Free Woman in the Making: Panti's Memoir by Rory O'Neill Page A

transvestites, nuts, prostitutes and runaways felt comfortable among its tatty stools and graffiti-scrawled walls, tucked away among the gays of Ni-chōme. It soon became my regular haunt for drinking bottles of beer and learning slang from ageing hair-oiled gangsters or making a fool of myself over some pretty tattooed rock-a-billy with a bored girlfriend. And overseeing this collection of friendly weirdoes and interesting oddballs was a sweet, skinny,older leather queen, who knew everyone by name and treated everyone, whether prostitute or businessman, with the same easy maternal familiarity.
    It was here, among the beer and the drugs and the stories, that I found a family of sorts. Tall, handsome, floppy-haired misfit Masa showed me how to make Japanese food and eventually ended up marrying my friend Sandy, a blonde English girl from the
gaijin
house. Crinkle-eyed, shuffling, long-haired misfit Kazua was never without his camera and always smiley-stoned. And sweet, funny misfit Hiroko, with her fringe always in her eyes, was already considered a dubious spinster in her late twenties. We’d stay up all night dancing and taking speed, then she’d potter off to her dull office job where her shamelessly unconventional lifestyle was cause for suspicion and gossip. Hiroko refused to bend to other people’s expectations.
    There are, however, no expectations to bend to if you’re a gay twenty-two-year-old foreigner in Tokyo. I was free to be whomever and
whatever
I wanted to be. And it turned out that what I wanted to be was Panti.
    In the spring of 1992 I met Angelo in a well-known bar popular with foreigners. A compact, doe-eyed Italian-American from Atlanta, he was on his first visit to Ni-chōme, having only recently arrived in Japan, and we became friends immediately, bonding over a shared sense of humour and similar taste in movies and fellas. It also turned out we had a shared interest in drag.
    Angelo was a much more experienced queen than I. He had started doing drag in Atlanta, a city with a long and rich drag tradition, where his glamorous, big-haired, country-flavoured character Lurleen (all gingham check, frosted lipstick and saucy flirtations) hosted parties and lip-synced country ballads and quirky pop tracks. He was friendly with a scene of ambitious young American queens, who were then beginning to ride a new drag wave off the back of the club-kid phenomenon – queens like Lady Bunny, and another young queen who was then just about to cross over into the mainstream: RuPaul.
    When I went to Tokyo I had no intention at all of doing drag, and assumed my brief, less-than-illustrious career as a badly painted mess was behind me. However, when Hallowe’en came around Angelo and I cobbled together a couple of silly nuns’ outfits, Helen dressed up as a priest, and the three of us spent a drunken night in a men-only bar. It was a fun night and it would perhaps have finished there, except that a club promoter we knew bumped into us and suggested we do a show at his next party – and, as we have already learned, I’m easily led.
    With some difficulty in petite-sized Japan, we managed to pull some kind of look together (mine decidedly less polished than Lurleen’s), rehearsed a simple routine to an Abba number and turned up at the club with the track on a C60 cassette tape. Thinking I’d make a fresh start from the car crash art-drag I’d done in Dublin, I decided I needed a new drag name and, after spendingno time at all thinking about it, chose ‘Latitia’ after a pet sheep we’d had when we were kids. So, Lurleen and Latitia did their first gig. Thanks, no doubt, to generous amounts of alcohol and ecstasy, people seemed to enjoy it and we were asked back. Before long we were doing small shows regularly in a few different clubs and having a blast. Helen made us matching outfits out of Hello Kitty fabric and we cobbled together backing tracks on a clunky old boom box. We practised dance routines in our little