Woman in the Making: Panti's Memoir (27 page)

There is a tension between that and the ‘new Panti’. Can you still be transgressive and discombobulating when you are on the cover of
VIP
magazine and accepting awards from universities? Can you still be an outsider artist and do a ‘Paint Along With Panti’ event for kids in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art? It’s a question I’m still working out the answer to.

Pantigate and the Noble Call have also given me new opportunities. I get invited to speak all over the country and around the world, and I’m still amazed and grateful that students in Montréal or gays in Berlin are interested
in what I have to say. Venues that previously wouldn’t have considered booking my show are now eager to have me, and I’m also grateful for that. And if it weren’t for that Abbey speech you’d be reading
Fifty Shades of Grey
right now, not the ramblings of a middle-aged drag queen with ‘notions’, and for that I can only apologise.

At the height of Pantigate when I was doing the rounds of radio studios and reporters’ Dictaphones, fighting for my reputation and struggling to get out from under the weight of solicitors’ letters, part of my strategy was to level the playing field by personalising RTÉ. In Ireland people talk of RTÉ, the national broadcaster, as a kind of monolith. A powerful hive mind. It is seen as a big, powerful organisation that speaks with authority, and I knew that to be an entirely false impression. I knew that RTÉ was just a sprawling building full of regular people – some efficient, some smart, some inept, most of them nice. People who were just getting on with their jobs and wondering what to make for dinner.

But that’s not how people see it. ‘RTÉ’ makes decisions, not some guy at a desk who just remembered he was supposed to pick the kids up from Irish dancing class (‘Fuck!’). RTÉ ‘issues statements’, instead of a woman from Portarlington with a desk fan and a hangover, who answered the phone. And while I knew there were advantages in being seen as the plucky underdog, I also knew it was working against me. There was a perception that if RTÉ had caved in to the complainants’ demands
then surely they must have been right. That drag queen
must
have said something terrible. So I deliberately set out to bring RTÉ down to my size. To pull back the curtain and show the Wizard of Oz frantically twirling his knobs.

To do that I took every opportunity to ridicule RTÉ’s legal department and point out the shortcomings of their advice – it wasn’t hard. By any measure, the whole affair had been an unmitigated disaster for RTÉ. Their legal team had managed to turn a small, annoying kerfuffle into a PR catastrophe that ended up making their employers look spineless, and become the focus of anger, protests and ridicule. They gave RTÉ’s commercial competitors the opportunity to pile on and give them a good kicking, created angry in-house tension between staff and management and, for good measure, destroyed the trust RTÉ had worked hard to build with the LGBT community.

My other strategy in interviews was to go around the important-sounding corporation ‘RTÉ’ straight to the ordinary-sounding Glen Killane, the managing director of television. I stopped talking about how RTÉ had treated me and spoke instead about how Glen Killane had treated me. I said I was looking for an apology for the attempt to throw me under the bus. I said I wasn’t looking for a public apology and I wasn’t interested in lawyers. A simple phone call would do. He should apologise, I said, because ‘if he asked his mother what he should do, she’d tell him he should’. But I wasn’t
simply doing it as a fighting strategy. I also believed it. I
had
been treated badly by RTÉ and, no matter what the eventual outcome, I deserved an apology. And no doubt Glen Killane was under all sorts of pressure to make the decisions he did – and no doubt he was led awry by his legal advice – but he was the one holding the mishandled can. An apology from the cleaner wasn’t going to cut it.

A few weeks after the media spotlight had moved on, Glen called and asked me to meet him for coffee. He didn’t ask me to come out to RTÉ but said he’d come into town to meet me. I took that as a good sign. We met at a busy city-centre café and Glen joined the long queue to get the coffees. I took that to be a good sign too. I liked him. He seemed like a good guy. It just happened that we’d ended up on opposite sides of a shit-storm. We had a good chat. Explained each other’s side of things, man to drag queen. We were never going to agree about some things but, as the kids say, ‘We were good.’

As we stood up to leave and I was putting on my jacket, a young woman approached me. ‘Sorry, I don’t mean to interrupt,’ she said, ‘but I wanted to give you this.’ She handed me a folded page torn from a notebook and walked away. Standing beside Glen, I opened it and written in pencil was a sweet note saying something nice about me, and declaring her to be on Team Panti.

I looked at Glen with a smirk. ‘That happens all the time now.’

R
U
P
AUL ONCE SAID
, ‘W
E
’
RE BORN
naked, the rest is drag,’ and she’s right. We all play different roles, presenting different versions of ourselves to different audiences. Parent, colleague, boss, friend, sibling, neighbour, adversary: all of them us, each different. Public faces and private faces that we dress accordingly. The polite woman who turns up at the parent-teacher meeting, in her nice blouse and her hair in a neat ponytail, is a very different person from the tired, bedraggled woman eating Jaffa Cake crumbs off her bobbled leggings in front of
EastEnders
. The crude bloke on the building site making wisecracks with his mates over today’s page three is a very different guy from the charming boyfriend taking his new girlfriend out for a meal later. The silly face-pulling dad helping his daughter find her Dora the Explorer schoolbag in the morning is a different man from the sober-suited
one sitting opposite his bank manager that afternoon. The serious, capable woman in the Monday-morning meeting is unrecognisable from the woman who was hanging over a balcony in a nightclub in Ibiza with a glass of vodka in her hand only two nights previously.

Drag queens do it too. It’s just that our public faces are even more deliberate, more clearly defined, sharply delineated with lip-liner and eyebrow pencil. No less real, no less
us
, just packaged differently.

In a way, being a drag queen is like living two parallel lives. One you would recognise: it begins when a vet’s wife holds her little gay baby in a Galway hospital and ends, I suspect, mundanely. The other, like a comet, appears suddenly and explodes across the nightlife sky in a shower of glitter and eyelashes. Its life is shorter, but burns more brightly. It is true to say that I breathed life into Panti, but it is equally true to say that she breathed life into
me
. She coloured me. She made me a better person – and somehow managed to pay my bills along the way while she was at it. Sure, she’s brought me some trouble and a few heartaches over the years – attracting the attention of lawyers and scaring off a few boyfriends – but all of that pales in comparison to what she’s given me. It was more than I could ever have imagined when I first pulled on a sticky dress made of surgical gloves in art college: friends, opportunities, courage, adventures, fun.

And, boy, it’s been fun! I’ve tumbled off tabletops in crowded bars, and got first-aid tips from Diana Ross.
I’ve performed in the day ward of an old folks’ home and in art galleries in Tokyo, on upturned beer crates in tiny basement bars and on huge floats in the St Patrick’s Day parade. I’ve pushed Cyndi Lauper onstage in a wheelchair and been remixed by the Pet Shop Boys. I’ve performed sellout shows on the stages of grand venues and turned up at crappy nightclubs to discover they don’t even have a stage. I’ve fallen into dressing rooms exhausted, in corset-induced agony, but howling with laughter. I’ve entertained in London, Melbourne and Paris, and horrified in Limerick, Derry and Hobart. And I wouldn’t change a thing.

I don’t know who or what I’d be without Panti, but I know I wouldn’t be happier. She liberated me, and for that, I can only thank her.

T
HIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN UNCOMFORTABLY
on planes, trains and automobiles, in snatched moments in dressing rooms and hotel rooms, and in late night bursts with my dog Penny on my lap. That it ever made it to book form at all is some kind of miracle, but that miracle only happened with the invaluable help of other people.

My editor at Hachette Ciara Considine, who first proposed I write this book, mostly managed to hide the panic when I would disappear for days on end, and she adjusted admirably quickly to getting chapters e-mailed to her at 5 a.m. I am indebted to her for her patience, as much as for her advice and guidance.

You wouldn’t be reading this book without the poking, prodding, cajoling and advice of my great friend and longtime collaborator Phillip McMahon either, who knows my own stories better than I do. How
I ever managed to do anything before I met him I don’t remember.

The book wouldn’t look as gorgeous as it does without the immense talent and huge patience of graphic designer Niall Sweeney, who hasn’t just been a great friend and partner in crime for over twenty years, but has also made Panti look much more beautiful than she really is for over twenty years.

And if you hate this book you can take it up with my agent Faith O’Grady, because apart from encouraging me all the way through, she’s the one who got me to agree to do it in the first place.

¹
Sadly, Leigh died of an AIDS-related illness, in 1994, aged 33.

²
In 2014, after losing some of their major sponsors over the ban, the parade organisers agreed to let one LGBT group from within NBC, who broadcast the parade, march.

Making my Confirmation in brown corduroy and green tweed, with my parents and three sisters.

Lounging in the garden in sunny Ballinrobe in a favourite shirt, a gift from glamorous Aunty Qy.

After my oldest brother Lorcan went away to school in Canada, it was rare to have the whole family together, so those occasions were usually photographed for posterity.