On 1 February 2014, Ireland's best-known queer performer, drag artist Panti (Rory O'Neill), delivered a ten-minute speech on the main stage of the Abbey Theatre following a production of James Plunkett's play The Risen People (1958).Footnote ¹ The oration was the last instalment in a series of so-called ‘Noble Calls’ programmed by the national theatre, in which invited artists, activists and public intellectuals spoke after the production about an issue of pressing concern. Plunkett's drama explores the impact on a family of the 1913 Dublin Lockout, during which approximately 20,000 people took to the streets in an industrial dispute over working conditions. Marking the centenary of the event, the production and its Noble Calls commemorated the original incident, while also encouraging reflection on the state of contemporary Ireland, and the public's aspirations for a country deeply affected by recent social, cultural and economic upheavals.Footnote ²

Panti's addition to the line-up came about following the appearance of O'Neill on RTÉ television, the national broadcaster, on 11 January. In a live interview with host Brendan O'Connor on The Saturday Night Show, O'Neill was asked what life was like for gay people in contemporary Ireland. While acknowledging positive developments, he suggested that there was still substantial homophobia, and, upon questioning, claimed that he considered the attitudes and actions of high-profile journalist John Waters (who then had a column in the Irish Times Footnote ³), and members of the Catholic lobby group the Iona Institute, to be homophobic. After the show aired, named and implied individuals threatened RTÉ and O'Neill with defamation action, leading the broadcaster to remove that segment of the interview from iPlayer the next day, and to issue an apology on The Saturday Night Show on 25 January. In the lead-up to an expected civil-marriage referendum,Footnote ⁴ the threat of legal action, and its acceptance by the broadcaster, who paid out approximately €85,000 to the offended parties, effectively meant that homophobia could not now be called out in public.Footnote ⁵ National media reflected this initially by barely documenting the interview, the censored edit or legal threat, leading to the palpable sense that accusations of homophobia were now prohibited. Across social media and blogs, however, the phenomenon that became known as ‘Pantigate’ grew into a near global story. That Panti would stimulate this kind of focus and discussion is of interest to my current research project on queer performance and contemporary Ireland, not least of all due to theatre's challenge to, and eventual circumvention of, the strictures of national broadcasting. But I am additionally compelled by the role played by social media and video-sharing technologies in the circulation of performance, including the cultural and methodological questions and possibilities that these platforms present.

Standing on the Abbey stage, surrounded by the cast of the current production, Panti delivered a witty and impassioned talk outlining what she and many others understood homophobia to be, and what it feels like. The speech was structured around incidents of being judged and then judging oneself at pedestrian crossings, an experience that many people, regardless of their sexuality, could identify with:

Panti also used the opportunity to speak to O'Neill's appearance on television, explaining his comments further:

The performer recounted some of the effects of his comments, arguing that the threat of legal action, and RTÉ's response, had created a situation where the term ‘homophobia’ was no longer available to gay people:

Met with a standing ovation on the night of its delivery, the filmed speech was also posted to YouTube. Immediately it went viral, appearing on NBC News, Fox News, Channel Four and BBC News stations, to name a few. It was discussed in the pages of The Guardian, the Huffington Post and the Washington Post. It was also the stimulus for debate in the Irish and European parliaments, and O'Neill was even approached by political parties to stand for election. Journalist and cultural commentator Fintan O'Toole described it on Twitter as the ‘most eloquent Irish speech since Daniel O'Connell was in his prime’.Footnote ⁶ The video has since been seen online by almost a million people to date – far more than any other Abbey Theatre performance – and translated into over ten languages. It has been endorsed and shared by figures such as Stephen Fry, Armistead Maupin, RuPaul and Madonna. In March, the Pet Shop Boys released a slow mixed track of the speech called ‘Oppressed (The Best Gay Possible)’, which features in their 2014 tour, accompanied by visuals documenting homophobia around the globe. Panti has since been invited to lecture or perform all around the country and abroad, to places including Australia, Canada, France and Germany. The hash tag #TEAMPANTI proliferated on social media feeds for months, leading Belong To (Ireland's national LGBT youth organization) to design and sell TEAM PANTI T-shirts, which have since earned over €10,000 for the charity.

In my research I’m interested in how this series of events reasserted homophobia as an experience that people continue to encounter, one in which performance might still directly intervene, and to which scholarship might pay attention. The revival of the word ‘homophobia’ struck an uncomfortable cord in a cosmopolitan Ireland that would rather assume its erasure, and instead debate the provision of rights and privileges to gay people in terms of what's best for children, or families, or more generally the natural order. (The latter response, of course, is not specific to Ireland alone.) The events also revealed how theatre and performance have a unique role to play when television and radio recoil under the threat of legal action: Panti in the Abbey could do more than what O'Neill on RTÉ could or was allowed to do.

Fig. 1

Panti (Rory O'Neill) speaking on the main stage of the Abbey Theatre, with cast members of The Risen People in the background (2014). Screengrab from YouTube.

While queer performance typically takes place in very localized community contexts, this occasion was striking too insofar as social media and video-sharing technologies were instrumental in effectively extending the stage by circulating the performance worldwide, newly expanding lines of influence and impact. As Panti's speech spread globally, it intersected with then-emerging news of homophobic violence at the Sochi Winter Olympics and the Uganda Anti-homosexuality Act (2014), better known as the Kill the Gays Bill. For Irish theatre, historically so preoccupied with battles over space and place, this occasion also revealed the value of a geographically rooted performance culture, but also the possibilities engendered by the virtual reroutings and disseminations that social media technologies enable.

Pantigate raises provocative questions about the concerns, targets and transmission of contemporary queer performance, but also about the methods of best researching queer performance's networks, locations and audiences online, as well as its circuits of influence and flows of feeling in a mediatized world. As Martha McCaughey and Michael D. Ayers ask, ‘Can you really put your body on the line, online?’Footnote ⁷ Insofar as the Web continues to be a popular locus for both sociality and cyberactivism, from signing petitions to circulating information, art and performance, my research explores how it might continue to support, facilitate or hinder queer practices, including their virtual and material goals.