Panti Bliss on DWTS: “It would have felt inauthentic for me dancing with an opposite sex partner”

Panti Bliss AKA Rory O’Neill has made history by becoming one-half of the first same-sex couple on Dancing with the Stars.
Panti tells VIP Magazine that she had been offered to appear on the series several times but the stars didn’t align. Until now.

And even at that, Panti had one very important clause as to doing the show.

“It would have felt inauthentic for me dancing with an opposite sex partner – it would have been just as fun, but for me of all people, it wouldn’t have seemed right,” she tells us in the latest issue of VIP Magazine.

“When I was 14 or 15 growing up in Co. Mayo, you never saw gay people anywhere. It would have meant the world to me to see a same-sex couple dancing on a Sunday night, family show. It was very important to me.”

Speaking of the moment she was asked to appear on the show, she admits: “I strongly suspected that they were going to say I could have a same-sex partner and that made it interesting for me. It was the first question I asked them and they said yes.”

And it certainly paid off as she topped the leaderboard on Sunday with an emotional performance as he dedicated his dance this week to Professor Fiona Mulcahy, a doctor who treated him when he was first diagnosed as HIV Positive in the early 1990s.

To read the full interview with Panti Bliss pick up the February issue of VIP Magazine