Ahead of the release of his memoir ‘Mr. Pussy: Before I Forget To Remember’, Alan Amsby talks to Brian Finnegan about queer Dublin in the rare aul times, life at 79 and treading the boards at gay weddings.

‘Mr. Pussy: Before I Forget To Remember’ is a typical celebrity memoir charting the glory days of Ireland’s original drag queen, but between the lines it’s a rich history of homosexuality through three decades in this country, before and after decriminalisation.

In the 1970s, long before Panti Bliss rose to national prominence, there was a queen who not only regularly appeared on TV screens across the land, but also toured to towns from Ballydehob to Buncrana, performing a cabaret act full of camp sexual innuendo that was hugely popular with the middle-Irish masses. That queen was Mr. Pussy, and for two decades she was a bona fide national treasure, albeit one that was never quite openly associated with the love that dared not speak its name.

“There’s still a lot of people around the country who think I have a girlfriend and six kids somewhere,” Alan Amsby, the man behind the Pussy, quips. “The first time I did The Late Late Show it was in black and white, and I was in full drag. For the interview they asked me to tie my hair back and put on a shirt and tie, so I looked a bit butch. Of course, I didn’t say anything about my sexuality. You couldn’t in those days.”

We’re in the Front Door bar on Dublin’s Dame Street, where Amsby met writer David Kenny two days a week this year to work on an autobiography, Mr. Pussy: Before I Forget To Remember. While in a typical celebrity memoir style it’s full of funny anecdotes and name-drops, its byproduct is a surprisingly rich portrait of gay Ireland through the course of four decades that led to momentous change. But it begins in London, where Amsby was born in during the blitz, and where Mr. Pussy was born at the height of the swinging sixties. In between he received his education from the drag doyennes of the East End, who presided over an underground scene before the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Britain in 1967.

“I preferred it when it was illegal; it was much more fun!” Amsby laughs, with a nostalgic twinkle behind his tinted glasses. “There was always somewhere to go, parties and clubs, always something going on. The queens used to go out in ski pants with headscarves and rollers and people didn’t think twice about it, because the east end was full of that kind of thing.

“One queen was called Stella Minge. She was about 6’2’’, an ex sea-queen, and her hair was like cotton wool, it had been bleached that much over the years. She had her own stool in the bar called the Kent, where all the sailors went there when they docked, and if anybody sat on it she wouldn’t go up and ask them to move, she’d just give them a smack.

“There was another queen called Mental Marilyn, who lived in the next street, and they used to take it in turn to have parties, although there was a bit of competition. I was sitting by the window one night in the Minge’s and a brick came through the window. It was completely covered in sequins and there was a note stuck to it, saying ‘Minge. How dare you have more parties than me, you bitch’.”

Amsby’s own drag career began in London’s legendary Royal Vauxhall Tavern, where on the dare of the landlady of the day, Peggy Ritchie, he discovered the joy of applause. “The acts at the time were the old, traditional kind of drag queen in shop window wigs. I’d worked for a theatrical wigmaker and I said to Peggy, ‘I could do better than that,’ and she said, ‘Go on, I dare you then’.

“Peggy’s daughter had gotten engaged to a guy who turned out to be gay, but she had the wedding dress and everything. So I got the dress, and Sandie Shaw had just gotten married at that time, so I stuffed a pillow up the front of it, went on and did Sandie’s ‘Always Something There To Remind Me’. It brought the house down and it was the first time I got that adrenalin rush. I thought: I want to do this.”

A further rush came in 1969 when photographer-about-town Mike Arlen shot pictures of Pussy on Carnaby Street. “Mike was always having parties in his place in Earl’s Court and some of the biggest names in showbusiness would be there, Brian Epstein and Lionel Bart and the like. One night he said to me: ‘We’ll do a feature on you, dear. You look wonderful.’ So we went and did a shoot on Carnaby Street in full drag, and the press took it up. Suddenly I was in all the papers and magazines, and on a billboard on Carnaby Street itself.”

Before Amsby had time to capitalise on his newfound fame in swinging sixties London, something happened that would change the course of his life forever. He was asked by the owner of The Intercontinental Lounge in Belfast to perform for a one-week stint. That turned into two months, and a tour of Northern Ireland, and then Amsby said he’d like to go to Dublin, where he ended up hosting his own hugely popular show for two years.

“A friend of mine introduced me to Jim McGettigan, who owned the Baggot Inn. He had a room upstairs, and I said to him, ‘let’s try it out’. We called it Pussy’s Parlour and it ran for six nights a week. It was a haunt for all the gang in the Dáil. Michael D Higgins came; Sabrina told me she remembers it.”

Pussy’s brand of drag was different what you might see on stage at The George today, in that it was about passing as a woman rather than exaggerating femininity, but at the same time with the Mr. prefix, there was always the assertion that this was very much a man in full make-up. “I was one of the boys and one of the girls at the same time – a bit of a slut,” Amsby explains. “I think people identified me not as drag but as an established character, like Brendan O’Carroll’s Mrs. Brown.”

And like Mrs. Brown, the people of Ireland took Mr. Pussy to their hearts. The popular pub-cabaret scene of the early ’70s, which preempted disco and nightclubs, was the perfect breeding ground for Pussy’s talents. “I went all over Ireland – Donegal, Galway, Limerick, Sligo… One week we went from Malin Head to Cahirciveen. I was in Cork once in my dressing room, looking out the window and there was a queue going all around the block, and I was wondering what it was for. It turned out they were queuing to see me.”

As the ’70s melted into the ’80s, Mr. Pussy became an Irish TV regular, with plenty of appearances on the aforementioned Late Late Show and a post on the popular RTÉ panel show, Play The Game, which ran for a decade. And while Pussy was in the mainstream spotlight, she also plied her trade on the not so visible Dublin gay scene.

“I was the first drag act ever in a gay bar in Ireland,” Amsby says of his Sunday morning gigs in The Parliament Inn (now The Turk’s Head). There were five or six gay bars in Dublin at one time – Rice’s, Bartley Dunnes, The South William, Tobin’s, The Viking on Dame Street, where I performed too.”

From this perspective gay Dublin seems like a hive of activity in the ’80s, but at the same time engaging in homosexual sex was a criminal offence, and very few people were out, living double lives that were thrown into sharp relief after the brutal murder of RTÉ designer Charles Self in 1982. “I knew Charlie from doing The Late Late Show,” Amsby says. “He was a well known about the scene.”

As part of the investigation looking for Self’s killer (who has never been identified), the police started rounding up men who frequented Dublin’s gay bars. “People were terrified they’d be discovered,” Amsby remembers. “I was rounded up too, brought down to the police station and fingerprinted. When they were bringing me in they opened the back door of the police car and I said, ‘I’m not getting in the back seat like some criminal. I’ll sit in the front.’ Everybody was fingerprinted and photographed. I don’t know whether those fingerprints are still on file or not.”

All through the emergence of the Irish gay rights movement, and the traumas and triumphs that went with it, Pussy was a fixture on the mostly underground gay scene. Post-decriminalisation in 1994, she became an integral part of a much more openly queer Dublin, with her very own venue, which had some proper Celtic tigers behind it.

“I was out another night and Bono was in our company, and I said I wouldn’t mind opening up somewhere, and he said, yeah, it would be nice, wouldn’t it? I didn’t think anything of it, but a few weeks later I was at a party and Gavin Friday called me into the hallway and said, ‘I’ve got something to tell you, we’re opening a café’. I said, ‘Oh, that’s nice.’ He said, ‘It’s for you’.”

Christened Mr. Pussy’s Café Deluxe by The Edge, it was open 24 hours a day on Dublin’s Suffolk Street, and was raided by the Gardaí in its first week for having (male) nude entertainment. A cross between a greasy spoon and a bordello, alcohol was served in teapots, and you could order Pussy Pies with Pint of Pussy (milk) on the side.

“I’d host camp bingo at four o’clock in the morning, and the likes of Ronnie Wood and Naomi Campbell would be there, silent as lambs, marking their numbers off along with everyone else,” Amsby remembers. “We had a gold Rolls Royce and anyone who won at the bingo, we’d go and collect them at their house to bring them for lunch the next week.

“My favourite memory is when Mel Gibson popped in. We left and went to the pub together, and I kept my frock on. Me in full drag with Mel. He was a gentleman, with a dry sense of humour. Van Morrison was the same. He’d sing with his guitar ’til four or five in the morning.”

Pussy’s Café Deluxe closed in 1995, signaling the end of a golden era for Amsby, and the beginning of a drag renaissance in Ireland, ushered in by the Alternative Miss Ireland contest, which introduced Panti, Shirley Temple Bar, Veda Beaux Reves and more to the gay scene. Mr. Pussy’s brand of drag may have gone out of vogue, but Amsby never stopped performing, and nowadays he’s a popular choice for same-sex couples who want a good, old-fashioned comedy drag show for their wedding receptions.

“I never thought I’d be asked to do gay weddings,” he says. “I never thought we’d have gay marriage in the first place. It’s unbelievable!”

At the ripe young age of 79 (next year she’ll be Octopussy!), and known as Auntie Pussy by Dublin’s younger cohort of drag divas, Amsby has continued partying too. “If I go out I don’t come home until seven in the morning,” he tells me, sipping on an afternoon brandy. And as for Mr. Pussy: “The day I look in the mirror and say, you look too old, dear, is the day I’ll give her up. The baby drags will have suitcases of frocks and wigs.”

Mr. Pussy: Before I Forget To Remember’ is in all good bookshops now. She performs on New Year’s Eve at the Galway Winter Pride Party in the Connaught Tribune Printworks. To book Mr. Pussy to perform at your wedding visit dragqueens.ie