Buried Not Dead Fiona McGregor

It’s 1996 and Fiona McGregor has been away for “almost a year.’ She’s back in Sydney, sitting in the audience at Club 77 and watching a drag performer Groovii Biscuit “in a three-piece suit with big messy eyebrows and clunky glasses,’ a caricature of the recently elected John Howard. “The song crescendoed and s/he started to strip. Groovii’s Howard was awkward, ugly and grotesque. S/he stripped down to Y-fronts, which had the US flag painted on them. S/he was packing with a little gun. S/he started to wank, and the show ended with an almighty gungasm. Oo-oo! Oo-oo!”

This scene, a collection of essays that dip between memoir, art history, and criticism. As a collection, it reads as an intensely personal record of Sydney’s queer scene as well as writing and performance over a twenty-five-year period, effectively told with the benefit of McGregor’s immersion.