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Those involved in the making of The Queen of Ireland admit that it has been blessed with extraordinary good fortune. During production of the film, which focuses on the life and work of Rory O’Neill and his drag alter-ego Panti Bliss, Pantigate happened: a series of events that began with Rory’s Saturday Night Show appearance, and led to Panti’s Noble Call at the Abbey Theatre. This propelled Panti to the forefront of the Yes Equality movement, which culminated in May of this year, with the passing of the Marriage Equality referendum. Enmeshed as the film’s protagonists have been in campaigning for gay rights, the documentary is largely shaped by the lead-up to and the results of the marriage referendum.
Panti, as the film attests, handles her leading role with grace and humor. A sharply intelligent speaker, Panti has apt replies for questions along the lines of “Are you a hetero-phobe?” and, in all of her fabulousness, she has lent the gay community much-needed confidence. In his roles as loud and proud drag queen Panti, and HIV activist, Rory stands in opposition to the shaming and silencing of non-normative identities.
The film does not completely avoid conflating the narrative of the Marriage Referendum with that of Panti Bliss and her role in its outcome. Or equating the solution of the myriad issues that LGBTQ+ communities face with a positive outcome in the marriage referendum – an outcome which is not the “last question”, as is stated at one point. The film also raises the lack of an active and vibrant queer counterculture at the moment, in contrast to the Dublin of earlier days – before the decriminalzition of homsexuality – where, as Rory puts it, clubbing had its basis in participation rather than consumerism. Panti, the self-proclaimed “giant cartoon woman”, undoubtedly plays court jester to Irish society, truth-saying and performing gender to undo notions of the permissible, working against the oppression she articulated so well in the Abbey Theatre last year. As Rory sums it up: if the No vote had won this year, the people wouldn’t have been dancing in the streets.
