Rory O'Neill AKA Panti

And so I go along there one, whatever, first Tuesday or Thursday of the month or whatever it was, like heart and mouth stuff.

And I went in and then it had like the little chalkboard and room, whatever.

You know, they had these little function rooms on the ground floor.

Icebreaker.

So I go in and there's like a circle of chairs and there's like 12...

novice gays you know sitting around and then there's two mother superior gays and you know they're making tea and getting biscuits out or whatever and then you have to sit and then you go around and you have to sort of say hello my name is Rory and I'm a gay or whatever

While I'm sure next door alcoholics are doing the same.

And it really felt like that, you know.

And I'm not, at the best of times, I'm not really a chair circle kind of person or whatever.

So I kind of sat through the meeting going, oh God, you know, this isn't really, I don't see how this is going to work for me.

But at the end of the meeting, the two like experienced gays, they said, we're going to go to a club, gay club, if anybody wants to come.

And I was like, I am in.

And they brought me to a place that was called Hooray Henry's, which was in the Powerscore Townhouse Centre.

I'd been in the Powerscore Townhouse Centre like a billion times and I'd walked by what was Hooray Henry's, which was in part of, you know, there's been a kind of a club space there now for years at the back.

But like nowadays, if you went up those steps into what's now, there's a flower shop and there's a door, kind of, you wouldn't even notice anymore, there's all the flowers, but there's a door there and you spin that door and there was like a little club in there

Well, I say little because I know the size of the space.

But in my memory, it was massive, you know.

And going in and there's like, to me, there was a thousand gay people in there.

You know, all with like, this is 1986, maybe five or something like that.

So it was like a lot of frosted tips and stonewashed denim.