Woman in the Making: Panti's Memoir (15 page)

Veda Beaux Reves had entered and she had entered to win. When she was announced as the first runner-up, she took her bouquet of flowers, accepted the runner-up trophy – the Golden Briquette – and returned to her place in the lineup, but she was not happy. In fact, she was overtly pissed off. And as the crowd roared its approval on realising that Tampy Lilette must be the winner, Veda remained so. As Tampy’s name was announced and she was adorned with the Medusa Crown of Shamrocks,
then gave a short, tearful speech of thanks, Veda’s demeanour remained unchanged. But one of Veda’s many talents is knowing what people want and giving it to them right between the eyes. At that moment Veda knew what the room wanted – no, needed – was a diva, so she’d give them a fucking diva. She stepped forward out of the line and, with a flick of her glossy black mane and a surprisingly accurate aim, she launched her heavy bouquet and her Golden Briquette at the judges’ table where they narrowly missed pop impresario and music mogul Louis Walsh, sending drinks and diving judges in every direction. For a split second the whole room stopped, before the capacity crowd bellowed its approval. Now,
that
queen knows how to put on a show!

Veda entered again the following year, and Louis Walsh, who had enjoyed himself thoroughly the year before, was back again as a judge. When it looked fairly sure that Veda was going to win, Louis, displaying the kind of knack for publicity that has kept him in the business and on
The X Factor
for so long, mischievously tried to persuade the other judges to give Veda the runner-up spot again. He just wanted to see what would happen. However, less mischievous heads prevailed and Veda was crowned the Alternative Miss Ireland 1999.

The next year the AMI picked up her skirts and moved into the faded Victorian grandeur of the Olympia Theatre, which would be her home for the next twelve years. Now we had a proper stage with bars to hang scenery
from, sides to appear from, proper curtains and lots of dressing rooms, so the production values went up many notches. We were conscious of not losing the riotous club feel of the event so kept the bars open throughout, removed the seating in the stalls and had standing only on the ground floor. Every year thereafter, on the Sunday closest to St Patrick’s Day, the gay community and its friends would celebrate their own queer version of Irishness. The whole ‘heel-clickin’, snake-banishin’, roller-coastin’ donkey ride’ became colloquially known as ‘Gay Christmas’ and all day, while the production crew and the contestants were rigging lighting, hanging sets and teasing wigs, all around the city the audience were sewing on sequins, squeezing into hot pants, and having cocktail parties in preparation.

Backstage was always chaos! pandemonium! with up to a hundred and fifty performers and crew squeezing up and down the corridors and in and out of dressing rooms, wearing everything but (or on one memorable occasion including) the kitchen sink. It became a major production and every show might have thirty individual performances, each with its own sound, lighting and prop requirements, but as the years went by and every year the same amazing people volunteered to be involved, we learned how to pull it all together more and more efficiently till eventually it was a reasonably well-oiled machine, gliding along on hard work, goodwill, fun, vodka and a stern talking-to from Dizzy, the take-no-nonsense,
clip-board-wielding drag queen who took over as producer after Trish decided to abandon us and have babies with a lovely man in Cork.

Over those years there wasn’t a lot you can imagine that didn’t at some point happen on that stage. Or fall off it. There was the time Miss Big Chief Random Chaos put an endoscope up her arse and the ‘live’ video feed showed it edging its way along his colon till it bumped into George W. Bush. There was Miss Heidi Konnt, the goose-stepping, leather-loving von Trapp babysitter, who won the crown in 2005 with a heart-warming song about fisting and poppers, accompanied by the von Trapp family in matching made-from-curtains outfits. There was the Edwardian lady Miss Mac Dermott, who refused to use modern conveniences, like electricity or amplification, which were not true to her era: she stood on her head and shouted at the audience through a tin cone. What she shouted was actually a rather beautiful contemplation on the human condition but nobody except me could hear her. There was the imposing, enormous, towering Miss Revvlon, seven feet tall in her stockinged feet (and even more towering in the platform boots she had made for herself out of cork tiles), introducing us all to his tiny Belfast mother in the audience. There was the bunch of straight boys in Speedos who shot their daredevil Miss out of a cannon and across the stage to the strains of Diana Ross singing ‘I’m Coming Out’. There was the young overexcited
queen who fell off the dangerously high stage into the pit and gave the venue management a collective heart attack. (The gays weren’t fazed.) Miss Minnie Mélange, the little person who flipped the pantomime favourite
Snow White
on its head by playing Snow White while the ‘dwarfs’ were all average-sized, and her father, also a little person, was the handsome Prince. The drag king dressed as a giant chicken who still managed to channel Elvis Presley. The numerous nervous young queens who emerged blinking into the light in front of an audience of two thousand raucous punters, like young deer timidly emerging into a forest clearing, and promptly fell down the steps in their unfamiliar high heels with their genitals awkwardly taped between their ass cheeks.

During the contestants’ performances I would sit onstage, on a sofa tucked to one side out of harm’s way, microphone in hand, at the ready to jump in if something went horribly wrong or another nervous Miss came a cropper on a sequin carelessly shed by a previous Miss. Mostly, though, I would sit there drinking and cackling with Dizzy and Dolly, two seen-it-all-before, unimpressed queens in up-dos and diamanté, whose job was
supposed
to be helping queens and their props on and offstage but who kept me and half the audience amused by sneering with their eyes and doing their level best to sabotage most of the acts. Dolly would regularly lean across to me, drink in diamantéd hand, two rheumy eyes suspiciously regarding the ‘arty’ antics of whatever
queen was on stage, and out of the side of her mouth she’d ask, with deliberation, ‘What is this
shit
?’

According to a note I wrote on the back of the programme for the final AMI in 2012, we had seen in total over the years:

• 186 contestants
  
• 634 performances
  
• 79 judges
  
• 4 venues
  
• 21 hissy fits (4 spectacular, 2 legendary, and 1 that involved the police and two ambulances)
  
• 2 snakes
  
• 1 dog
  
• 3 drug tests (1 inconclusive)
  
• 4 genders (all inconclusive)
  
• 1 lesbian punch-up
  
• 1 lesbian make-up
  
• 26 ‘Oh no she didn’t!’
  
• 1 ‘Oh yes she did!’
  
• 3 apoplectic health-and-safety officers
  
• swollen genitals
  
• plenty of bruises
  
• lots of walkouts
  
• countless tears
  
• numerous boo-boos
  
• innumerable disasters
  
• myriad heart-warming moments
  
• 1 accusation of Satanism
  
• 1 police investigation and
  
• 1 jam jar of human poo, which was never explained or returned to its rightful owner
  .
  

Every year the contestants, their themes and performances reflected a changing Ireland and the concerns of the day. The year the scandal of abuse in the Church blew up, the show was a parade of blasphemy and channelled anger, with buggering priests, randy nuns and evil bishops. When the campaign to bring in civil-partnership laws was coming to a head, there were wedding dresses, stage divorces and anti-gay fundamentalists. As the economic boom continued, we started seeing contestants from Poland, Spain, Malaysia and the US, and for many years there was the winner of the Alternative Miss Philippines, a heat organised by the Filipino Nurses Network in Ireland.

In 2012, when she turned eighteen, the Alternative Miss Ireland was as popular as she ever had been, and we decided it was time she moved out of the house and got a job. Eighteen years is a long time to be doing anything and we were tired. It took up an enormous amount of time every year, and it was becoming harder for us, especially as core people from the AMI family had moved to other cities, other countries, or gone from being easygoing students to middle-aged people with careers, kids, businesses and lives.

Also, the pageant had always been about raising money for HIV/AIDS organisations, and over the years, as the nature of the epidemic changed and treatments improved, we saw these organisations change too, shift focus and, in some cases, cease to exist. The nature of the projects we were funding changed, too: they were less urgent. And there was something poetic about finishing on the eighteenth, and something right about ending it when it was still successful and enormously loved. Better to kill her off then than have her slowly die in another ten or fifteen years.

The AMI is gone, but I’m happy to say she’s fondly remembered by all who sailed in her. And she left a legacy, visible in the vibrant Irish drag scene today. The Alternative Miss Ireland helped shine a light on, and give a platform to, a kind of performer that Ireland hadn’t seen much of before and I’m proud of that.

T
HINGS WERE GOING WELL FOR
me in 1996. I was living with Niall and Frank, waiting tables for cash by day and running amok at night. I had no great plan, but I was only twenty-seven and happy yet to work it all out. I was young, I was invincible. I was in my prime.

One day in the spring I went to my doctor, nothing serious, just feeling a little unwell. He ran a few blood tests, nothing serious, just checking some stuff, routine. When the bloods came back he noticed my platelet count was low, nothing serious, could be all sorts of reasons. Still, he might as well do a full screen for everything, you know, just to rule stuff out. HIV infection is one possible explanation but one of many! He’s sure there’s nothing to worry about. But, you know, to be on the safe side and all that. He’ll just do the HIV test. Put my mind at ease, right?

A few days later he called me. He told me he had the results and asked me to come in at the end of the day – which I
now
know is a bad sign. (He knows this might take time and could be messy so he doesn’t want a waiting room of people outside.) It was a lovely warm sunny day, the kind of spring day that speaks of approaching summer and lifts your mood. I walked to his office near Grafton Street, the spring in my step, unconcerned. I’d come of age in the era of HIV, the panic, the scares and the ads on TV. Safe sex wasn’t something I’d had to adjust to, it just
was
. It was second nature, just how things were.

My doctor is a nice man – cheerful, kind, thoughtful. A little tubby. I don’t know much about his private life but he’s a father, he likes motorbikes, and he told me I was going to die.

Of course that’s not what he said, but that’s what I heard, that’s what I understood. What he actually said was that the test had come back positive for HIV.

For a fraction of a moment, an insta-second, I could see where I was with absolute clarity. I could see each item on his desk – the stapler, the notebook, the pen that lay askew against a desk calendar. I could sense the room around me, the closed door behind me, the chart on the wall. I could feel how much space I was taking up in the room, the air I had displaced from it with my infected body. And I could see the nice doctor sitting on his chair, facing me directly, leaning slightly forward – concerned, kind, uncomfortable. Waiting to see how I’d react, how bad it was going to be. I felt sorry for him.

He said something about a false positive being a possibility so they’d have to redo the test, but it was clear he didn’t believe that for a moment. He started to explain some things but I wasn’t really listening and didn’t need to. I was a twenty-seven-year-old gay guy. I knew people who were sick, I knew people who had died, I’d been to AIDS funerals. I was under absolutely no illusions about what this meant. This was a death sentence. I was going to die. And it wasn’t going to be a nice Hollywood passing away, it would be an ugly death. Gaunt and skin-marked. Without even the dignity of battle with a named disease, a proper noun I could rage at. I wouldn’t be stoically battling cancer, or heroically grappling leukaemia, I’d be brought low by a vague syndrome. Hobbled by ridiculous, weird, old-timey afflictions, like tuberculosis, Kaposi’s sarcoma, salmonella. It would be painful, slow, grasping and hidden. People would be afraid of me. Friends would talk of it quietly and carefully, away from prying ears. My family would be guarded but the neighbours would talk anyway. And sympathy would be shaded – because hadn’t I brought this on myself?

The doctor made an appointment for me at the hospital and gave me a strong sedative so I would sleep that night. I walked out into the warm, bright afternoon. The streets were busy with office workers heading home and people nipping in and out of shops before they closed. I crossed Grafton Street, and as I passed a flower-seller who was trying to shift her last bunches with end-of-day
prices, she smiled at me, recognising me as a familiar face. I wanted to tell her I was dying. I wanted to tell
everybody
I was dying. I wanted to stand there in the middle of the hurrying, sun-squinting crowd, and scream, ‘I’M FUCKING DYING!’ I was suddenly angry. Angry at these shoppers and homeward-bound workers. I was angry that they were going about their business as if everything was completely normal, acting like the world hadn’t just been turned upside down. I was angry that they were worrying about missing the next bus, angry that they were wondering if it was too soon to text that guy, angry they weren’t all stopped and trying to breathe or not breathe, cry or not cry, scream or not scream. I wanted to grab a passing woman and shake her. ‘How can you be buying a fucking Marks & Spencer cottage pie when I’m fucking
dying
?’