The Queen of Ireland: Champion of Same Sex Marriage

Panti Bliss Gets Standing Ovation for Fierce TED Talk on Homophobia

We were on our way to see The Queen of Ireland at Carlton's Cinema Nova when we came across a political march in Melbourne's CBD. Seems everything is connected these days.

Marriage Equality Rallies Hit Sydney And Melbourne https://t.co/tU4DzfFdts #marriageequality #noplebiscite #auspol

— Alastair Lawrie (@alawriedejesus) October 8, 2016

This documentary is promoted by Transmission Films as 'An uplifting documentary about Ireland's superstar drag queen Panti Bliss as she rises from ‘giant cartoon woman' to one of the highest-profile activists in the LGBTIQ community.'

The film is actually about Rory O'Neill whose occupation is that of old fashioned drag queen. His life intersects dramatically with the successful Irish referendum on marriage equality in 2015. The connections between his private story and his public exposure as a champion of the cause climax in his triumphant return to his hometown of Ballinrobe.

The Queen far exceeded my expectations. Plain-clothes Rory is a thoughtful, engaging person, quite unlike his alter ego in many ways. Director Conor Horgan gives us a very sympathetic portrait. The documentary deserves the praise it has received.


The Australian situation, with a proposed plebiscite on same sex marriage, appears to parallel Ireland. However, having this vote has been opposed by most of the LGBTIQ groups down under. A referendum is not required to change the law, as was the case in Ireland. Nor is a plebiscite binding on the Australian parliament. Former PM Tony Abbott and opponent of same sex marriage adopted the policy as a tactic to delay giving his government members a free parliamentary vote. His successor Malcolm Turnbull supports marriage equality but agreed to the proposal to placate the right-wing of his party.

The Labor Party opposition has rejected the proposal, arguing for a free vote in parliament, citing both the cost ($A 200 million) and the negative social and psychological impact on gay people and their families. The plebiscite bill is likely to be blocked in the Senate. The Guardian reported recently:

Advertisements for the anti-marriage equality case in the Irish referendum caused a majority of LGBTI people to feel angry and distressed, according to a new study.

The survey of 1,657 Irish LGBTI people also found that only a minority of respondents would be prepared to face the referendum again if they did not know about the eventual successful outcome.

Rory/Panti refers to this aspect when meeting referendum supporters after the result.

His journey is one that is well worth following.

Spotlight: Suffering the Silence

Spotlight is an old-fashioned movie about an old-fashioned craft - investigative journalism. Director and co-writer Tom McCarthy has stuck to the proven formula for this kind of story telling so effectively mastered in All The President's Men forty years ago. It is based on actual events and keeps to a straightforward narrative.

The Boston Globe's 2001 Spotlight team is bigger and has a woman on board (Sacha Pfeiffer well played by Rachel McAdams). A quick scan of the cast shows how nearly all aspects of this shameful epidemic were male-dominated. Clergy and laity, police, lawyers and judges, and journalists: all played their part in the systemwide sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests and the collusion or silence of those who should have made it their business to expose it.

The two Spotlight male leads, Mark Ruffalo as Mike Rezendes and Michael Keaton as Wally 'Robby' Robinson, give very creditable performances. Liev Schreiber as the new Jewish outsider newspaper editor Marty Baron is hardly recognisable as his character from Wolverine. The beard helps.

This isn't a film about paedophile priests or its coverup by the highest levels of the Catholic church. Nor is it about "a bunch of lawyers turning child abuse into a cottage industry". It is a story about journalism, its power and importance. The sort of journalism that is much less common now under the current financial and other pressures on newspapers and other old media.

IMDb has tagged the film as Biography, Drama, History and Thriller. It is primarily a crime investigation. As the credits indicate, it has been a global crime wave. Its 'survivors' suffered a long time in the silence that denied them justice.

Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict #FilmReview

I certainly wasn't looking for twentieth century art when visiting Venice in June 1980. But wandering the backstreets I stumbled across a house that seemed to double as an art gallery. The name Guggenheim rang bells but Peggy had not been on my philistine radar. We went in not knowing what to expect. The place was deserted much like the rest of Venice in early June in the good old days. It was a delight beyond imagining. Picasso, Pollock, Miro and Marcel Duchamp were just a few amongst a feast of modern artists in her Collection.

It was still very much a home as well as a personal museum. Peggy had died only six months earlier. My strongest recollection over the years has been of the courtyard garden where the ashes of many of her dogs were buried. She has since joined them in the wall. It was a secluded spot then.

On a return visit in October 2015, being the first there was not enough to avoid the crushing crowds that packed the place by mid-morning. A gate now leads from the garden to the temporary exhibition rooms and a restaurant. The house has been extended by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Foundation to display more recent artists' work.

Lisa Immordino Vreeland's documentary Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict helps to give some idea about whether Peggy would have approved of the changes. The film covers her very full life of 81 years in considerable depth. 95 minutes is not enough to mention all her lovers, not even the famous artists but Peggy wrote detailed accounts for those interested (now in a single edition): Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict. Must get a copy, if only for the Gore Vidal foreward.

Peggy is not spared the criticisms of some of her contemporaries. Some of the more biting comments on her personality and her artistic endeavours probably tell us more about art connoisseurs and critics. Two of her regular guests in Venice confirm that the catering at her palazzo left much to be desired.

The discovery of interviews taped by her authorised biographer, Jacqueline Bogard Weld, gives the documentary a personal, winning touch. Peggy claimed that she was never "afraid". Her art collecting campaign in Paris at the outbreak of the second world war attest to her courage, drive and determination.

Her rich and famous family had an exceptional number of tragic deaths but she reveals very little in the interviews. Director Vreeland commented in an interview about her film, "she wasn't someone who was especially expressive; she didn't have a lot of emotion". Nevertheless, her sharp sense of humour is evident throughout.

What is revealed about Peggy explains how she left such a spectacular legacy: "It was really ballsy of her to have been so open about her sexuality; this was not something people did back then. So many people are bound by conventional rules but Peggy said no. She grabbed hold of life and she lived it on her own terms." This was especially true about the art and the artists she collected and promoted. "Peggy's life did not seem that dreamy until she attached herself to these artists. It was her ability to redefine herself in the end that truly summed her up".


A life definitely worth sharing.