Woman in the Making: Panti's Memoir by Rory O'Neill

Simpson, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Kool & The Gang, Chaka Khan, Deniece Williams, and Pointer Sisters special imports.
    There was sex, too, of course. If you weren’t dancing you were cruising – leaning oh-so-casually against the wall, cradling your tepid glass, your eyes smarting from cigarette smoke and Giorgio For Men, scanning the room with studied nonchalance, rigorously avoiding eye contact with the creepy old fella to the left (you didn’t want to encourage him) while hoping (in vain) that the hot dark-haired guy in the white denim jacket, who, someone once told you, was a ‘part-time’ model, might notice you and give you the return glance that letyou know you were in with a shot. If you were lucky you might catch the eye of some guy with a moustache and a bedsit on the South Circular Road, but even if he lived at home with his mammy or his wife you could always go to the ladies’ toilet for a quick fumble and a clumsy snog. There wasn’t much call for a ladies’ toilet in Minsky’s so an enterprising queen had usually removed the light bulb.
    Past the toilets was the door out to a back laneway, which, in those days before the smoking ban, was used in the summer months for cruising and making out – to everyone’s mischievous delight, because the lane was overlooked by the offices of Opus Dei.
    Excitingly, here in the gay demi-monde, all the things that marked me out as weird or different in the regular straight world didn’t matter at all. In fact, everything that was ‘wrong’ about me out there wasn’t just OK here in Minsky’s, it was ‘right’ – it just made me an even better gay. Knowing all the words to ‘Wham! Rap’ didn’t make me a poncy faggot, it made me a fun faggot! Having a strong opinion on the Madonna vs Cyndi Lauper debate wasn’t suspiciously gay, it was
de rigueur
. (The gays even used French in casual conversation!) No one in Minsky’s was ever going to ask me whether I’d seen the match last night, and if they did I’d have gone looking for Derry the owner to tell him I thought maybe one of the Opus Dei people was in on a spying mission. Of course the gays had – and still have – their own hang-upsabout masculinity, but they mostly concern whether or not they want to sleep with you or introduce you to their parents, and on the dance floor at Minsky’s I was free to be me without fear or favour.
    The community I had discovered under the mirrorball was a much more democratic society than the daytime world outside. Or, at least, the hierarchies the gays had developed were entirely different from those outside. They were custom-made – of the gays, by the gays, for the gays, one ‘gaytion’ under Olivia Newton-John. Outside, people were socially sorted by seemingly random attributes. Being good at sports, especially field sports, conferred sometimes stratospheric status on men in the regular world, even though it seemed unlikely that an ability to play football well was ever going to save a baby from a burning skyscraper. Owning particular kinds of cars was respected. I am always terrified that one day I will witness a horrible crime and see the perpetrator drive off in the getaway car. When the police ask me what kind of car it was, all I’ll be able to mumble is that it was the same colour as those cute shorts I got in Sitges three years ago. In the heterosexual world, on the other side of Minsky’s Georgian door, being Bono was something, whereas on the homosexual side of Minsky’s door the only member of U2 who even came
close
to mattering was Larry, the hot one.
    Being hot counted for a lot. If you were hot, no one cared whether you drove a Ferrari or cycled a bicycle – aFerrari wasn’t going to fuck you all night long, then ask you for its bus fare home in the morning. The scene had its hot stars – the sexy moustachioed ‘clone’ or the snake-hipped blond ‘twink’ – but all gay life was represented and the democracy of hotness, combined with the