Fabulous Beasts | Pocketmags.com

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70 mins

Fabulous Beasts

Graphic designer Niall Sweeney’s multi-disciplinary, sociopolitical approach to his work has seen him become part of the fabric and evolution of Dublin’s queer scene, beginning with designing flyers and installations for the legendary Sides nightclub in the 1980s, and designing the very first issue of GCN, back in 1988. He’s most known for co-creating and designing Alternative Miss Ireland, which ran for 25 years and raised over a quarter of a million euro for Irish HIV and Aids organisations, and he’s also the man behind the visual identity of Pantibar, which celebrates its 10th birthday this year. However, few know how intricately Niall has been connected to the evolution of Queen of Ireland, Panti herself.

As Rory O’Neill self-effacingly says during this conversation piece, celebrating not only ten years of his fabulous gay bar, but reflecting on over three decades of being at the heart of Ireland’s LGBT+ scene: “I’m sometimes accused of having talent, but I think my real talent is working with really great people and letting them do their thing.” And Rory has fundamentally let the enormously talented Niall Sweeney do his thing, not only in creating the iconography of a drag icon persona that would become a national treasure, but in placing Panti front and centre in the story of Ireland’s queer cultural flowering.

“For the first time you had this sense of liberated queers in Dublin, and their straight mates were totally on board and involved with it.

Panti first appeared on GCN’s Christmas cover in 1995, photographed as part of an alternative queer family that included Niall, who was appearing as his own alter ego, Mister Sphincter, a character who on the stage of Ireland’s first fetish club got up to all sorts of unmentionable shenanigans involving Panti’s posterior. But before that, Niall had already been working on turning Panti into a brand that challenged the status quo…

Niall: We met in art college in 1986. Rory did drag for his final show and we did some bits and bobs together, then he ended up in Tokyo. He did a bit of drag over there with a guy he met over there called Angelo, who was coming from the Atlanta Georgia,/Woodstock/New York drag scene. It took off unbelievably quickly.

Meanwhile I was back in Dublin, out of college and working on different things. There was this strange little filtering back and forward of faxes. Rory would send photocopies of himself and Angelo out on drag nights and all that fun stuff, and I started using images of ‘proto Panti’, from the Dun Laoghaire drag show, in posters for Smirnoff Young Designer of the Year Awards. It was the first version of Panti, but Panti only arrived on the scene when Rory arrived back from Tokyo in 1995.

Rory: I always say that Niall’s image of Panti became the image of Panti even before Panti looked like that. He was using her as a sort of icon in the visual sense, using a perfected version. Even now, when someone’s referring to Panti, what they describe is actually Niall’s version.

Niall: That year, 1995 changed everything. Everything seemed to happen. Nightclubs started to happen, POD [Place of Dance, Harcourt Street] opened. At the time, when we were doing stuff, whether it was a poster for a cultural event or a launch, or whatever, we’d stick Panti on it, whether or not she was available.

Rory: People had money for the first time and the city was changing, there were lots of empty spaces around and we’d all been away and been to clubs, and we wanted to do things. So it was a case of ‘let’s put on a show’. We decided to put on a dirty fetish club called GAG, but our attitude was always humourous. We weren’t proper fetishists; ours always had a wink or a nod about it.

Niall: We did realise that if we did something that was outrageous and beyond the boundary, that it freed up everyone else.

“We did realise that if we did something that was outrageous and beyond the boundary, that it freed up everyone else.

Rory: It took us three venues to find a venue that would let us keep doing it because the first two were absolutely horrified with what was going on. We were taking the light bulbs out of everywhere and putting up chains, and really encouraging people to go for it. It was very queer but open to everyone, and there were a lot of straights there, and it had a very strict door policy. People made the effort and it grew very fast, and part of it was us doing these kind of shocking, but funny performances.

You’d go to the club, you may be a little bit nervous, you’ve never been anywhere like this before, everybody is dressed up in weird things, there’s porn playing on the monitors, and it feels very serious – and then you’d see this performance with a guy dressed in a suit [Mr. Sphincter] pulling the lyrics of ‘9 to 5’ out of a drag queen’s ass. After that, it got pretty full on.

We went to all these fetish things in London and other places to research, and they were interesting, but a little bit boring. There was no laughing or giggling. Ours was a conscious effort to be funny and smart, and to look good.

Niall: Famously GAG came to an end [it was shut down for public indecency – ed], you can check out the records of the Sunday People front covers.

Rory: ‘Red Hot Pictures Of Dublin Orgy Sensation!’ Or something likes that.

Niall: We were relieved in some ways. Anything we’d have done with GAG from then on in would just have been more GAG. The groundwork was done.

Rory: Around the time GAG was closing, John Reynolds was opening The Red Box, which was the first mega-club. He came to us and said ‘would you like to throw a party in this giant new space that used to be a train station?’ We thought, sure, fuck it, let’s do that. You couldn’t do GAG in a space like that because there weren’t enough perverts, so what we did was a more accessible version. Powderbubble had elements of the kinkiness, but it was much more fun and performative, with drag queens and inflatable sharks.

Niall: We wanted to throw a big party in that way that you’d been at maybe when you’d been on your holidays, or you’d been to London, and you’d been to Kinky Gerlinky or any of those clubs and you were back at home and there was none of that. Friends had come back from abroad, so all of this conspired at the same time and the generation had cut loose.

Rory: The thing about Powderbubble was that as Irish people it was like we’d never had our teenage years. We never had nightclubs, we couldn’t get a drink after a certain time, and we would go abroad and go to these clubs and we’d never had that experience at home. When Powderbubble came along, there was a whole generation of Irish people from 18 to 30, who were like, ‘this is our chance’.

The decriminalisation of homosexuality also played into it. For the first time you had this sense of liberated queers in Dublin and their straight mates for the first time were totally on board and involved with it.

“I always say that Niall’s image of Panti became the image of Panti even before Panti looked like that.

Niall: We’d done GAG with a woman called Claire Crosby and her fella owned what’s now known as the Button Factory but was then the Temple Bar Music Centre. We did the very first event in it, which was the very first Alternative Miss Ireland (AMI) in 1996. But you could definitely say that 1997, with Shirley Temple Bar winning in The Red Box, was when AMI arrived.

Rory: Go on YouTube and check out Shirley Temple Bar’s winning performance, it’s three and a half minutes of absolute genius.

Niall: (on the Panti posters for AMI): Basically there was a live doll with various digital tools for dressing her up, and we had Conor Horgan taking the photographs and creating this apparition. It was basically our own Knock, and Panti was our own vision.

Rory: I’m sometimes accused of having talent, but I think my real talent is working with really great people and letting them do their thing. I was really lucky that Conor wanted to take my pictures and that Niall wanted to use Panti and do things with her. Maybe that’s part of my lazy personality, I’m like, yeah, sure whatever. But it’s worked out very well for me. They kind of created this visual mythology for me before I had anything to hang it on.

Niall: It goes back to pre 1993 when being gay was in itself a political act by default. And then ideas of dressing up and having fun, or gathering people to have a party, or nightclubbing and the way that those things can consciously or unconsciously be part of a socio-political drive. It doesn’t have to be a protest on the street; it can be dancing at a nightclub. And then the idea a drag queen, or Panti, becoming this character having greater meaning than the sum of her parts, and consciously creating an icon. Looking back in its own simple way was it was a political drive.

Rory: We would have these wanky conversations, about our flyers and about what the club was going to be, why we were doing it, what it meant. We were always interested in the political aspects of clubbing and going out, and what you were wearing. We honestly did think about those things.

Niall: It had to be good. I always claim my mother gave me a lot of my drive and my political nous – that idea of doing good work, with as much emphasis on the doing work as doing good. A poster for a drag competition in a nightclub – there’s no reason it can’t be a brilliant poster that goes beyond the boundaries of what’s expected, especially in Ireland. That certainly comes into play with Pantibar, and it did with all the AMI stuff and Powderbubble.

Rory: It was the idea of a collective, there wasn’t just me and Niall, there were 30 people spending all day in Powderbubble, making all this stupid stuff. There were people around who were willing to do it.

Niall: It was the same with AMI; we were a family. We still are.

Rory: (On Pantibar): We toyed with the idea of calling it Baxendales, you can still see the Baxendales sign above the Pantibar door, it was a plumbing supplies place originally. There’d been a bar there called Gubu that went gay at one point, and then it closed. It was sitting there empty for about six months, owned by Jay Burke and Eoin Foyle, who owned loads of cool, hip places in Celtic Tiger Dublin. The two of them were disentangling their business relationship after many years, and one night I met Jay and he said, ‘Do you want to open a gay bar?’

I was heading towards 40 at the time, and I was thinking ‘what does an aging drag queen do?’ Well the obvious answer is a bar; I’d worked in them all my life.

I didn’t immediately say I was putting Panti’s name over the door, but I came to the decision that I needed to use all the things I had in my favour.

Niall: It was Lorcan, your brother, who said you’re mad, you have a brand. I guess it was possibly because you were questioning what Panti was doing in general.

Rory: I was tired of traipsing around doing gigs, making money for other people and then getting my little envelope of cash. But also at that point too, it was when I was growing frustrated with club performing because it’s very limiting. I had started moving into the theatre stuff, so it all dovetailed very well. I could keep my silly clubbery stuff for Pantibar and then do the theatre stuff anyway.

Niall: The first few posters [for Pantibar] had to be not like AMI, they couldn’t just be yet another photograph of Panti, and it definitely had to sit to one side and not seen as part of that. Also, it had to be good, and the first few goes were not quite necessarily good.

I remember sending a drawing of boots for the Search For Panti’s PA poster and it was a classic case of, ‘Oh, that’s it’. It was influenced by the original cover for the Velvet Underground book, with the boots and the whip and the series of parts. There were things from my childhood, and Japan, and the idea of a kit of parts, so we had boobs and eyes and lips, like a drag queen has and you put them all together.

I do remember the excitement once we’d nailed it, and the drawings that came. And it was that it was drawings, it made them really great posters.

Rory: If you didn’t know what they were, you wouldn’t know they were for a bar. They’re just beautiful illustrations that over time people have come to recognise the style as meaning Pantibar.

Niall: I love that with the posters, many of them with just a line or a shoe, you know it’s Panti. The new ones which are animals, pen and ink drawings, but they have a sense of the bigger picture of draggery about them. They’re fantastic beasts, really.

Rory: There were three complaints about the [Pantibar] sign. One was from a Christian pastor, one was from a man who walked into the bar and said that he was going to complain unless I gave him ten grand, and the third one was this randomer who claimed that at when it rained, at night time it reflected off the road and was a danger to drivers.

Niall: All the articles that came after those compaints. Lisa Godson wrote a piece in the Irish Times putting the sign in the context of Dublin landmarks. And eventually I got a letter from An Bord Pleanala saying it had been granted historical and cultural status.

Rory: Philly [McMahon], who I do all the theatre stuff with, and I have this TV show with Sky Atlantic, which we’re writing, and it’s set in a fictional version of Pantibar, so we’ve been mining the last 25 years of stories from the Dublin drag scene, and all the characters we love. We spend days in meetings with people in England trying to explain who DJ Karen is, and why we want to have a version of her in the show.

It’s amazing when you get into these conversations and you find these archetypal characters. Dublin is just full of that stuff, and half of it is all out the stuff that me and Niall have been involved with over the years, all it’s all coming around again.

This is an edited and abridged version of the first GCN podcast. To listen, search GCN Presents Q+A: The Queer and Alternative Podcast in Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

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