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

apartment, customised cheap accessories, learned the words to
The Brady Bunch
songs and spent the little we earned on taxis and getting high.
    However, it soon became apparent that the names Lurleen and Latitia weren’t working for us. Japanese people have great difficulty with the English letters
l
and
r
, finding them hard to pronounce or even differentiate between, so no one could remember our bloody names! We quickly decided we needed to come up with a ‘group’ name. Our
shtick
, our USP, was that we were foreign drag queens, so we decided we should pick a name that wasEnglish but at the same time easy for Japanese people to understand and remember.
    We also wanted something that sounded ‘cutesy’ to appeal to the
manga
aesthetic so popular in Japanese youth culture and among the club-kids. The name we came up with was CandiPanti. It seemed to fit all the requirements, plus ‘candy’ and ‘panty’ were words that the Japanese already used, having adopted them from English. Our intention was that CandiPanti would be our group name but that we would still be individually called Lurleen and Latitia. However, almost immediately people started to call Lurleen ‘Candi’ and me ‘Panti’. It became a nickname that stuck until eventually even I forgot I’d ever been called anything else.
    As for the surname ‘Bliss’? One night after a gig, the club wanted me to fill out a payment form, which had a space for a family name. Until that moment, like Cher, I had never given a single thought to a surname so I put down the first thing that came into my head: Bliss. And for a short time thereafter I was ‘Latitia Bliss’, before poor old Latitia got entirely lost along the way and was usurped by a youthful Panti. (Clearly Latitia had never seen
All About Eve
.)
    Panti isn’t a name I would have chosen deliberately – when people hear it for the first time, they think I chose ‘knickers’ as a stage name and imagine all sorts about me and my show. And sometimes in ‘polite company’, especially on TV or radio, I hear a momentary awkwardness around my name, as if it might be salacious. When I first came back from Japan and it seemed like it might be a problem I started to use ‘Pandora “Panti” Bliss’, to give the false impression that Panti was short for Pandora, which worked to a large extent. I am still often referred to in that way and I don’t disabuse anyone of the notion. I almost believe it myself at this stage. But, of course, it’s almost impossible to shake a nicknameand, anyway, in truth it’s not a nickname any more and hasn’t been for a long time. It’s my name. I’ve embraced it. And, on the bright side, people don’t forget it!
    In those prehistoric early nineties, before YouTube and
RuPaul’s Drag Race
, the only way to learn basic drag skills was through trial and error and, hopefully, from more experienced queens who were willing to give you the benefit of that experience. In the drag world it’s an informal system known as ‘drag mothers’ where older queens pass on the tricks and secrets of the trade to favoured younger
gurls
. It’s a kind of apprenticeship, and a young queen without a drag mother to teach her and help her up the drag-scene ladder in platform heels is unlikely to get far. Nowadays, many of the transformative secrets of the drag queen, from make up to hip padding, can be gleaned from the thousands of instructional YouTube videos on the subject but even today nothing beats a word of advice from a drag mother or simply being able to watch her get ready.
    In Dublin I had fumbled through entirely on my own. I had never even
seen
an actual drag show. As a kid I had occasionally watched Danny La Rue on
The Royal Variety Performance
, and I was aware of Mr Pussy, whom I’d once seen interviewed on the telly, but I’d never met a professional drag queen or been to a show. Unlike neighbouring Britain, with its working-men’s clubs and