IT is, in its own way, a royal visit. Next week, for one night only, Rory O’Neill, aka Panti Bliss, otherwise none as The Queen of Ireland or, in her own words, a bona fide "f****** national treasure", will visit Glasgow for one night only. Her job when she’s in the city, she says, will be to shout abuse, to poke and prod and discombobulate and to point out what is going wrong with society, and she will do it in a Dusty Springfield wig and vertiginous high-heeled shoes, because Rory O’Neill, aka Panti Bliss, is a big, loud cartoon woman. She is a drag queen and always has been.

But she is not necessarily the kind of drag queen you would expect. Traditionally, drag acts, as performed in gay bars or on the TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race, are full of single entendres and lip synching to Cher songs. They are not to everyone’s taste and, to some, feel pretty old-fashioned. But Panti is different – she still wears 10-inch lashes and huge fake breasts and she still has some good catty one-liners, but she has also raised the sometimes low tone of drag. Her stand-up act is perceptive. Intelligent. Funny.

And it’s important too. Three years ago, shortly before the 2015 Irish referendum on same-sex marriage, O’Neill – all done up as his Panti alter ego – gave a speech at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in which he talked about his upbringing in County Mayo, homophobia in Ireland and why the Irish should vote for gay marriage. A few months later, they did vote for it, making Ireland the first country to legalise same-sex marriage by a popular vote, and many said Panti’s inspirational speech, broadcast around the world, had played a large part in winning the vote. Ireland had changed and it was a drag queen who helped do it.

Three years on from the famous speech, 48-year-old O’Neill is now one of the most well most-known drag performers in the world and is touring his show, High Heels In Low Places, around Australia before bringing it to the Tramway in Glasgow as part of the Take Me Somewhere festival. The show takes the famous Dublin speech as the starting point, but it’s mainly a funny, thoughtful take on O’Neill’s life and some of the lessons he has picked up along the way. It is the story of how a small-town boy ended up in very high heels.

The small town in question is Ballinrobe, a two-streets-and-a-pub place in County Mayo where O’Neill grew up and where his father, Rory Snr, worked as a vet. O’Neill remembers his childhood there as happy – idyllic even – and in 2015 it confounded the traditional image of small-town Ireland as a conservative, intolerant place when O’Neill took his show there and walked through the streets in full drag, with his mother and father by his side (his father held an umbrella over his son to prevent his son’s big blonde hair getting wet).

But, happy as it was, the small town could never give O’Neill everything he needed. “Anybody from a small town, you need to explore and see the world,” he says. “In my little village, there weren’t gays on the street, so like anybody I wanted to go to the big city – I wanted to see people who looked different to me.

“I had a happy childhood, an idyllic childhood, but when I was about 12 I started to feel a little different or odd. I wasn’t bullied – I’ve always been mouthy so I always got along fine, but I understood that there was something about me that I didn’t see reflected around me and I needed to go off to bigger places to find that. And that turned out to be the fact that I was queer.”

The bigger place he found was Dublin, which is where he started to perform as a drag queen. Later, he hosted the Alternative Miss Ireland pageant, and in 2007 opened his own gay venue in the city, the Pantibar; he also appeared in the theatre the same year with his first show, In These Shoes?. As for the small task of coming out to his parents, it could have been a lot worse – his mother, who is Catholic and a minister of the eucharist, took a little while to get used to it but his father didn’t bat an eyelid. Now, both his parents are relaxed, supportive and proud of their son, as demonstrated by that strut through Ballinrobe in full drag.

What was more difficult for O’Neill was telling his parents in 1995 that he was HIV positive. “That was much harder,” he says. “And it was a much darker time to be telling them something like that. It seemed like the natural order was ended and I was going to die before them and that’s a horrible and awful thing to have to tell your parents. Plus there was a kind of shaming around it.”

What frustrates O’Neill – and this is one of the subjects he tackles in his show – is that the shame and awkwardness around HIV still exists, even in the gay community. “There’s still a lot of bulls*** about it in the gay community,” he says. “Partly, it’s younger people because it has slipped off the radar because people aren’t dying. Most younger gays don’t know anybody who got sick and died but this stigma has clung to it.”

O’Neill says he sees men on the gay dating app Grindr who say they want to meet “clean guys only”, by which they mean people who are HIV negative, and it infuriates him. “I can sort of understand why a straight guy might not know much about HIV so I can be more forgiving with the general population,” he says, “But I find it hard to be forgiving with the gays who have those attitudes.”

The fact that the attitudes exist should not be a surprise though, says O’Neill, because that’s how homophobia works. In his Dublin speech, O’Neill pointed out just how pervasive negative attitudes about being gay are and told the audience that we’re pretty much all homophobic. “To grow up in a society that is overwhelmingly homophobic and to escape unscathed would be miraculous,” he told the audience. “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.”

O’Neill’s point is that gay people are not immune to these effects and says there’s increasing pressure on gay men not to appear “too gay” and to act masculine. “That is one of the bigger planks of my live show and in some ways it’s getting worse. In the 1980s when I was coming out, there was a feeling that you announced you were queer and you were absolved of a lot of that bullshit around masculinity – people stopped expecting me to be into soccer, whereas now all the other gays want me to be into soccer, they want me to join rugby teams and they want me to be straight-acting. Now even the other gays are traducing my masculinity.”

O’Neill’s drag act is a direct response to this trend – he will not be the man you want him to be, or the woman you might think he is; he will occupy a glamorous middle ground he’s created for himself. What he’s doing, he says, is presenting something that’s neither male nor female. He knows everyone knows he is a drag queen and he knows no-one is going to mistake him for a woman and that’s the joy of it: strutting around in the space in between. If there’s a political point he’s making, it’s that we are still, even after all the progress we’ve made, pretty hung up on what kind of clothes people wear.

“I’m not impersonating a woman,” he says. “What I’m doing is using the tools of femininity or what I call peakcockery. We decided that women would be the peacocks so we give women jewellery and glitter and make-up and high heels and all that stuff and the bad thing is that our culture insists that women do all that stuff and if a woman decides, ‘I don’t want to do that’, often our culture looks at her with suspicion – she’s lazy or slovenly or lesbian. Our culture also insists that men are grey and dull-looking, not just in how they dress but in how they react, their emotions have to be tied down and it’s all bulls*** to me and all I’m doing in drag is I’m ignoring those rules. If I want to cover myself in glitter or have big hair and make myself bigger, then why shouldn’t I?”

For all of those reasons, O’Neill says drag should never be seen as an enemy of feminism because it is not mocking, or copying or impersonating women – it is an expression of individual identity and an assertion of the right to wear what the hell you want to wear. In other words, in their big hair and big heels, drag queens are still at the front of the march to equality.

“There’s a reason drag queens have often ended up in the middle or forefront of gay liberation and it’s because they can’t hide,” says O’Neill. “The guy who’s quietly gay and going to work in a suit, he’s not the target, he doesn’t draw attention to himself – whereas the drag queens and the screaming faggots, they’re obvious, their heads are above the parapet so often, it’s the flaming queens, the drag queens and the ones with glitter in their hair who end up sparking these things because they draw big reactions.”

Which is pretty much what O’Neill did with his famous speech ahead of the Irish referendum on same-sex marriage: he stood there as Panti and wagged his finger a little and attitudes that were already changing were given the final push they needed. As for the result of the referendum itself, O’Neill does find himself in a slightly odd position. He’s delighted about same-sex marriage – of course he is – but he also finds he’s a little disconcerted about the pace of change, and the fact that the gay life he once led in secret has become so mainstream or, God forbid, a little bit boring.

“Even though I’m glad of the changes, there’s a small part of me that misses the excitement of being queer in those days,” he says. “I’ll always remember discovering my first gay club in Dublin – they were always hidden away in basements. It was before decriminalisation. And to find them, you kind of had to reject what I call the muggle world – the ordinary world – and there was something exciting and liberating about that: to be in this basement, this little disco, and you’re all sniffing poppers and dancing to the Pointer Sisters. There was a feeling that we were making up our own rules because the outside world was ignoring us.”

Gay marriage has changed all that. “At that time, you were never going to get married – it was impossible,” says O’Neill. “And so, in a way, that cut you free from the expectations that my straight brother had on him – to find a nice wife and move to the suburbs and get a Labrador. All of that stuff was going to be impossible for me and I found that freeing. Now it’s becoming so normalised and 20-year-old gay boys are taking their boyfriends home to meet their mother for Christmas and part of me says, ‘Oh no, you should be out f****g 100 people or whatever’.”

O'Neill tackles this change in the gay scene in his show and having thought about it, he says he recognises that marriage is a conservative goal that some people want. And he also recognises that most gays are just as boring and ordinary as everyone else and if marriage is what they want, they should have it. But Rory O’Neill’s great wish – and it would certainly be Panti Bliss’s wish too – isn’t that gays end up with all the same conventional social pressures as straight people, it’s that straight people have fewer of them. He wants all of us to have a little more fun. He wants all of us to be a little more gay.

Panti Bliss – High Heels In Low Places is at The Tramway, Glasgow, on Friday, March 10