Rory O'Neill AKA Panti

You know, it started out as a bit of nonsense, but we were like two foreigners, two foreign drag queens.

So very quickly... You were exotic.

You know, being foreign was our USP, you know.

And so that's where Panty came from.

That's where I got the ridiculous name.

All of that stuff comes from there.

Yeah, but I also came back to a country where there were no drag queens.

There was Mr. Pussy, but Mr. Pussy never particularly worked on the gay scene or the club scene, because there hadn't been a club scene.

Mr. Pussy worked the kind of straight cabaret circuit.

But I had been spending the last number of years, you know, running around nightclubs and doing crazy performances or not necessarily fully gay nightclubs, but a lot of them.

But also the kind of just queer mixed, you know, undergroundy, you know, kind of thing.

And I arrived back to Dublin where there was absolutely none of that.

But I did arrive back to Dublin, which while I was away, had A, introduced, you know, allowed you to sell beer.

Because before that, there was no nightclubs because they were all restaurants.

Oh, yeah.

And there was only wine.

Yeah.

So now you could get beer and sort of the, I don't know, I guess the ecstasy thing had arrived.

And so raving and dance music.

So in between when I left and came back.