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

a riotous queen in a makeshift cloakroom under the grand staircase would take your money and your coat, before you wereushered through to the ground-floor bar with a wave of a decidedly unashamed, defiantly limp wrist. Inside was a rather grand Georgian parlour with moulded ceilings, expensively upholstered furniture, side tables, carpet and gilt frames, while two leather queens and Anne Doyle propped up the bar. Gays of every hue stood around chatting and good-naturedly slagging each other, checking out the new arrivals while drinking glasses of wine or Campari and orange.
    Not a beer or a spirit in sight: before the licensing laws were changed in the early nineties, Dublin’s nightclubs were technically ‘restaurants’. That meant that in order to stay within the law, late-night drinking and dancing establishments had to serve food – which usually meant that at one a.m. a desultory (and possibly dangerous) chicken curry would be brought out, or a few baskets of chips and cocktail sausages passed around. It also meant that they could serve only wine – so even the butchest, moustachioed, denim and plaid-covered ‘clone’ would be daintily sipping a nice sweet Riesling or a dry sherry.
    But the real action was downstairs.
    A narrow staircase led to a small, dark basement where swirling lights, mirrors and a hard-working smoke machine made a compact, loud dance floor seem bigger than it was. And on that dance floor men would be
dancing
. And I mean
proper
dancing. Feeling the rhythm, the beat, the emotional arc of the music and allowing their bodies to move in response to it. You know … actual
dancing
.
    In 1986, straight Irish men didn’t dance. Oh, sure, at weddings the men would eventually be so polluted drunk that they’d stumble and flail around to ‘Eye Of The Tiger’. And, yes, teenage boys with bird’s-nest hair would close their eyes and nod their heads to The Cure, and working-class boys with denim jackets would tap cigarette ash and jerk a foot in time to Thin Lizzy, but they didn’t actually dance. Before the arrival of ecstasy and dance music, straight Irish guys didn’t dance for fear of looking gay. Expressing yourself in any way was considered suspect and gay, and even the only two legitimate forms of artistic expression allowed to straight men – writing and acting – were allowed only if combined with a prodigious drink problem and syphilis. But in Minsky’s the men danced. They twirled and slid and shuffled and swayed and dipped and shimmied and popped and got down. They spread their arms and spun each other, clapped and did silly synchronised moves, laughed and whooped and rushed onto the floor to demand ‘How Will I Know’ by that gorgeous Whitney Houston girl.
    And in Minsky’s it was perfectly OK to like that song by the sweet, fresh-faced Whitney Houston. Outside it was not OK to like Whitney Houston. Outside, Irish muggle boys were only allowed to like U2 and Hothouse Flowers and AC/DC and Madness, and maybe a
little
David Bowie because he got a pass on the gay stuff because of all the drugs but, still, you can’t like Bowietoo much ’cos it’d be poncy. While the rest of Europe was embracing synthesisers and New Romantics and makeup and big hair and Bronski Beat and even Madonna, Dublin remained suspicious of all that. Oh, sure, there were pockets of New Romantics hanging around town, but for the most part Dublin remained stubbornly a hippie rock town where music journalists had long curly hair and testicles. But behind the Georgian door of Minsky’s (and the handful of other gay clubs) we didn’t give a crap about U2 or Status Quo. Rock music represented everything that excluded us. Every uncomfortable teenage disco. Every suspicion that I wasn’t ‘regular’ enough, every uncomfortable silence when I’d been asked if I’d seen ‘the match’ last night. On the dance floor of Minsky’s we danced and sweated and took poppers to ‘Diana’, Eurythmics, Ashford &