Woman in the Making: Panti's Memoir by Rory O'Neill Read Free Book Online

tablecloths, walls – everything slowly became engulfed in a tide of cartoon doodles of glamorous women with evening gloves and nipped waists, lantern-jawed men, fat opera singers, goofy dogs, majestic horses and futuristic cars.
    And I knew I wanted to find other queers. By that point I knew
technically
that gays existed – I’d read about them, I’d heard about them, I’d seen them on the telly – but, rather like my then increasingly tenuous belief in God, I believed in gays only as a matter of faith. I’d been told they existed so I had to accept that they did, but I still hadn’t met a real-live, fully paid-up, card-carrying gay, and I was beginning to worry that if I didn’t meet one soon I’d become a gaytheist. I needed proof.
    So I applied to art college.
    It was a very small one on the edge of Dublin in Dún Laoghaire with only a couple of hundred students, and on my very first day I sat in the queue for registration beside an impossibly handsome bleach-blond Mohawked punk, who was wearing a pair of pyjamas with a
Playboy
centrefold safety-pinned to the back. He was so beautiful and so exciting I couldn’t bring myself to look directly at him, terrified that if I did I might not be able to stop myself throwing myself onto his lap and kissing him full on the mouth.
    But my small art college turned out not to be the homo-filled, gender-bendin’ 1986 gaytopia I’d hoped for. In fact, there turned out to be only one other definitely queer student. Handsome, brown-eyed, exotically coiffed and dressed like a
Face
magazine cover, Niall was universally thought of as one of the school’s most talented students, so he was a good one to have onboard but, still, he was the only one. And Niall was a year ahead of me so even though we would eventually become close friends and lifelong collaborators, that first year it was up to me to find queers on my own.
    In the Dublin of 1986, still seven years before homosexual acts were decriminalised, just finding other gays was a job worthy of Jessica Fletcher. Today, with two clicks of a cursor, gay kids can be chatting to other gay kids or watching the badly lit homemade pornography of an exhibitionist French couple and their horny friend Pascale. And if they have the right app ontheir phone, they can tell you how many metres they are from the nearest Dominant Verbal Top, who likes holding hands and nights in on the sofa with a glass of wine and a movie. And everyone knows where the brightly lit, rainbow-flag-flying gay bars are. The world and their granny can tell you where The George is and chances are Granny has already been there one Sunday to see Shirley Temple Bar’s
Bingo
show.
    But in 1986, on Saturday afternoons, I would take the 46A bus into the city centre on my mission to find the gays, these creatures of myth and legend and crude schoolyard jokes. I was still a country boy, and the city was still exciting and full of possibilities to me. I was blind to the crumbling plasterwork, peeling fly posters and boarded-up shop fronts of depressed eighties Dublin, and all I saw were interesting people hurrying to interesting assignations. I would wander the streets, soaking up everything and everyone, and fumble with the change in my pocket, separating out the return bus fare and counting what was left.
    Every now and then I’d see that elusive creature who made my pulse quicken a little: another gay. I couldn’t always be totally sure – my gaydar was still underdeveloped, and the New Romantics were muddying the waters at the time – but sometimes I’d get a glancing eye contact that confirmed my teenage suspicions. I would go to Marx Bros café, which was popular with punks and cycle couriers and, it was rumoured, with‘the gays’. I’d buy coffee from the shaven-headed server (was he a gay?) and sit nervously at a table, cautiously eyeing the clientele for signs of gayness, signs of me. I’d buy
Hot Press
magazine, and in the back there were small ads where