Woman in the Making: Panti's Memoir (19 page)

In the seven years since, we’ve gone on to make
four more shows together –
All Dolled Up
,
A Woman In Progress
,
Restitched
and
High Heels In Low Places
. We’ve done fringe festivals and main festivals and ended up in the national theatre. We’ve carted a set across Australia twice, and watched with raised eyebrows as middle-aged middle-class ladies filled the seats in Paris. We’ve played in an inflatable theatre in Brighton and taken our stand-up show to Vicar Street. It’s been an amazing, rewarding and exciting journey.

When you step onto a stage, alone, in a theatre, it’s an intense experience. The audience is sitting in the dark, facing you, silent and expectant. They have paid to come and see you; they’ve taken cars and buses and trains, and now they’re there, waiting. Waiting for you to entertain them, to enlighten them, to make them laugh or cry or think. Waiting for you to make them
feel
. You are in a crowded room and yet you are entirely alone, and for a moment you stand there, in the glare of the light, sensing the audience more than seeing them. You feel like you’re in an empty roller-coaster car, poised at the very top of its arc, the adrenalin coursing through you as it tilts forward. Then you open your mouth to speak and the car rolls over the edge and the next ninety minutes is a blur as the car falls along the framework of the words you wrote and rehearsed.

In some ways it’s terrifying, but in others, for someone who came from a nightclub background, it’s liberating. When you’re performing in a noisy club or a
boozy cabaret the audience have distractions – there are drinks to be ordered, toilets to go to, friends to greet, boys to flirt with – so as a performer you compete with these distractions by being big and bold and loud. There is no room for subtlety. But in the theatre the audience is quiet and undistracted, and is expected to be. In the theatre the performer can be small; in the theatre you can whisper. In a nightclub a gesture needs to be big and broad, but in the theatre a tiny movement of a single finger can tell a story.

Back in 2007 when I wrote my first theatre show I wasn’t only looking to make artistic changes. As I pushed past my mid-thirties, I started to consider my future because, thanks to my magic pill, I suddenly had one to consider. I had been working hard for all these years but I had nothing to show for it. All around me the Celtic Tiger (then in its last gasp, unbeknown to us) was flashing its cash, driving its fancy cars and counting its shares, and I had nothing, apart from a box full of wigs and a bag full of costume jewellery.

I lived in a crummy rented flat, I didn’t own a car and I had no savings. I had spent fifteen years filling the venues and the pockets of club owners and promoters, yet the one time I enquired about getting a mortgage, the lady across the desk looked at me, a drag queen with no steady income and a life-threatening condition, and shook her head. I needed to make some changes.

There aren’t many obvious options for a middle-aged drag queen, except to keep plugging away, keep taking
those gigs, keep hustling. Then one day I was in a burger joint on Camden Street, being interviewed by a journalist for something or other, when the owner of the place came by. Jay Bourke was a well-known entrepreneur with a string of bars and restaurants all over the country. I knew him because he had originally owned the well-known Dublin bar The Front Lounge and had hired me to host a weekly show there. Seven years later, when we met in his burger place, I was still hosting it, but he would also have been familiar with various other clubs and events I was involved with, like H.A.M. and the Alternative Miss Ireland.

‘How would you like to open a gay bar?’ he said.

Jay and his business partner had owned a handsome corner bar on Capel Street for ten years. It had started out as a fashionable straight bar but struggled to find a crowd on the less fashionable northside. The Front Lounge had found success by slowly and organically becoming a gay bar, and so Jay had turned his Capel Street bar into a gay bar too, and for a few years it did fine. But eventually it struggled to hold onto the gays, and by the time I met Jay that afternoon it had been sitting empty and closed for months.

Opening your own place is one of the obvious, but daunting, options for an ageing drag queen. What did I know about running a bar? Oh, I had spent my working life in bars and clubs but what did I know about the everyday mechanics of running one? About beer taps
and gas and kegs and deliveries? Nothing. What did I know about the business or legal end of it, our arcane licensing laws? Nothing. And where the fuck would I get the money to invest in a bar? From nobody in their right mind, that’s who.

But I could get a manager who knew about beer taps and deliveries, and I could learn. I’d partner with Jay and he could look after the licensing applications and the ‘late-night exemptions’. And the money? Well, it turned out that nobody in their right minds was in charge of the banks in 2007. So all I’d need to do was get people in the door and the Lord knows I’d been doing that for long enough, except now it’d be my door. And so, after much discussion with friends and my father, I became a pub landlady.

The first job was to find a manager, someone who knew what he was doing. I asked around, and someone suggested a restaurant manager called Shane Harte. And I remembered sitting on the edge of his bed ten years earlier, my head in my hands, crying because I’d just told him I was HIV positive.

Sometimes I’m accused of having talents. That I’m a good speaker, or a good performer, maybe not a terrible writer. But I think my real talent is in finding good people to work with, then letting them do what they’re good at. I put my image in Niall’s hands, my shows in Phillip’s hands and I put my bar in Shane’s hands. Because my name is above the door I’m often given
credit for everything good about Pantibar, but it’s really Shane who deserves most of the credit.

Opening a business is exciting and exhausting, and for the first two years Shane and I spent almost every minute of every day at Pantibar. We painted walls and fixed pumps and ripped out bars, and I learned to change kegs, cash up and pull pints. It wasn’t easy. Six months after we opened in November 2007, the economy imploded, people stopped going out, and over the next couple of years half our customers emigrated. And although we were only fifty metres from the river, we were fifty metres from the
wrong side
of the river. The river was a psychological barrier to the gays who were comfortable in their south-of-the-river gay triangle and it took us years to make them comfortable crossing the invisible north/south divide.

We struggled to survive and, on a couple of occasions, came within a hair’s breadth of closing, but we worked our asses off and kept changing things and trying new things. We did open-mic nights and ‘bear’ nights and club nights in the basement. We did craft nights and live music events and comedy nights and movie nights. We did Eurovision parties and quiet afternoon pints, and wrangled with the neighbours about late nights.

We decorated and redecorated and decorated again. We had break-ins and floods, and one day the ‘head shop’ across the road was set fire to and three buildings went up in flames. It was exciting and exhausting
and frustrating and worrying. And we survived and eventually thrived, and now, seven years later, Pantibar is stronger than ever. Most of the staff have now been with us for years and are like family. They work hard and play hard, and send pictures home to their mothers in Brazil of the giant drag queen they work for. I do my silly bar show there every Saturday, but now it runs so smoothly and the staff are so great I can tour my theatre show in Australia for a month, or take time out to write a book, and know that everything is under control.

I
SOMETIMES WONDER WHO
I might have been had I been heterosexual. What kind of person might I have turned out to be, had I not been flaming? I suspect I might not like me very much. Perhaps that’s unfair on Straight Me, but there’s no doubt that all the conditions would have been there for Straight Me to be a jerk.

Straight Me would have been dangerously comfortable in the world. Born into a nice middle-class family, never spoiled but never without, smart enough (and encouraged enough) to do well in school and go to university, and afterwards a good job in a good company almost by birthright. Not a model, but decent-looking, healthy, good at football, with nothing to put me in the firing line of schoolyard taunts or adult discomfort – no disability, no speech impediment, no fatness, no buck teeth or gammy eye. I’d have the right accent, the right qualifications and the right genitals to be taken seriously by the world.

I would speak and people would listen. I would be fully participant in the world because the world was built for me by people like me. I would vote in elections because my opinion was important, and I would vote not to change things but to keep them the same. Why wouldn’t I? The world would have been perfect already, and I perfectly comfortable in it. And Perfectly Comfortable Straight Me would have had no ability – and maybe no inclination – to understand or empathise with people who weren’t so comfortable in a world that hadn’t been built for them.

Yes, I know, I’m being unfair on Straight Me because he would have been raised by the same decent parents, had the same Traveller neighbours, the same trips with Dad to the home for the mentally disabled, his pockets full of Milky Moos to share, but still … I can’t help but wonder if I’d have turned out to be a dick.

Most of the things I like about me are rooted in my difference. I like the fact that I like the misfits and the oddballs and the freaks. I like that I like the fey fella who marches down Capel Street wearing a Panama hat, long silk scarves, pastel slacks with homemade piping made of ribbon up the side, and medals pinned to his chest. Even as a kid I didn’t want to flick spit balls onto the back of the witch who lived in the funny little house with the dark windows you couldn’t see in on the way home from school. I wanted to go home with her and learn to make potions. I like the fact that I’m not threatened by people who are different. I like the fact that I have Chinese neighbours, that my local Italian restaurant is
staffed by Filipinas, and that there’s a mosque on my street that spills handsome men onto the pavement on Fridays. And I like the fact that I’m willing to imagine that the way things have always been is not necessarily the best way.

I like the fact that, for a change, one Sunday ten-year-old me went to the Protestant church instead, just to see what their mass was like, and the small group of mostly elderly ladies wondered where this strange child had come from while I stood with my hands behind my back and smiled at them and decided it smelt different from our church.

And when I was old enough to understand what it was that was different about me, old enough to understand my gayness, it liberated me from assumptions. My gayness made me question everything around me, everything I’d been told, everything I’d taken for granted, because if everything I’d ever been told about being gay had been wrong – and it had – then couldn’t everything else I’d ever been told be wrong? Being gay made me think.

And the underground gay Clubland I discovered was populated by people just like me. People who’d rejected everything they’d been expected to take for granted, and who’d found a place full of people just like them, where the rules were vague, made up as they went along, where creativity and outrageous investigation were prized above all else, where even gender was up for grabs. A place with its own secret codes, full of people who’d thrown off everything to be there, and now that
they were, they were doing it their way, with disco and hanky codes, with poppers and sidelong glances.

When I found this world I exploded, and in its heady atmosphere of sex and colour, creativity and fun I continued to question everything I’d ever been told. I threw myself into its every dark and exciting corner. I revelled in the lights, the music, the smoke, the fun and the sex. And every sex act was a liberation, another push to question everything, to accept nothing as given, to assume everything is unproven till I’d worked it out for myself. I was young and gay and free, proving to myself, and the world, that everything you’d ever told me about sex and my sexuality was bullshit! ‘Fuck you and your Popemobile!’ I was saying to the world every time I got fucked.

My gayness had propelled me into this exciting new world and it was my gayness that gave me the freedom and the courage to make up my own mind about everything. And I did. We did. Being gay pushed us to think, and from it came a maelstrom of creativity, art, politics and passion. A lust for life and all it could be.

And I wouldn’t change a single thing about it, because I was forged in that chaotic world and it made me the person I am today.

But in 2008 I didn’t recognise the new gay world that had started to develop around me. Gay culture was changing and most of the younger gays seemed more interested in gym membership and fancy cocktails than changing the world. I had just turned forty and
felt I should be putting my feet up in a world I had done my tiny bit to create, but instead my world was disappearing, leaving me stranded, cast away. I was a relic of a disappearing world. A fucking dinosaur. Granted, I was a bloody gorgeous dinosaur, but I wasn’t meant to be a dinosaur!

Being gay had saved me, but this New Gay was killing me.

Because the New Gay was the opposite of creativity, the opposite of passion. It was an inoffensive, sickly sweet candyfloss of blandness created by corporations and devoured by thoughtless youth.

The gay culture that had rescued me was being replaced by a culture that questioned nothing. The New Gay didn’t question, didn’t search – Google did that. It had the whole world at its mouse tips but it only clicked on Hannah bloody Montana. Fifteen-year-old me, starved of anything that reflected me, read and re-read the section on homosexuality in Desmond Morris’s
The Naked Ape
, thrilling at the clinical descriptions of sex acts, excited by the (mostly) non-judgemental tone, clutching at the hard evidence of a gay world somewhere ‘out there’. But in 2008, any fourteen-year-old could watch Brazilian boys fucking each other before reading all about Stephen Gately’s painful break-up in
Heat
magazine.