I went to see Alternative Miss Ireland for the first time, its 20th anniversary, at the Olympia.

I laughed a lot; the four-hour show was slickly produced, the dancers were well-rehearsed, and the audience had a blast. The hostess Panti is a very clever and witty entertainer. There were some really off-beat entrants too, including an edgy but studenty “performance art” duo called Miss Carriage, ketchup on white dresses a go-go.
There were a few heterosexual lads entering for the craic, as it were, in Evel Kneivel spandex and glitter, and a giant polystyrene cannon, just in case we needed the point driven home that they were real men. The deserving winner, Joanna Ride, was a blast of raucous energy, a chubby Finglas knacker with comedic influences from Brendan Grace to David Walliams to Catherine Tate.
I’ve avoided drag and cross-dressing in my life, as it’s not an area that has any charge sexually for me. The only time I went in drag to a club was when I was 20 or so, and I won first prize. Retirement seemed the only dignified option.
There is something liberating about the travesty of drag, the mockery of sex roles, the atmosphere of carnival where nothing is as it seems. For many of us, our gender can feel like a trap, a prison, because if we have qualities in abundance that are traditionally associated with the opposite sex, it leads to a conflict that can be hard to bear.
The first description about myself I remember hearing as a boy was “he’s very sensitive”, from my mother to my aunt, in my grandmother’s house on a Sunday afternoon before The Riordans. The winter sun was shining in through the living room window, and I was engrossed in a world of dust motes floating around the white smoke from my grandmother’s Gold Bond.
Sensitive. That was a phase I never grew out of.
Personality eclipses sexual orientation every time. In many ways, it is my emotionality and sensitivity that has been the hallmark of my life, and those are qualities that in many ways are problematic for me as a man. Those who would suppose that a sensitive gay man would have an easier time of it compared to other men, because gays are supposedly free of the restrictions of adhering to traditional gender roles, miss the crucial and exasperating nature of sexual desire.
I have dear friends who value me for exactly these contra-sexual qualities, which of course are universal and genderless at their core, and which serve me well professionally. But when it comes to sex, it gets complicated. My emotionality means I can identify very well with women in relationships, the subtleties and nuances of love and nurturing. But my very male sex drive pulls me in a completely opposite direction, the force of which is alien to most women I know.
The funny thing is, I know just as many heterosexual men with this split as gay men – it’s not about orientation, it’s about finding a balance between the need to relate and the need to have sex. (Some women might find it odd to consider them as polar opposites, but I think most men know what I’m on about.)
One wise old man I know, a hippy still, is a fluid floating man with wispy white hair, as ethereal and gentle as you could imagine. He believes that one chooses either sex or relationship at some deep level – and he chose to marry and stay committed to his wife, even though there’s a part of him I know that has very different cravings.
I think because I am so evenly split this way, I tend to see-saw, occasionally quite wildly. In London, the type of men I fell for were masculine in both temperament and sexuality – which left me bruised more times than not. I could not play the hard sport of gay sex with them, and stay in a relationship. My relationship needs didn’t fit with the “no-strings” world of the London scene, and I floundered.
In Dublin, I am realising, to my pleasure, that “no strings” is not an easy attitude to maintain, and there is much more of a friendly decency here. If you know you are going to bump into people fairly regularly in the city, that sort of London arrogance just doesn’t wash. In larger capitals, anonymity, which allows shameless imaginative experimentation and exploration – and exploitation – to flourish, is next-to-impossible to maintain here.
For other men, the split works very differently (for there is always a split). For those men who are both emotional and less phallic in their sexuality, cross-dressing and drag offers a way of expressing both sides of their nature in a way that is congruent. Admiring the ladyboys performing at Alternative Miss Ireland, all feathers and glitter and cheeky passivity, I imagine that their sexual partners tend to be men more along the bisexual side of the spectrum, who like the male body but also appreciate the symbols of femininity and what they represent, a quality of relatedness.
There are plenty of men who desire such she-males, and who are willing to play the traditional masculine protector role. Whether or not such relationships are acceptable in a fully open way in Ireland is less certain, because transvestites and transexuals don’t have an easy time of it here, running a real risk of personal attack in our lovely hospitable land.
It gets more complicated, however, if one is heterosexual and yet also finds it erotic to cross-dress. Transvestism is far more common among male heterosexuals, and in a way I have a lot of sympathy for their plight, in terms of finding honest relationships, because they are my opposite, with a mirror-image dilemma about sex roles – they desire relationship, and yet their sexuality runs counter to what their prospective sex partners find attractive in them. Whereas I desire sex, and my relationship needs run counter to what my prospective sex partners find attractive in me. And I know lots of gay men like me.
It must be difficult for women to tolerate, let alone encourage or desire, partners who cross-dress. The fact that so many women do is a testament to their capacity to see beyond sexual attraction and value the person inside, which is not something that men are renowned for.
The antidote to all this complexity and struggle is, however, humour. That’s why Alternative Miss Ireland and drag acts are so important. It is why the good ones like Panti and Lily Savage serve such an important need. They help us to laugh at ourselves, at the absurdity of gender, the complications of desire, and the expectations that we place on ourselves as men and women.