Dublin this week, more time here than usual, on holiday, chilling, hanging out, getting pissed with friends. It’s eight years now since I’ve lived here. The city is unrecognisable in many ways. I’m loving the architecture of the new Dublin; in the main, it seems to be intelligent and congruent. I’m enjoying, once again, the humour and thoughtfulness in the snippets of conversations I hear on the buses, or in the coffee shops. As for pubs – well, drunken shite is talked the world over. Perhaps not with the same passion and verve as in Ireland.

And I’m really, really enjoying putting my hand out and getting a taxi at night. Went to The George on Sunday night, the glossy, overpriced, overcrowded and over-bouncered hub of the Dublin gay scene. Nothing’s changed there, then. Will no one offer a serious challenge to their monopoly, please? (Although I’m still recovering from the culture shock of drinking in GUBU in Capel Street – I haven’t been able to get my head around that one yet. Surreal. Northside. Style. Northside. Style. Black. White.)

The George’s main treasure, of course, is Shirley Temple Bar, offering her own Bingo Show every Sunday to the adoring punters, who were seemingly of all persuasions and none; there were many straight couples wandering in when I was there, six-foot-seven men holding on to their women for dear life. But they were laughing, which is the point.

The experience was far more exuberant and entertaining than any cabaret show I’ve seen in London, not since Her Imperial Highness Regina Fong, who is now, sadly, fading in glory with the last century. But Shirley’s hitting the big time now, with two documentaries under her belt, rave mentions in both Vanity Fair and Loaded, a combination that is so bizarre it could only be true. Shirley combines refreshing silliness with an athletic madcap energy, being funny, agile, oddly earnest, and very likeable. Where Lily Savage amuses us with tales of her debauchery and crime and relentless tales from the Scouse gutter,

Shirley’s comic device is to wind the clock back (perhaps to Lily’s youth?) to play a gurning 15-year-old gormless ingénue, a manic cartoon Lolita in pigtails. She is impossibly thin, not-woman-not-man-but-girlish-boy, gawkily in-your-face, bursting with a dervish energy that is so expressive it reminds me of the best female clowns who use their physicality, like Lucille Ball, Joanna Lumley, or Kirsty Alley. Seeing Shirley leppin’ around like a mad thing, doing a goofy trippy dance miming to Aha’s Take On Me, complete with a gymnastic ribbon on a stick, is something I won’t forget in a hurry.

Declan Buckley, Shirley’s creator, spoke to me in the aftermath of appearing on The Late Late Show, on the eve of entering the nation’s living rooms twice-weekly to host The National Lottery’s Telly Bingo. I found him to be thoughtful and enthusiastic, and, like all good performers, very serious about the business of being funny.

He gets annoyed when gay political activists accuse him of being self-serving, as if all gay men have to adhere to the same script, demand the same political rights. His crusade is to make people laugh, but also, in a more subversive way, broaden the limits of what is acceptable in our society so that it becomes irrelevant whether one is gay or not. Read that sentence again. So that it becomes irrelevant whether one is gay or not. Now that’s a post-gay liberation mission statement if ever there was one. No wonder some of the hide-bound gay politicos are a bit miffed. The agenda is moving on, with or without them.

So if a thirty-something man dresses up in a teenybopper’s boobtube and microskirt, and can grin for Ireland, and Ireland grins back, something important is happening. Declan the performer spoke of his embarrassment for the way Ireland still functions when it comes to sexuality. In a recent trip to Cork’s gay venue, The Other Place, he was appalled when a fan, who had seen Shirley on TV and wanted to take a photo of her in the club, was not allowed to by the management. He spoke with passion about how ridiculous it was in this day and age in Ireland, that there were people still ashamed to be seen in a gay venue. The George plays host to photographers and journalists and TV crews practically every week. It’s 2001, he said, not 1975.

I loved hearing him talk about being embarrassed for those who are ashamed.

Embarrassment is an important state, for it reveals the truth of what we unconsciously feel, as opposed to the way we should feel. For many years, in my radical youth, I found myself embarrassed by gay men – especially camp men – despite my best intentions and political beliefs. Mostly, I was probably ashamed of myself. In the subtle way that Catholic cultures work, shame about one’s body is passed on, almost by default.

Shirley Temple Bar’s performance is not of the old school of drag queens, where women are mimicked and portrayed with an edge that is both admiring and dangerous. Shirley has no bra, stuffed or otherwise. She is full of that gauche quasi-sexual vitality that pre-pubescent girls can have before they realise that they should learn a thing or two about modesty and not being loud. Watch a 9-year-old girl dancing to the Spice Girls at a family party in glitter and spangly lycra shorts and see the same magnetism at work. Watch the parents and other adults look on in affection, and sigh with the thought that it won’t be long now before she’ll learn that wiggling your navel around like that attracts a different sort of attention.

What I love about men who dress up in frocks, whatever their age, be it the complex Barry Humphries or the surreal Eddy Izzard, the serenely bawdy Julian Clary or the much-missed and depraved Divine, is that they poke fun at the split between male and female, instead of agonising over it or fearing it.

The French word for queen is folle – a female fool. Fools were the only ones in the courts of old who were permitted to speak the truth to the monarch, however they dressed it up in doggerel and riddles, and however daft they looked in jingly hats and bright colours.

Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, the doyens of the Bible Belt in America, have said that in their opinion, gays and lesbians and pagans and liberals and every other godless sinner “helped this happen” on September 11th, as divine retribution for moving away from God’s law.

If fundamentalism, of all persuasions, is the enemy, (and rigid sex roles seem inextricably linked with fundamentalist religion the world over), then drag queens and gender benders and frock-wearing clowns are powerful symbols of resistance and tolerance. Thank God they make us laugh.