Rory O'Neill says he aims to smash down the stigma that still surrounds HIV when he swaps his Panti Bliss persona and dances as himself for the first time on DWTS this Sunday in honour of the doctor who first treated him for his own HIV diagnosis 27 years ago.
On Sunday night’s dedicated dance week, Rory will take a spin under the glitterball with his professional dance partner Denys Samson with a Paso Doble to Pet Shop Boys hit It’s a Sin.
It will be an emotional dance dedicated to Professor Fiona Mulcahy and her team at St James's Hospital in Dublin and Mayo man Rory wants to show how he has lived a healthy life despite his diagnosis.
Speaking to RTÉ Entertainment ahead of the big night, he said: "I’m a 54-year-old bloke who has been living with HIV for 27 years and I’m perfectly fit and able to be on live television every Sunday night.
"I was diagnosed with HIV in 1996 and I went straight to the HIV clinic in St James’s and the first doctor I spoke to was the consultant, Fiona Mulcahy.
"She has remained my consultant for the last 27 years until she retired during the pandemic so I thought I would dedicate me and Denys' dance on Sunday to her personally but also to the whole team who have been looking after me."
Unfortunately, Professor Mulcahy won't be in the audience on Sunday night as she is holidaying in South Africa, but Rory and Denys did a zoom with her last week to let her know that they would be dancing in her honour.
"I also wanted to do this because there is still a lot of weird stigma around HIV," Rory says. "And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that the average person on the street doesn’t understand that HIV is a pretty easily managed condition nowadays.
"I take one pill a day in the morning, and I expect to live as long and as healthily as anyone else. I can’t pass HIV onto anyone else."
He adds: "I think people don’t understand that because there was never a eureka moment when people discovered a cure. It wasn’t like that.
"Doctors slowly learned how to manage it by making advances and then refining those advances, so I think it's important to let people know that HIV isn’t what they imagine and hasn’t been for a long time."
However, he agrees that are other reasons why some people may still feel there is a stigma attached to a HIV diagnosis.
"Of course, there are. Mostly because of the kind of communities that are mostly affected by it in this part of the world - gay men and drug users and that comes with its own stigma.
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"There’s still a lot of shame around it and it’s hard to be open about it. I live in a very gay world, and I think it’s important for me to be open about it so we can make room for other people.
"It’s really the only condition I can think of where people are afraid to be open about. People aren’t terrified to tell people they have cancer.
Rory adds: "It’s relatively easy for me in the kind of life I live and the world I live in, but it might be impossible for someone who is working in a meat factory in Ballyhaunis or in the local choir or playing in the local football team.
"Whenever I am open about it on the radio of the telly or whatever, I get emails afterwards from people who are living with HIV, and they’ve never told a single soul in their whole lives apart from their doctor.
"The thing I treat so lightly and take a little pill and get on with it, to them it’s this huge psychological millstone around their necks because they’ve never been able to treat it lightly."
You might call it education through dance, really, which sounds like the title of a Pet Shop Boys’ number.
The choice of It’s a Sin for Rory and Denys' dedicated song makes perfect sense. The track garnered a whole new audience after the acclaimed TV series of the same name and Rory says it was a key track for him when he was growing up in the eighties.
Of course, Panti has a history with Pet Shop Boys. In 2014, the timeless pop duo released Oppressive (The Best Gay Possible), a 10-minute dance remix that sampled a speech he gave following the notorious Panti-gate affair of nearly a decade ago.
"They made a track out of the speech, which was wild and wonderful!" he says. He spoke to Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe of the band on the phone at the time of the remix and they met at one of Panti’s shows in Soho in London soon after.
Putting drag in the dress-up bag and dancing as Rory was one of the main things he wanted to do when he signed up for DWTS in the first place.
"They had asked me to do the show in other years, but my diary would be quite full, but this time they asked me as we coming out of the pandemic and my diary was still quite empty and I thought `oh, I could do it'.
"I said to them, are you about to let me dance with a same-sex partner? And the other times that wasn’t on the cards, so I said yes. They were interested in Panti doing it and so was I even though it’s hard to dance as Panti in wigs and heels and corsetry and all that.
"But I also said from the beginning that I want to do at least one week out of drag because it’s important to me - I’m on RTÉ One, on a family entertainment show on a Sunday night and there will be two blokes dancing together just like all the other couples.
"I wanted to dance as Rory at least once and this week seems like the perfect week to do it because Fiona Mulcahy and everyone at the clinic treats Rory, they don’t treat Panti.
"It is a little more nerve-wracking for me because it’s out of my comfort zone and a little more exposed but I’m looking forward to it."
There is no elimination on Sunday’s show. The couple with the highest overall score at the end of the glitter-fest will have immunity from the first dance-off the following week.
Everyone is in it to win it, but it seems Panti has fast emerged as the firm favourite among viewers over the past few weeks.
"Of course, we want to get to the final, every couple does. Especially the pro-dancers, they’re all ex-competitive dancers so they take the competitive element very seriously.
"For the rest of us, of course, we want to get to the final because we spend so much time and energy and effort and tiredness and frustration and blisters and bruises so to have the, god, I’m going to use this word, journey cut off early would be a real disappointment.
"Of course, I want to get to the final. Would winning be a nice little cherry on top? Yes, it would but, for me, I just want to get to the end and have the full experience and I’ll be happy with that. Don’t tell Denys I said that! If he asks, tell him I definitely want to win!"
Alan Corr @CorrAlan2
Dancing With The Stars, Sundays, RTÉ One, 6.30pm
