Panti's Noble Call at The Abbey Theatre - Isl and closed captions

Tonight, we are delighted to welcome to the stage, Ireland's fabulous drag queen, and most famous activist, Panti. Hi. Hi. Hello. My name is Panti and for the benefit of the visually impaired or the incredibly naïve, I am a drag queen, I am also a performer of sorts, and an accidental and occasional gay rights activist. And as you may have already gathered, I am also painfully middle-class. My father was a country vet, I went to a nice school, and afterwards I went to that most middle-class of institutions - an art college. And although although this may surprise some of you, I have always managed to find gainful employment in my chosen field - gender discombobulation. So the kind of grinding, abject poverty that we saw so powerfully on stage tonight is something I can thankfully say I have no experience of. But, I do know a little something about oppression. or at least oppression is something I can relate to. Now, I am not of course, for a minute going to compare my situation to Dublin workers in 1913, but I do know what it feels like to be put in your place. Have any of you ever been standing at a pedestrian crossing when a car goes by and in it are a bunch of lads, and they lean out the window and they shout "***!" and throw a milk carton at you? Now it doesn't really hurt. It's just a wet carton and anyway they're right -- I am a ***. But it feels oppressive. When it really does hurt, is afterwards. Afterwards I wonder and worry and obsess over what was it about me, I mean, what did they see 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 hate myself for it, but 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. Have any of you ever come home in the evening and turned on the television and there is a panel of people - nice people, respectable people, smart people, the kind of people who probably make good neighbourly neighbours the kind of people who write for newspapers. And they are having a reasoned debate, on the television, a reasoned debate about you. About what kind of a person you are, about whether you are capable of being a good parent, about whether you want to destroy marriage, about whether you are safe around children, about whether God herself thinks you are an abomination, about whether in fact you are "intrinsically disordered". And even the nice TV presenter lady that you feel is almost a friend because you see her being nice on TV all of the time, even she thinks it is perfectly ok that they are all having this reasoned debate about you, and about who you are, and what rights you "deserve", or "don't deserve". And that feels oppressive. Have you ever been on a crowded train with your one of your best gay friends and and inside a tiny part of you is cringing because he is being SO gay and you find yourself trying to compensate for his gayness by butching up or trying to steer the conversation, onto "safer" "straighter" territory? This is you who have spent 35 years trying to be the best gay possible and yet still this small part of you is embarrassed by his gayness. And I hate myself for that. And that feels oppressive. And when I'm standing at the pedestrian bloody lights I am checking myself. Have you ever gone into your favourite neighbourhood café with the paper that you buy every day, and you open it up and inside is a 500-word opinion written by a nice middle-class woman, the kind of woman who probably gives to charity, the kind of woman who you would be totally happy to leave your children with. And she is arguing, over 500 words, so reasonably, about whether or not you should be treated less than everybody else. arguing that you should be given fewer rights than everybody else. And when you read that, and then the woman at the next table gets up and excuses herself to squeeze by you, and smiles at you, you smile back and nod, and inside you wonder to yourself, "Does she think that about me too?" And that feels oppressive. And you go outside and you stand at the pedestrian crossing and you check yourself and I hate myself for that. Have you ever turned on the computer and seen videos of people who are just like you in far away countries, and countries not far away at all, being imprisoned and beaten and tortured and murdered and executed because they are just like you? And that feels oppressive. Three weeks ago I was on the television and I said that I believed that people who actively campaign for gay people to be treated less or treated differently, are, in my gay opinion, homophobic. Now, some people, people who actively campaign for gay people to be treated less under the law took great exception to that characterisation and threatened legal action against me and RTÉ. Now RTÉ, in its wisdom, decided incredibly quickly, to hand over a huge sum of money to make it all go away. I haven't been quite so lucky. And for the last three weeks I have been lectured to by heterosexual people about what homophobia is, and about who is allowed to identify it. Straight people have lined up - ministers, senators, barristers, journalists - have lined up to tell me what homophobia is and to tell what I am allowed to feel oppressed by. People who have never experienced homophobia in their lives, people who have never checked themselves at a pedestrian crossing, have told me that unless I am being thrown into prison or herded onto a cattle truck, then it is not homophobia. And that feels oppressive. So now Irish gay people, we find ourselves in a ludicrous situation where not only are we not allowed to say publicly what we feel oppressed by, we are not even allowed to think it because the very definition, our definition, has been disallowed by our betters. And for the last three weeks I have been denounced from the floor of Oireachtas to newspaper columns, to the seething morass of internet commentary, denounced for using "hate speech" because I dared to use the word homophobia. And a jumped-up *** like me should know that the word "homophobia" is no longer available to gay people. Which is a spectacular and neat Orwellian trick because now it turns out that gay people are not the victims of homophobia - - homophobes are the victims of homphobia. But let me just say that it's not true, because I don't hate you. I do, it is true, believe that almost all of you are probably homophobes. But I'm a homophobe. It would be incredible if we weren't. I mean to grow up in a society that is overwhelmingly and stiflingly homophobic and to somehow how escape unscathed would be miraculous. So I don't hate you because you are homophobes. I actually admire you. I admire you because most of you are only a bit homophobic. and to be honest, considering the circumstances, that is pretty good going. But I do sometimes hate myself. I hate myself because I *** check myself when standing at pedestrian crossings. And sometimes I hate you for doing that to me. But not right now. Right now, I like you all very much for giving me a few moments of your time. And for that, I thank you.