Woman in the Making: Panti's Memoir (4 page)

Our days were spent in Clearasil-smelling herds, prodded from dorm to canteen (there’s bloody Jesus again) to class (hello again, gruesome Jesus) to football field (phew!) to study hall (there he is again). So even if two horny, confused, excited farmers’ sons wanted to
compare erections, the opportunities to do so in peace were very few and very far between. Oh, I’m sure they did from time to time – that’s what hormone-addled boys in all-male environments do and, as Jeff Goldblum astutely points out in
Jurassic Park
, ‘Life finds a way’ – but it certainly wasn’t common and most certainly wasn’t boasted about.

In my own case it only ever happened with one boy that I remember. He was one of the alpha-males, a popular member of the Gaelic team, and during second year, out of the blue, he appeared in the dark during the night and sat on my bed and we clumsily and silently rubbed each other’s erections. I don’t even remember if we kissed or even if we fellated each other, but I do remember the musky, slightly acrid smell of his skin so I guess I kissed something. It happened a couple more times after that, the same way. But he was one of those boys who never got over the homesickness, and although he was a tough guy during the day, at night he’d often cry himself to sleep. After one summer holiday he didn’t come back. Mostly my homosexuality was confined to occasional crushes on handsome older boys about whom I’d occasionally have cheesy romantic Mills & Boon fantasies, and about whom I’d occasionally masturbate.

At some point every year the first-years (or ‘preps’) would go through a ‘bender’ phase, even though we only had the vaguest idea of what homosexuals were or did. For a short time all the jokes would be about homos –

‘Did you hear there’s a queer in our year?’

‘Who?’

‘Give us a kiss and I’ll tell ya!’

– and before ‘lights out’ the dormitory would be filled with homoerotic grappling, ‘pile-ons’, with studiously ignored hard-ons, and good-natured claims and counterclaims of ‘Bender!’ and ‘Puff!’ And then, as quickly as it started, it would pass and never be mentioned again. Till next year’s first-years had their bender phase.

And yet, even in this repressed, sexually innocent atmosphere, everyone knew what went on in Father Ronald’s office. The pupils knew, the other Franciscans knew, the staff knew. Everyone knew.

There were a couple of priests or brothers who had reputations for being a bit too touchy-feely, but for the most part it seemed fairly benign – lonely unmarried men who perhaps enjoyed a hug as a fairly rare moment of human contact. But Father Ronald was different.

Father Ronald was a balding, grey-haired, chubby man in his fifties with thick-rimmed glasses, who, among other things, was the school bursar (if you needed money you would go to his office and plead your case, and he would debit your account in a little notebook) and, bizarrely, the school sex-education teacher. Every boy in the school was occasionally called to Father Ronald’s office for ‘the talk’. His voice would come over the Tannoy system during ‘study’, and as the named boy got up from his desk to
make his way out of the hall, two hundred boys would pull rapidly at their cheeks making a masturbation sound while the friar on duty glared down at us till silence was restored. After ‘study’ when the boy was back, we’d gather round and ask him if Father Ronald had touched him, and if he had what he’d done, and laugh about it because we didn’t know what else we were supposed to do.

For me and my friends, Father Ronald was little more than a creepy unpleasantness. A necessary evil. I would realise I needed money for something and, with the resigned dread of a poorly prepared student going to an exam, I would slouch to his office, press the buzzer and watch the little traffic lights that were outside his and all the other friars’ offices. If the red light came on it meant, ‘Go away, I’m busy’. If the orange light came on it meant, ‘Wait a minute’, and if the green light came on it meant, ‘Come in’. For the most part I escaped unscathed from my visits to Father Ronald’s office. Once, during one of my two sex-education ‘talks’, he asked me if my friends and I ever pulled each other’s Speedos down in the pool, told me we should shower naked together, then demonstrated how I should tuck my shirt, pushing my shirt tail into my underpants with his meaty hands. It was creepy, uncomfortable and embarrassing, but afterwards I told my friends about it and we joked and made puking noises about Ronnie the Bender.

Other boys were not so lucky. We all knew that Father Ronald paid particular attention to certain boys, but the
details were vague. Those boys didn’t laugh and joke about it, and some innate sense in us told us not to ask. Once, one of the quietest, most naïve, most sheltered boys in the school, who wore ironed slacks every day, had no real friends and spoke to his mother on the phone every evening (it was rumoured she told him what clothes to wear the next day), came back into the study hall after a visit to Father Ronald’s office and, as usual, we all started to make masturbation sounds. Until we realised the boy was sobbing crying. And the cacophony of stupid masturbation sounds subsided till all that was left was a confused, embarrassed silence, punctuated by a lonely boy’s stifled sobs.

Sex and sexuality were just too confusing and too alien in school to deal with properly, so for the most part I simply ignored them. Of course, as I went through my teenage years I started to suspect I might be gay, but it was still such an alien concept, so foreign, so removed from my actual experience, that I mostly buried these uncomfortable suspicions. I’d never met or even, for sure,
seen
a real, actual, bona fide homosexual so the idea that I might actually
be
one was almost impossible to process. I might equally have wondered if I were a unicorn. I wasn’t totally sure gays
actually
existed. I couldn’t be entirely sure they weren’t just made up, invented to be the subject of schoolyard jokes and played for smutty laughs on sitcoms.

There were no gays in my world. No hairdresser with trendy tattoos in my mother’s local salon, no
lesbian couple breeding dogs on my father’s client list, no Graham Nortons being casually gay on the telly, no Will Youngs singing about boyfriends on the radio, no Anna Nolans being a ‘lesbian nun’ on
Big Brother
. Even my toothy, tanned, big-haired and short-shorted George Michael was straight. There was only Mr Humphries, swishing and flapping his way through Grace Brothers’ department store leaving a trail of canned laughter in his wake.

There were, of course, gays to be seen on TV and in magazines, but either they didn’t identify themselves as gay or we simply didn’t recognise them as such. When Village People appeared on the telly in the late seventies, the boys of Ballinrobe’s Christian Brothers primary school just thought of them as a gang of fun guys in crazy outfits. We simply had no frame of reference for leather queens. When Boy George first appeared on
Top of the Pops
, the next day in the schoolyard the big discussion was whether he was a girl or a boy – the idea that he might simply be a flaming queen never entered our minds. It may seem incredible now that we didn’t simply assume Larry Grayson or Kenny Everett or Vincent Hanley were gay, but they weren’t casually referring to hot guys on chat shows or discussing husbands in the TV guide, and what did an eleven-year-old boy in Ballinrobe, County Mayo, know about moustaches or check shirts or faded jeans or any of the other tell-tale signs of urban homosexuality? Absolutely nothing.

It was my parents’ library that first confirmed for me the existence of gay men. Among the books I discovered a yellow-paged, dog-eared copy of
The Naked Ape
by zoologist Desmond Morris. Morris’s book was one of the first popular science books to look at humans as an animal species and compare them to other animals and, as any curious boy would, I skipped the boring parts and went straight to the chapter on sexuality. Within that chapter there was a section on homosexuality, a revelation to pubescent me. Morris described calmly and matter-of-factly what homosexuals were and what they did. There were some dodgy 1960s Freudian comments on what might cause homosexuality in males (domineering mothers, weak fathers, etc.), but other than that, he mostly presented gays as facts rather than opinions. There was no judgement. For the first time ever, not only did I have solid proof that gay people existed but, even more thrillingly, here was someone – an obviously smart and respected man – who wasn’t laughing at homosexuals, judging them or denouncing them. He was simply describing them. In fact he went as far as to say that, from a detached zoological perspective, there was nothing to judge and that, in some particular situations, it could even be argued that homosexuality was biologically ‘moral’. It excited me so much that I read it over and over again, sexually aroused and intellectually giddy. Here was
what
I was, reflected back at me in black and yellowed white, and it was as thrilling
as it was terrifying. So terrifying that I’d slam the book shut, shove it back under my bed and try to forget about it till the next time I crawled under to get it with my heart in my gay mouth.

But in school I pushed all that to the back of my mind and got on with the boring business of being a schoolboy. However, that didn’t stop the vague feeling that had started back in primary school in Ballinrobe from beginning to crystallise: that I didn’t entirely belong. That I felt different from most of the other boys. Although in retrospect I know that much of that was down to my sexuality, it was heightened by a school that had a narrow idea of what it meant to be a boy, and an Irish boy in particular.

Irish boys played Gaelic football so we were forced out to play Gaelic football, no matter how much we hated it (rugby and soccer were strictly forbidden, being tainted with Englishness and Protestantism – though somehow tennis was fine), and I would stand around on the side of the pitch, miserable, cold and pissed off, wasting my time, learning absolutely nothing, except how much I hated that stupid game, a hatred I had plenty of time to nurture and care for, standing there in the drizzle.

Irish boys didn’t do art. The visual arts were generally suspect and probably foreign, and certainly
smart
Irish boys didn’t do art. So I studied art on my own at night and sat the Leaving Cert art exam alone in an empty exam hall.

And Irish boys liked AC/DC, Led Zeppelin and U2 and possibly, at a stretch, Queen (though that Freddie Mercury was a bit weird. He wasn’t gay, ’cos he had a moustache and obviously gays didn’t have moustaches but, still, there was something queer about him). They definitely didn’t listen to The Jacksons, Howard Jones and The Thomson Twins, or jump around singing ‘Holiday’ by that new girl Madonna.

Boarding school taught me to survive on my own. It also taught me that apparently, like Michael Jackson, I wasn’t like other boys.

I
WAS ALWAYS RATHER PROUD
of the fact that Ballinrobe had given a word to the English language. It was – and still is – a piece of trivia I wield defensively whenever someone (usually from a dull Dublin suburb) tries to denigrate my generally unremarkable but handsome hometown: ‘Has Stillorgan given a word to the English language? No, it bloody hasn’t!’

And not just any word either. Not some common-as-muck noun, no fly-by-night adjective, no here-today-gone-tomorrow slang enjoying its brief fifteen minutes in the
Oxford English Dictionary
, but a proper word, an everyday word, a verb, even, and a verb with such weight of meaning that you can’t even imagine how the language got along without it before Ballinrobe gave it to the world in 1880.

Seriously, what did people in 1879 say instead of ‘boycott’?

Captain Boycott was the unpopular British land agent for an absentee landlord in Ballinrobe, and in 1880 the local people began a campaign of isolation against him, refusing to labour in his fields, serve him in local shops or shoe his horses. When Boycott wrote to
The Times
in London his case became famous and troops were drafted in, but by then a campaign of ‘boycotts’ had started to spread across the country, and Ballinrobe was already smugly looking down its nose at ‘metrosexual’ and ‘selfie’.

Captain Boycott had lived in Lough Mask House, a large, classic Georgian farmhouse, but by the time Ballinrobe heard the pitter-patter of my
tiny
large gay feet, the Dalys lived in it. Mr Daly was a client of my dad’s, but unlike most of my dad’s clients, who eked out precarious livings from Mayo’s stony wet soil with a few hardy sheep and resigned-looking cattle, Mr Daly also had a couple of horses and a long driveway. This exotic combination of horses and driveways meant that whenever our father was going on a ‘call’ to Mr Daly’s we would clamour to go with him. Not that it was terribly exciting (after all, my horse-mad middle brother had a sweet but tired old pony called Toffee Apple, who did her best to ignore us in the field beside the house) but ‘Mr Daly’s’ provoked in us a Pavlovian response of giddy excitement.

Ostensibly we wanted to go so we could ‘drive’ the car. At Mr Daly’s gate, my father would stop the car and put you on his knee so you could clutch the steering wheel
and ‘drive’ up the long grass-and-gravel driveway to the big house, while he worked the pedals and jiggled you on his lap and tickled you and pretended to make you crash the car into the ditch, while my sisters screamed in pretend fear in the back seat. But, really, we just wanted to spend time with our dad. A small-town country vet doesn’t get days off and on the rare occasions he’s at home his small children are often already in bed. So, spending time with our vet dad meant spending time out ‘on call’ with him in his muddy car that smelt of animals and rain, and rattled and clanked with glass bottles of medicine and scary-looking implements, which were covered with dubious dark stains and the gloopy saliva left behind by muscular cow tongues.

At Mr Daly’s I saw a horse being ‘covered’ for the first time. The mare was standing in the centre of the yard, her ripe horse-womanly pheromones clearly driving the prancing, sex-addled stallion wild, his hoofs clattering on the cobbles till eventually he rather clumsily mounted her, his big bouncing rubbery horse-hose seeming to have a mind of its own as it sought out and found her lady bits, while the men stood around chatting and watching with detached interest. The mare didn’t seem to enjoy it much, the stallion was so addled that I doubt he even remembered it, and the men looked as if it fell somewhere between a chore and a local football match. I started out with pretty realistic expectations of sex.