Está disponível para download no Soundcloud https://soundcloud.com/rory-brendan/the-best-gay-possible um remix dos Pet shop boys
criado para abrilhantar ainda mais o discurso da Drag Queen irlandesa e
ativista, a Panti Bliss (Rory O'Neill). Panti Bliss é um ícone antigo da cena gay da Irlanda.
O discurso chamado “Noble” foi filmado por Conor Horgan, no Teatro Abbey, em
Dublin, em fevereiro desse ano. Os fatos que levaram a esse discurso
aconteceram quando jornalistas e um grupo de lobby
católico rebateram o casamento gay e os direitos dos homossexuais em ampla
discussão no país.
O “poderoso” discurso tem ganhado a cada dia respeito e admiração e até tradução para outros idiomas.
Neil adicionou sua voz no
discurso questionando: Where's the love?
Where's the love?
Where's the love?
Where's the love?
I've been waiting here
for you
For so many years
Assista ao vídeo com recurso de legenda do You Tube em português.
Abaixo o discurso completo e em destaque as partes que foram colocadas no remix.
Hello. My name is Panti and for the
benefit of the visually impaired or the incredibly naïve, I am a drag queen, a
performer, and an accidental and occasional gay rights activist.
And as you may have already
gathered, I am also painfully middle-class. My father was a country vet, I went
to a nice school, and afterwards to that most middle-class of institutions –
art college. And although this may surprise some of you, I have always managed
to find gainful employment in my chosen field – gender discombobulation.
So the grinding, abject poverty so
powerfully displayed in tonight’s performance is something I can thankfully say
I have no experience of.
But oppression is something I can
relate to. Oh, I’m not comparing my experience to Dublin workers of 1913, but I
do know what it feels like to be put in your place.
Have you ever been standing at a pedestrian crossing when a car drives
by and in it are a bunch of lads, and they lean out the window and they shout
“Fag!” and throw a milk carton at you?
Now it doesn’t really hurt. It’s just a wet carton and anyway they’re
right – I am a fag. But it feels oppressive.
When it really does hurt, is afterwards. Afterwards I wonder and worry
and obsess over what was it about me, what was it they saw in me? What was it
that gave me away? And I hate myself for wondering that. It feels oppressive
and the next time I’m at a pedestrian crossing I check myself to see what is it
about me that “gives the gay away” and I check myself to make sure I’m not
doing it this time.
Have any of you ever come home in the evening and turned on the
television and there is a panel of people – nice people, respectable people,
smart people, the kind of people who make good neighbourly neighbours and write
for newspapers. And they are having a reasoned debate about you. About what
kind of a person you are, about whether you are capable of being a good parent,
about whether you want to destroy marriage, about whether you are safe around
children, about whether God herself thinks you are an abomination, about
whether in fact you are “intrinsically disordered”. And even the nice TV
presenter lady who you feel like you know thinks it’s perfectly ok that they
are all having this reasonable debate about who you are and what rights you
“deserve”.
And that feels oppressive.
Have you ever been on a crowded train with your gay friend and a small
part of you is cringing because he is being SO gay and you find yourself trying
to compensate by butching up or nudging the conversation onto “straighter”
territory? This is you who have spent 35 years trying to be the best gay
possible and yet still a small part of you is embarrassed by his gayness.
And I hate myself for that. And that feels oppressive. And when I’m
standing at the pedestrian lights I am checking myself.
Have you ever gone into your favourite neighbourhood café with the paper
that you buy every day, and you open it up and inside is a 500-word opinion
written by a nice middle-class woman, the kind of woman who probably gives to
charity, the kind of woman that you would be happy to leave your children with.
And she is arguing so reasonably about whether you should be treated less than
everybody else, arguing that you should be given fewer rights than everybody
else. And when the woman at the next table gets up and excuses herself to
squeeze by you with a smile you wonder, “Does she think that about me too?”
And that feels oppressive. And you go outside and you stand at the
pedestrian crossing and you check yourself and I hate myself for that.
Have you ever turned on the computer and seen videos of people just like
you in far away countries, and countries not far away at all, being beaten and
imprisoned and tortured and murdered because they are just like you?
And that feels oppressive.
Three weeks ago I was on the television and I said that I believed that
people who actively campaign for gay people to be treated less or differently
are, in my gay opinion, homophobic. Some people, people who actively campaign
for gay people to be treated less under the law took great exception at this
characterisation and threatened legal action against me and RTÉ. RTÉ, in its
wisdom, decided incredibly quickly to hand over a huge sum of money to make it
go away. I haven’t been so lucky.
And for the last three weeks I have been lectured by heterosexual people
about what homophobia is and who should be allowed identify it. Straight people
– ministers, senators, lawyers, journalists – have lined up to tell me what
homophobia is and what I am allowed to feel oppressed by. People who have never
experienced homophobia in their lives, people who have never checked themselves
at a pedestrian crossing, have told me that unless I am being thrown in prison
or herded onto a cattle train, then it is not homophobia.
And that feels oppressive.
So now Irish gay people find
ourselves in a ludicrous situation where not only are we not allowed to say
publicly what we feel oppressed by, we are not even allowed to think it because
our definition has been disallowed by our betters.
And for the last three weeks I have been denounced from the floor of
parliament to newspaper columns to the seething morass of internet commentary
for “hate speech” because I dared to use the word “homophobia”. And a jumped-up
queer like me should know that the word “homophobia” is no longer available to
gay people. Which is a spectacular and neat Orwellian trick because now it
turns out that gay people are not the victims of homophobia – homophobes are.
But I want to say that it is not
true. I don’t hate you.
I do, it is true, believe that
almost all of you are probably homophobes. But I’m a homophobe. It would be
incredible if we weren’t. To grow up in a society that is overwhelmingly
homophobic and to escape unscathed would be miraculous. So I don’t hate you
because you are homophobic. I actually admire you. I admire you because most of
you are only a bit homophobic. Which all things considered is pretty good
going.
But I do sometimes hate myself. I
hate myself because I fucking check myself while standing at pedestrian crossings.
And sometimes I hate you for doing that to me.
But not right now. Right now, I like
you all very much for giving me a few moments of your time.
And I thank
you for it.