Hi, this is against everyone with Connor Abeeb, a weekly podcast featuring my conversations with countercultural figures and presenting complex, spiritual, political, and philosophical ideas in an engaging and accessible way.

Each week, I ask the question what it means to be human in our moment and envision a better world.

And I do that asking and envisioning with some of the greatest minds

with the most radical and dangerous projects of our time, artists, occultists, philosophers,

journalists, and more. This week, my guest is, I believe, my first drag queen ever,

Rory O'Neill, better known to the world as Panty Bliss. Panty is an Irish

drag queen who brought Irish gay rights to the world stage and also created an entirely

nuanced, deep, and exciting discussion about oppression and who gets to speak and why.

So I came to Pamcy's work in a kind of roundabout way. I've always had my sort of more

radical queer thoughts about gay marriage and how that has largely been a conservative movement in the U.S.

and how we need deeper leftist radical critiques of marriage.

And so when I heard that Ireland was passing gay marriage through a vote,

I didn't make distinctions between the way gay marriage took place throughout the world and why gay marriage would be different in different places.

So when I went to Ireland in 2016, just after gay marriage had passed and I met Rory, I just thought, okay, well, so this is a drag queen who's talking about equality, all that, so and so forth. But then as I looked more into Rory's work, an Irish, queer, and gay identity,

I became struck by how radical actually this moment might have been working towards marriage

for gay people and lesbians and everybody in Ireland. And interestingly, this topic really comes up, and we both go into it very deeply,

both about our misgivings about marriage and the state in general,

and also what we might gain from movements like the Equality Movement in Ireland.

And we also talk about what it means for Rory Panty to be an artist who is doing something that was once seen as extremely

transgressive, that is drag, and has now taken the world stage in a sort of mainstream way.

What does it mean to be someone who was working at the margins and is suddenly thrust into

the center of people's attention?

...