to land spectacularly onstage during the show. And when the show finally opened the street was cordoned off and we closed the restaurant so we could stand behind the barriers and wait to see Princess Diana arrive. And when she stepped out of the car and waved, bird thin in diaphanous pale blue, the burst of camera flash was so intense and so bright the whole world was momentarily overexposed.

That summer of fun changed everything for me, and when I stumbled back to Dublin, tired and gayer than
ever, I was absolutely sure I didn’t want to be a graphic designer. It wouldn’t be fair on me
or
design. Instead, I was on a mission to find a new, more fabulous me and I would leave no sequin unturned – but I still had to get through that final year of college
and
I had to do it without being bored to death. So, after thinking about it for all of ten minutes, I decided to spend my final year designing a drag show. At first that didn’t go down too well with my college tutors, but after I’d assured them that I would include enough traditional design elements to pass muster (posters, set, costume, illustration …), they allowed it. I think they already knew I’d be no great loss to the design community.

So, while my classmates did real work and prepared for careers as designers, I spent the time smoking cigarettes and trying to make a gown out of chicken wire and Copydex. I knew nothing about drag, nothing about making costumes, and nothing about making shows, but none of that stopped me. I
had
made plenty of puppets since I was a kid (and had even made student cash doing my own version of a
Punch and Judy
show at Christmas parties in factories) and figured a drag show couldn’t be that much different. I’d never even seen a traditional drag show, but I had the entirely misplaced confidence of youth and the couldn’t-give-a-fuck freedom that came from already knowing I was unemployable.

I wrote a basic script for a fictional show starring a fictional queen called Simply Devune – a name I’d taken
from a ridiculously camp movie called
Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?
starring Jayne Mansfield, during which the pneumatic Jayne would squeakily exclaim that everything was ‘simply devune!’ I drew sets and lighting plans, took photographs, and did line drawings that would be projected onto screens during this fictional show. I designed posters and tickets, then screen-printed them by hand. I made a ridiculous, uncomfortable and impractical dress, which I covered with surgical gloves and sprayed gold. The paint I used reacted with the rubber in the gloves and never quite dried so the dress would stick to everything it touched and leave a gold residue behind, as if a glamorous slug had passed clumsily by. And in those pre-eBay shopping days, I made matching ugly man-sized mules.

The show was awful on paper, but I was young and fun and stupid (and possibly a little high) so that didn’t seem like any reason not to put it on. After all, I decided, it was silly to go to all that bother and
not
put it on. And so it came about that I mounted the show for all the students in the college and for the external assessors from the Department of Education.

I persuaded my indulgent straight friends to be in it. I had two of my girlfriends dressed as purple furry angels on swings (I don’t remember why) and two fit game-for-a-laugh straight boys topless and baby-oiled (I don’t need to remember why). Neither do I remember what the show was supposed to be about, if anything, but I stole
jokes from old songs and, with arty student pretensions, I started the show sitting at a table as a boy and slowly applied terrible makeup. On their way in, each audience member had been given an inflated plastic vet’s ‘arm glove’ – the kind vets use to shove their hands up cows’ arses – to wave pointlessly. I’m pretty sure there was absolutely no rhyme or reason to that except I thought it would be funny and stupid, and it was definitely one of those (and possibly both). My sister came and sat near the front, wondering what on earth art school had done to her tow-headed little brother, and the Department of Education assessors were clearly so confused and traumatised that they lost their reason because they gave me my piece of paper.

I was twenty years old, an art-school graduate, and an absolute fucking chancer.

A
FTER MY ART-SCHOOL SHOW
, Niall’s boyfriend, Frank, decided to let me do a show in Sides. Actually, ‘let me do a show’ gives the wrong impression. As was to be the case very often over the years, essentially Frank (and later Niall) had a nutty idea for a show and, unlike every other right-thinking person, I didn’t say, ‘Fuck off, Frank, I’m not doing that!’ In a pattern that would reach its apogee years later, when I was giving myself paint enemas to the delighted horror of clubbers in a dodgy club in the Docklands, Niall and Frank would come up with a complicated idea for a ridiculous show that nobody in their right mind (including Frank and Niall) would actually do – except me. I was the best fully poseable doll ever.

And so one Saturday night I found myself doing my first ‘professional’ drag gig, lip-syncing to Klaus Nomi songs and emerging from a tube of stretch fabric, like a drunk, gay sausage roll with a pointy cardboard
headpiece and a crappy wig, in front of a room of utterly unimpressed gays and increasingly angry lesbians. Frank watched from behind his fingers, Niall thought it was hilarious, and I wanted to die. It was
fabulous
!

But grey, depressed 1989 Dublin was a difficult place to be fabulous and, like most other young Irish people of the time, I was almost expected to leave. London was the obvious choice, but then my friend Helen and I read a book by the travel writer Paul Theroux called
Riding the Iron Rooster
about train journeys through Communist China, and suddenly London seemed like a boring idea. Instead, just months after the Tiananmen Square massacre, and just weeks after the Berlin Wall had come down, we set off by train with our waiter’s tips and a vague plan: try to get into Soviet Russia, somehow find black market tickets for the Trans-Siberian Express, get across Mongolia, through China, and eventually take a boat to Japan where we imagined we could get jobs teaching English. And all this we figured we would just
do
, without visas or (in those pre-internet days) any real information. All we had was the fearlessness and ignorance of youth and a vague rumour we had heard from a friend of a friend of a bloke we’d met in a pub once: a nameless professor at a university in Budapest might help if we could find him.

The weird thing was, I didn’t even like Asian food at the time. In truth, the whole thing was Helen’s idea.
*Stands up and points wildly at Helen*
. She was, and still is, a kind of post-hippie adventurer. (I used to call her and her sister ‘The Bamboo and Snot Sisters’ because they would make
everything they needed, from clothes to camera bags, out of whatever seemed to be to hand, and I always imagined they’d be very handy if you ever found yourself trapped on a desert island with them. You’d soon be living in tropical splendour in a quirky treehouse with a system of slides and pulleys made from bamboo and snot.) Helen decided this would be a great, why-the-hell-not, possibly-achievable adventure – she just needed someone to go with her. And I, as we already know, am easily led. I was also bored, and being bored was the thing I feared most, and this stupid idea didn’t sound
entirely
boring (except possibly for all the parts where we spent weeks on end in trains) and so I thought, OK, let’s do that instead.

The story I am trying (in my own way) to tell you here is
not
the story of how two kids, with nothing but a pocketful of dreams, recurring conjunctivitis and a lot of blind good luck (in particular, our timing was excellent – the Soviet Union was crumbling and everyone had more to worry about than two Irish kids with home haircuts and no tickets), spent half of 1990 travelling painfully slowly overland from Dublin to Tokyo. So apart from mentioning that I was briefly arrested for trading in endangered animals (or something – obviously I was entirely innocent, and I didn’t speak Mongolian), and a skinny, bespectacled, middle-aged man dressed
Starsky & Hutch
-style pressed his erection into my thigh on a bus in Shanghai – how the hell did Chinese Starsky even know I was gay? – I’ll move the narrative on:

We arrived in Tokyo.