The film started with a man with a black beard in a blonde wig, a basque and fishnet tights, lip-syncing onstage to a strangulated falsetto version of The Star Spangled Banner.

He slowly bent over, and with a latex-gloved hand, reached inside his butt-crack and gingerly teased out the American flag from his evidently roomy ass, to cheers from the night club audiences, onscreen and off. At the end of the anthem, the flag is dropped on the floor, and a pair of size 12 stiletto heels walks over it and exits, stage left.
Another Saturday night in a gay bar. Even the guest MC for the night, Heklina, the burly high-gloss starlet of Filthy Gorgeous, a film about San Francisco’s legendary drag bar Trannyshack, commented on the oddity of showing a documentary in a night club, albeit one like the George in a city like Dublin, where the drag subculture is so sophisticated. Truth be told, it emptied the place, when the bravura opening sequence wasn’t followed through in the rest of the film with equally offensive/amusing MTV-style vignettes. It became more of a gentle enquiry into the thoughtful, handsome, and sometimes troubled men who make irreverence a performance art form, and, as such, I enjoyed it, but at 90 minutes it was far too long for the venue and the night. Heklina’s brassiness was about as in-your-face as you could imagine, with repeated appeals to the audience that, if there was anyone who got off on being rimmed by a gorgeous tranny, would they make themselves known after the show?
The oddness of the evening was compounded by the fact that it was a charity event, the money raised at the door going to support the High Court challenge to allow same-sex couples to marry. One cannot imagine two more contrasting icons: Heklina, the epitome of transgressive queer anarchic hedonism, and Ann Louise Gilligan and Katherine Zappone, the dyadic symbol of decades-long fidelity and commitment. They represent, in a sense, an extreme polarity of masculinity and femininity: the rapacious single priapic male, the fool, the jester, intent on disrupting the social order and offending as many as possible, and the domestic unruffled contentment of the lesbian couple. Of course, not having met any of these three, I can’t comment on the sort of people they are, but I think it’s safe to hazard a guess that neither of the good doctors have ever pulled a flag from their nether regions in public or advertised their desire to lick a stranger’s ass, nor has Heklina, or any of the other trannies featured on the documentary, had a monogamous relationship of any equivalent quality or duration to that which was placed in evidence at the High Court by Gilligan and Zappone.
I’ve been interested for a long time in exploring the shadow, the unconscious, of any given culture, person or belief system. To this end, my sexual explorations and adventures in London were part of this voyage of discovery; no stone was left unturned as I found different ways of rooting around in the barrel-bottom of my psyche, and those of other men. And I know I’m not alone in this journey, it’s something that many gay men do, going to a big city and reinventing ourselves, using anonymity to explore the many facets of desire. For me, it was definitely connected to an inner struggle to overturn bourgeois notions of conformity and Catholic notions of shame, and to allow myself to enjoy being sexual for its own sake. I succeeded in this - but, paradoxically, I believe I am coming full circle. Coming back to Ireland, I find that a sexually confident and playful younger generation is highlighting how much of what I was struggling with is history now. It’s old baggage, and it’s time to dump it.
Notions of modesty and chastity and sexual continence and fidelity used to be enormously distorted in Ireland, because they were all associated with one extraordinarily dominant archetype, the Virgin Mary, to the exclusion of all else. Her impossible example was used by the Catholic Church in Ireland to batter the sexuality out of many generations of women and men, and that affected all areas of Irish life. In a similar way, notions of modesty are also dominant in Islam, and, as in Catholic Ireland, it is women that are bearing the brunt of the distortion. Recently, a Muslim cleric has suggested that an uncovered, unveiled woman is as responsible for the advances she gets from men as a piece of uncovered meat on the street is, when cats come and eat it. It’s the Madonna/whore polarity all over again, rigid and uncompromising, with no middle ground. Whenever that sort of cultural imperative is in force, balance and wholeness is extremely difficult to achieve on a personal level.
I’m beginning to see that, of course, the values of the Catholic Madonna or the archetypal modest Muslim woman are not inherently bad and oppressive, they are important qualities in themselves. It is only in a truly post-Catholic or secular society that one can begin seriously to reclaim them, not from a sense of sin or bourgeois conformity or social pressure, but because they are of worth in themselves. The tranny tart offering to lick the arse of any man who wants it has, somewhere inside him, as a counterpoint, a part that would value contentment and security in a stable relationship, to enjoy sex not only as an act of pleasure, but as an expression of love. The lifelong committed female couple must, if only at seven-year-itch intervals, seek some liberation from the safe and the known, and risk something vital in pursuit of pleasure.
We are all creatures of duality, we all contain our opposites within.