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| Panti Bliss is the guest of honour at Toronto’s Green Space Festival’s all-drag Starry Night, co-presented by Pride Toronto on June 25 |
This is an expanded version of Bugs’
interview with Panti Bliss originally published in Daily
Xtra
Irish drag queen and
“accidental activist” Miss Panti Bliss became a YouTube sensation in January
2014 when she walked on the stage at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and gave a
touching and memorable speech on homophobia.
“Have you ever been
standing at a pedestrian crossing when a car drives by and in it are a bunch of
lads, and they lean out the window and they shout “Fag!” and throw a milk
carton at you?” Miss Panti asked the Abbey Theatre audience rhetorically. “Now
it doesn’t really hurt. It’s just a wet carton and anyway they’re right – I am
a fag. But it feels oppressive.
“When it really does
hurt, is afterwards. Afterwards I wonder and worry and obsess over what was it
about me, what was it they saw in me? What was it that gave me away? And I hate
myself for wondering that. It feels oppressive and the next time I’m at a
pedestrian crossing I check myself to see what is it about me that ‘gives the
gay away’ and I check myself to make sure I’m not doing it this time.”
I can relate: I live
in the McGill Ghetto in downtown Montreal and I can’t tell you how many times
over the years folks in drive-by cars have screamed “Faggot!” at me at the
corner of Parc Avenue and Milton.
The video of Panti's speech
went viral — it has been seen more than 700,000 times on YouTube — and landed her a
North American lecture tour.
Upon her return to
Dublin, publishing house Hachette Books Ireland asked Panti (aka Rory O’Neill)
to write her memoirs, Woman in the Making.
“The turnaround on the
book was less than six months,” Panti says. “But saying I cashed in suggests I
was given loads of money, and I wasn’t. It is part memoir, part rant. And I
have two chapters about the aftermath of my lecture at the Abbey Theatre. It
was an insane period in my life, exciting and exhilarating.”
