Panti Bliss: ‘I lost 8kg doing Dancing with the Stars — I won’t lie, that was a good part of why I did it’
Fresh from a groundbreaking appearance on the show, Rory O’Neill, aka Panti Bliss, talks about shedding his Covid kilos, the miracle drug keeping him alive and anti-trans rhetoric in the queer community
It is a miracle drug — nothing less. Every day, Rory O’Neill takes a single tablet and it ensures he can live a full and normal life.
It was all so different in the late 1990s in the years after he was diagnosed as HIV positive. “I was taking 38 different medications a day,” he says. “That’s a full-time job. I had to take them at different intervals. Some with food, some without food. Some with fat, some without fat. Loads of them would have side effects, so some of them would be taken simply to counteract those side effects. I had a giant pill box and one of those digital watches bleeping all the time to remind me to take a certain one.”
He chuckles mirthlessly at the memory. “Over time, the number of pills started getting less and less as they developed new drugs. There was never a ‘this works’ moment, more like there was constant experimentation. I feel like I’ve been on this one-tablet-a-day regime for about 15 years.”
O’Neill is 54 now and has spent half his life living with HIV. “I was diagnosed at 27 and, at the time, it felt like a death sentence.” His doctor reckoned he had somewhere between two and five years left to live. “I’d already known several people who had died of Aids,” he says. Living to see the new millennium was the aspiration.
Now, thanks to extraordinary medical breakthroughs, he can afford to look back and think of what might have been. “If I’d been diagnosed 10 years previously…” His voice trails off. “I definitely wouldn’t be here today.”
Instead, O’Neill — and his Panti Bliss alter ego — is a cherished member of Ireland’s LGBTQ+ community, a gay rights activist, a successful businessman in the pub and nightclub trade and, increasingly, a household name among the wider populace. Thanks to an impressive run in the latest season of Dancing with the Stars, Panti has achieved considerable exposure. The country’s best-known drag queen just got much more famous.
Weekend visits him at his Penny Lane bar, just north of the Liffey. “It was hard, initially, to get the gays to cross the river,” he quips, in reference to the fact that Dublin’s gay scene was traditionally centred in the south inner city. Now, there’s a thriving scene in this area, which sits at the junction of Capel Street and Great Strand Street. His Pantibar, across the road, is not just one of the country’s foremost gay bars, it is also one of Dublin’s busiest pubs.
Just before the interview begins, O’Neill busies himself with the task of penning a ‘thank you’ card to a seven-year-old Wicklow girl. She had written to say how much she loved Panti’s dancing on RTÉ’s hit show and was disappointed to see her voted off earlier this month.
It is, he says, one of the lovelier aspects of Panti’s rise. Yet, as he points out, all letters received are not as sweet as this particular one.
O’Neill dedicated one of his dances to Dr Fiona Mulcahy, the doctor who has treated him in all the years that he has had HIV. “I’ve talked about it before,” he says, “but not to an audience that big.”
It was 1996 when he got the diagnosis that, initially, turned his life upside down. “I made a conscious decision not to tell my parents for about a year,” he says. “I wanted to be able to answer all their questions — I wanted to read everything I could about it, and understand it inside out. I’m sure I was a horrible, annoying patient and, by the time I told them, I was a f**king expert. I knew everything about it.”
I was telling them that I was going to die before them, and that’s a very unnatural, weird conversation to be having with your parents
The conversation with his parents, he says, was the toughest of his life. “I was telling them that I was going to die before them, and that’s a very unnatural, weird conversation to be having with your parents. But it didn’t work out like that and I constantly feel very lucky about that.”
Homosexuality had been finally decriminalised just three years before, but mid-1990s Ireland could still be a cold place for gay men, especially those who were HIV positive. “I had a strong support network,” he says. “I won’t lie — it was a very hard time. And then, after a number of years and with more and more breakthroughs happening, I came to realise that this was all going to be fine.”
Where once his HIV status greatly curtailed his sex life, the power of modern medicine allows him and his husband to enjoy themselves without the need for condoms. “Thanks to the medication,” he says, “I cannot transmit HIV. That’s a huge thing. I mean, I could inject my blood into you and you wouldn’t get HIV and that’s because there is no HIV in the blood any more.
“It is,” he adds, “a functional cure. You still have to take the tablet, and if you miss a day or two, that’s fine.”
Rory O'Neill (right) and his husband Anderson Cabrera
O’Neill has been married to Brazilian native Anderson Cabrera for four years. There’s a significant age gap, he says, as well as major cultural differences, but he lights up when he speaks about him.
The interview happens in O’Neill’s large dressing room, where he transforms himself into Panti. There’s a lot of work to get her to look as good as she does. “Going from this” — he gestures to his jeans, sweatshirt and makeup-free skin — “to Panti, in all her glory, takes three hours.”
There is a lightbulb-framed mirror, pots of makeup, a huge number of wigs and two rails of dresses, all neatly arranged. “Years ago, you’d have to get shoes made,” he says. “Now, they’re very easily got. It’s all thanks to things like RuPaul’s Drag Race.” The American TV show has brought drag culture into the mainstream, but it was all so different when Panti first emerged.
Does he feel love-hate toward her? “Oh no,” he says, slightly aghast at the question. “I only have a love relationship with her. Sometimes, I think people on the outside don’t quite grasp drag culture. They think it’s the same as Mrs Brown, or something. But Mrs Brown isn’t a drag queen. [Brendan O’Carroll] is a comedian who’s playing a character, and that character happens to be a woman.
“From the drag world I come from, the boundaries between the performer and the character are very blurred. We’re running around nightclubs and bars — we’re not up on a stage separated from an audience the way Mrs Brown is. Mrs Brown cannot exist outside of the world that’s been created for her, whereas Panti — especially when she was young — is out and about, getting taxis, all that stuff. She’s in the world.”
O’Neill says he and Panti are two parts of the same person — and, among regulars at his Dublin bars, that is understood implicitly. “Regular customers come every week and they get to know Panti and they meet her at the bar and they might say, ‘Oh, I hear your mother was sick.’ They don’t want a stupid, fake answer from a character — they actually want to know how my mother is. All the conversations are real — they’re just kind of heightened.”
He warms to his theme. “Let me try to explain it. Say, you’re a 30-year-old woman who works in tech and you have an interview. You go into that interview and your hair is pulled back, you’re in a nice suit, the person who speaks in the interview is presenting themselves in a particular way. The next day, you go off to Tenerife with your best girl pals and you’re hanging off a balcony in a club with a gin and tonic in your hand and wearing a boob tube. At a glance, they’re incredibly different people, but they’re just different versions of the same person — and that’s how I feel about Panti.” He insists that he never, ever considers Panti to be an ‘act’.
Panti Bliss first came to national consciousness in 2014 when she gave an impassioned speech about gay rights from the stage of the Abbey Theatre. The Noble Call got a million views on YouTube. In the years leading up to the marriage equality legislation in 2018, O’Neill became a frequent media performer, both as Rory and as Panti.
I got depressed for the first time ever — I couldn’t fit into any of my clothes any more
The change in the law around gay marriage had a direct impact on O’Neill’s personal life when he and Cabrera married in 2019. But the honeymoon period of the marriage coincided with the arrival of the pandemic and significant strain on O’Neill. “Everything had to shut down. There was such a long period where the bars were closed.” Panti also had to take a back seat.
“I put on a huge amount of weight,” he says. “Something like 15kg, which is over two stone. And that’s a lot for me because I’d always been able to maintain the same sort of weight. I was heavy for the first time in my life and I found it very difficult. I got depressed for the first time ever — I couldn’t fit into any of my clothes any more.”
O’Neill assumed that when life returned to normal and he was running about all the time, as he’d always done, that the weight would simply drop off. “It turns out that, at 54, it doesn’t just fall off. I struggled for about six months. I was going to the gym and watching what I ate and lost 5kg — and that was it.”
Salvation came in the form of Dancing with the Stars. “I lost 8kg doing it,” he says, happily. “I won’t lie — that was also a good part of the reason why I did it. I mean, it’s fun to learn something new at this stage of my life, but everyone told me I’d lose weight doing it, and they were right.”
The dancing took over his life for the best part of five months. He had been asked on it before, but declined, feeling he didn’t have time to devote himself to it fully. But in a post-Covid landscape, it was a case of now or never.
Panti Bliss with dance partner Denys Samson on Dancing with the Stars. Picture: Kyran O’Brien
What’s shown on RTÉ One on Sunday nights is only a tiny fraction of the relentless work and rehearsals that the contestants and their dance partners have to undergo. “It’s tough! You get very stiff and sore — your knees and your back start to get to you. You’re spending 10 hours a day in the studio with [my dance partner] Denys [Samson]…”
The pair have become good friends. “You get very close very quickly. You’re literally thrown into a room with this person for hours a day from day one. You have to throw yourself into his arms, essentially, and you have to become intimate. I don’t mean intimate that way. Denys is a big, straight bloke and there was never any weirdness about it. He’s very comfortable in himself, so there was never any issue.”
It wasn’t all plain sailing, though, and when he talks about the gruelling nature of the training, you sense that he’s happy the whole adventure is behind him. “It’s Wednesday evening, let’s say. You’ve been in there for seven hours. You’re both tired and frustrated and I’m not getting [the dance moves]. Denys has been doing it since he was a kid and it comes so easy to him and I’m struggling, and eventually the frustration from one or both of us would emerge. It wasn’t unusual for us to have a big row. We’d have a shouting match once a week — but that clears the air and we just get on with it then.”
O’Neill is a natural-born performer. Growing up in Ballinrobe, Co Mayo, he always sensed he was destined for a bigger stage — and, for much of his later life, that stage has been literal.
Panti’s rip-roaring stage play, If These Wigs Could Talk, is a potted history on Panti/Rory’s own life and explores the immense change that the queer community has experienced here in just a generation or two. Most of it, O’Neill says, has been for the better, although he notes that a curious side effect has been the rise of conservatism within the gay community.
It’s a theme he’s given much thought to and he pauses to find the right words to express what’s driving it. “Acceptance, probably. The fact that the gays can get married now. Gays have the same pressure from their mammies to settle down and get married, and that used not to be the case.”
He says he is alarmed by an apparent rise in gay-bashing incidents and he is especially chilled by the emergence of a far-right cohort who are happy to express their homophobia online. He is also upset by the latent hatred toward trans people, especially if the haters happen to be gay.
For much of this year, a hashtag — #LGBWithoutTheT — has been trending on social media. “It’s definitely a thing online, but in my real-world experience, I never come across that. You hear something ridiculous like, ‘All lesbians are against trans people,’ but all the lesbians I know are completely trans-inclusive. Those ‘LGB without the T’ people are utterly unwelcome in the vast majority of queer spaces. They are a small, very vocal minority — and it all seems to be an international thing, rather than Irish.
“None of this stuff,” he adds, “would bother us if social media wasn’t there. What we’re doing is importing, wholesale, all this culture war stuff. All of these things come as a package — anti-immigrant, anti-Semitism, anti-trans, anti-queer. Nothing revolts me more than any member of the queer community who rolls in with this anti-trans rhetoric. It would almost be funny if it wasn’t so sad.”
An avid tweeter, he says he is actively trying to spend less time on the platform. Social media, he believes, has largely been a divisive force. “I’ve abandoned Facebook altogether. I was never particularly interested in Instagram, but it has its own issues, too. There’s less of the screaming at each other going on there, but it’s so looks-oriented. I’d hate to be 17 years old and going on Instagram, scrolling through page after page telling you you must have a perfect body and perfect teeth.”
He says, as a man in his fifties, he doesn’t feel anything like the sort of pressure younger men do, especially gay men. His husband is a case in point. “He’s in his thirties and he definitely feels a pressure that I don’t any more to look good. He’s also Brazilian, and Brazilian culture is very visual and they all want to look perfect, with the white teeth and all that.”
Cabrera is an avid-gym goer. “Going to the gym has always been his hobby. He’s in great shape but I always tell him he’d be happier in himself if he just accepted that he doesn’t have to look exactly like all the people in his Instagram feed.”
O’Neill says he has become more accepting of the ageing process. “It’s a cliche to say that ageing is harder in the queer community, but like a lot of cliches, it might be true. For gay men, there’s probably more pressure [to halt the signs of ageing] than for straight men — but our experience around ageing is probably a signpost for where it’s going for straight men.”
We have spoke for a long time, but O’Neill has to be off. “I have a dental appointment,” he says. “I need to get a tooth fixed.” He pauses and laughs. “You see, I’m still interested in my appearance — even as I get older!”
THISISPOPBABY returns to Vicar Street with Panti Bliss’s hit show ‘If These Wigs Could Talk’ for one night only on May 14
