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

small scene, meant that the social demarcations that existed outside were blurred or erased altogether. Barristers hung out with electricians, who dated professors, who fucked taxi drivers, who had affairs with rent boys, who lent money to students, who woke up with an architect, who caught his farmer in the ladies’ toilet with that solicitor who once helped him out for free when he had that bother with the TV licence when he was a poor student. That social free-for-all is one of the great joys of a gay scene. Walk into any straight bar in any city and the patrons will all be roughly the same: roughly the same age, roughly the same social background, with roughly the same accent and roughly the same interests. In a gay bar, Darndale and Dalkey are chewing the face off each other and you can get legal advice or a plumber in the ladies’ toilet.
    I met Gerry and Dennis in Minsky’s. They were a handsome couple, Gerry a TV writer and Dennis an architect, and I fancied both of them. They were good to me, and we would drive out to the edge of the city to see the motorways being built – I thought it was the height of sophistication. Gerry wrote for the hottest show on TV at the time.
Nighthawks
was ground-breaking andhugely popular, part chat show, part soap opera, part sketch show, and when I first started doing drag, Gerry wrote a series of sketches about Sean the Transvestite Farmer. I would get into drag in the RTÉ studios and then we would drive out to a large farm near Maynooth.
    We didn’t want to spook the farmer who owned the place so we would film on days when he was at the mart. Only his confused-looking sons would be there when we spilled out of the car to film in sequins and blond curls. The sketches involved me prancing through fields of sheep lip-syncing to Dusty Springfield’s ‘You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me’ in gold lamé, or strolling through giant sheds full of thousands of gobble-gobbling turkeys with a wistful look in my eye, or polishing the exhaust of my tractor in gold wellington boots, while a voiceover (by the recognisable voice of RTÉ’s then agricultural reporter) would dully intone about the effects of European agricultural policy on farmers like Sean. They weren’t ever going to win any comedy awards but they were good, stupid fun.
    Years later, when I returned to Dublin from Japan in the mid-nineties, one of the first things I did was attend Gerry’s funeral. It was a nice day and a fitting service for a fun, kind, smart guy like Gerry, but his timing was terrible. Gerry was one of the last people I knew who died before HIV treatments started to improve.

6. Making a Show of Myself
    B ACK IN ART SCHOOL I drew and painted and printed, but mostly I just hung out. I lived with friends in grim, mouldy basement flats and drank cheap booze, and when I had to, I made mediocre work. In the summers I would go to France, work on a maize farm (where I had sex in a tent with a girl for the first time, a loud and determined older girl from Leeds, while my friend Liam had sex with her friend in the tent next door) and sell ice creams on the beach.
    My straight college friends were art students and therefore thrilled to have a gay friend until they remembered how annoying I was. Occasionally they would come with me to Minsky’s, enjoying their dips into this cologne-drenched gay secret society. And I became good friends with Niall, the school’s other gay, who, it turned out, had an older boyfriend who managed an arty gay nightclub in town called Sides.
    Sides was the difference between a ‘niteclub’ and
clubbing
. Whereas Minsky’s was the gay cousin of Dublin’s Leeson Street establishments – local, fun, boozy, upholstered, the Nolan Sisters – Sides was clubbing in the new mould: house music, strobe lights, big sound system, stripped-back dance floor and new drugs, the descendant of Studio 54 and The Blitz. Niall would spend endless hours designing and making intricate fliers for