Theme: Gay Ireland

Mm, mm, mm – wish I had pictures for this page. Somehow I just didn't have a camera with me in the bars, or at least the nerve to whip it out and point it at people. Gay men all over the world don't exactly cotton to that, even today.

Dublin, not surprising, has an enormous and vibrant gay community. Its visibility, however, was surprising. In a staunchly Catholic country full of brutish soccer fans, well, somehow I expected Dublin queers would have to keep things a bit mum. The George, though, Dublin's biggest gay bar (three levels and a no effort-no entry dress code), is a tourist attraction. At least, the Sunday evening drag bingo games are. For an hour, a riotous drag queen named, I think, Fifi Fo-Fum, calls out bingo amid a non-stop catty shtick. This was followed by a top-notch drag show – the usual hot pants and lip-synching, plus two absolutely gorgeous Irish lads dancing, Thomas and Mark. "And believe you me," Fifi said, "they're not saints."

We were fortunate enough to be in Dublin on the night of the seventh annual Miss Alternative Ireland drag pageant. Unfortunately, we had plans with our group much of the night. Three of us, though, broke away from dinner early and headed to the Olympia Theater in Temple Bar, hoping to catch the last of the show. The box office, however, had already closed, and the bouncers wouldn't let in latecomers, certainly not Americans. At this point, Holly took matters into her own hands and led us into the alley, to the stage door, where she plied the stage guard with thw sweetest smelling bullshit about being a friend of Joey Arias and how much he wanted us to see the show while we were in Ireland shopping for frocks. The door was actually slammed in her face. Further down the alley, though, we found – gasp! – an open stairwell door. All the way up, we emerged at the top of the balcony and were able to watch the very end of the pageant: the crowning of Miss Alternative Ireland 2001.

The second runner-up was a drag king, Miss Stephanie Strap-On who had me totally fooled at first. "What's the hot blond doing up there?" I asked. Oops. The first runner-up, Miss Revlon, was something to behold – easily seven-and-a-half feet tall, big-boned, soft all over, strapped in like a tied turkey. She looked like a pro wrestler in 12-inch platforms, and the crowd loved her – whooped like they were watching footie. The winner was Miss Tina Leggs Tantrum, a bodacious blonde who'd modeled a homemade evening dress shaped like a boat and performed as Dolly Parton. The theater was packed to the gills – we probably couldn't have found tickets to buy, anyway – with maybe 4,000 screaming queens. And this was the seventh annual show. I'll bet this is a stripe of the Celtic Tiger old Ireland didn't expect.

In Galway City one night, the middle of the week, I went hunting some of the craic and found instead, well, make up your own joke. It being a Wednesday night, none of the bars on Lower Dominick Street recommended to me as musical hotspots had live music. As I walked along Raven's Terrace, though, I heard hearty singing coming from a pub. Finally, some music! I went in – they were singing to the jukebox: "Go West." I'd read about this bar, Zulu's, and spotted it earlier but didn't even realize this was it until I stumbled in and found the patrons taking Mary's name in an entirely different context.

Galway City has two gay pubs, this being the liveliest. The nice thing about being from Oklahoma is that it gives me such an immediate entry in a gay bar. "Where're you from?" inevitably leads to some queen with his arms in the air singing about purty fringe. Two pubs may not seem like much, but it's quite something for Galway City – or anyplace on the west coast, it seems. A nice chap named Brendan explained that Cork, a major city to the south, has virtually no gay scene at all. Why's that? "Because the west is fucking beautiful and attracts beautiful fucking people. Cork's industry dregs."

And lest you think Wilde is only a pop culture memory, I asked Brendan's partner what he did for a living and he replied, "As little as possible." Epigrams and Epiladies!

The journey:

Recurrent themes: