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

farmers were looking for farmers, and nice ‘regular’ blokes from the midlands were looking for other nice regular blokes who could travel.
    And there was always an ad for ‘Ice Breakers’, a monthly meeting of a gay youth group where nervous and skittish new gays could meet other nervous and skittish new gays over cups of tea in a room at the Clarence Hotel and be nervous and skittish together under the watchful eye of an experienced proper gay. Nowadays, of course, the Clarence is fancy and U2-owned, but in 1986 it smelt of polish and served roast dinners to country priests who were up in Dublin to see the bishop. So, on the first Thursday of the month, I found myself sitting in a circle of hotel chairs announcing to strangers that I was gay, while in the room next door a circle of strangers announced to each other that they were alcoholics.
    I’ve never been one for chair circles or groups so I sipped my tea and dunked my biscuit and felt uncomfortable throughout, but I had definitely, without doubt,
finally
found some other gays. Only a small handful of nervous gays but that was enough – they were my gay slippery slope, the thin edge of the homo wedge – and after the tea and biscuits the two guys who had led the meetingbrought us to a gay club and that was all I needed. Here were the gays! And lots of them.
    All along the gays had been hiding right under my nose but I just hadn’t known where to look. How many times had I passed this club, Hooray Henry’s, tucked into the corner of the Powerscourt Townhouse Centre, not knowing that at night it was full of exuberant, drunk gays with faded denims, frosted tips and Hi-NRG 12 inches?
    And that night, while Hazell Dean continued ‘Searchin’ (Lookin’ For Love)’, an older hairdresser with bleached hair gave up the search and settled on awkward sex with me.
    Pre-decriminalisation, Irish gays existed in a shadowy twilight world of their own devising. The laws that criminalised sex between men weren’t generally enforced – there weren’t gangs of gardaí sweeping through Bewley’s on a Saturday afternoon throwing queens and half-finished éclairs into police vans – but the legal and social uncertainty pushed the gay community underground, after dark and behind closed doors.
    Today the lines between the gay and straight worlds have blurred. Their edges have bled into each other. Gok Wan is in your mother’s living room, hen parties are in the local gay bar, rainbow-flag-draped leather queens shimmy down O’Connell Street every June and, according to the internet, Pat Butcher is going out with Hyacinth Bouquet.
    But in the Dublin of 1986, becoming an
actively gay
gay, a proper cast-iron gay, a sexually active gay with purposeful erections and Grace Jones, you had to turn your back on the heterosexual daytime world you’d known until now and agree to enter a new underground gay world, which somehow managed to exist hidden in plain sight of the everyday world that surrounded it – an everyday world that suddenly seemed to me to be dull and dreary and grey. Like Harry Potter’s first letter from Hogwarts, that night in Hooray Henry’s revealed to me a previously secret world. I was wide-eyed Harry Poofter, discovering the hidden magical world of Witchcraft and Faggotry, while only feet away the straight muggles caught the night bus home to their grey muggle lives, unaware that in the basements below their feet the gays were building a new world out of disco and poppers.
    And I
loved
it.
    My underground den of iniquity of choice was Minsky’s. I would spend the evening with my art-school flatmates in Dún Laoghaire, then catch the last bus into town, nervous, excited, taut like a bow string. Tucked off salubrious St Stephen’s Green, Minsky’s was the ground floor and basement of a large Georgian townhouse in an imposing terrace that had long ago been converted into the offices of dentists and accountants. Up the steps and behind the large Georgian door,