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

glitter and staple-gun parties like the ‘Andy Warhol Obituary Party’ where our friend Wendy did cookery demonstrations that involved shoving things into a microwave and seeing if they exploded. People dressed up – they made costumes and poured paint on themselves, boys wore makeup and put glue in their hair, and one night there was a silly drag party called the Alternative Miss Ireland. It helped to be beautiful at Sides (it helps to be beautiful everywhere) but at Sides for the first time I saw that people could also
make
themselves beautiful. And if they couldn’t quite achieve beauty, well, they could certainly achieve
interesting
–
    ‘
I like your hair.’
    ‘Thanks. I made it out of flour and Monster Munch.’
    ‘You lost a bit at the back.’
    ‘I know. A seagull grabbed it when I got off the bus.’
    After my first year in art school I had decided to eschew fine art for design, and I enjoyed it, even though my work was generally pedestrian. However, by the time I finished my third year, with only one more to go, Irealised I didn’t want to be a graphic designer. In fact, the thought of spending the rest of my life at a drawing table, illustrating cereal boxes for men in suits, filled me with dread. But I had to do just one more year and then I’d at least have my piece of paper to show for my time there. Something for my parents. Now I had to decide what I would do with that final year. What big project would I spend the year working on that would be assessed and judged, and would decide whether or not I was an art-school graduate or an art-school failure? I had no idea but I had the whole summer to think about it.
    Before Ryanair came along the only people who flew off this island were expensive racehorses and landed gentry with monocles so, like everyone else, I took the ferry, then the train, and turned up in Chelsea to stay with my older brother Lorcan, who at the time worked for a famous and moneyed contemporary art gallery.
    That first night Lorcan threw a party. In the kitchen I came across a large, imposing Australian, who was wearing a ridiculous wig and a tweed jacket that appeared to have tiny swastikas embroidered all over it. He was holding forth loudly in a good-humoured argument over his sartorial choices, defending the offending jacket on the basis that the swastika was, after all, a Hindu symbol meaning ‘wellbeing’ and other people’s ignorance was none of his business.
    That was Leigh Bowery. As an art student in the 1980s, I was already aware of Leigh Bowery. He was a clublegend and performance artist, who had made a name for himself as a living work of art, a Clubland flesh-and-blood sculpture, a towering voluptuous installation of skin and costume that moved with surprising grace through crowded rooms of startled clubbers or puzzled gallery patrons. His astonishing costumes, which seemed to push his very human flesh into impossible, unsettling, inhuman shapes, set a standard for which every club kid with ping-pong balls stuck to his face has been striving ever since.
    For Leigh, his body wasn’t an end, it was a beginning; a medium of transformation, an opportunity. With paint and fabric, movement and performance, he pushed against the boundaries of his own form, his own biology – and
transformed
himself.
    In Leigh I began to see all sorts of new possibilities. He was a doughy kid from a tiny town in the asshole of Australia, yet here he was, the startling epicentre of cool London, the most fabulous creature in a scene full of fabulous creatures where what you decided to be was more important than who you were expected to be. 1 For the first time in my life I realised that I didn’t have to be defined by Ballinrobe, County Mayo: I could define
myself
. I was the master of my own destiny! Life was for creating, not consuming! Convention was for wimps! And being gay, far from being a burden or a limitation, was a
gift
because it freed me from a wearying weight of expectation. I