Maeve: Hi, I’m Maeve Marsden, and you’re listening to Queerstories. This week, Fiona McGregor has published seven books, most recently the essay collection Buried not dead. Her novel Indelible Ink won the Age Book of the Year. Her other books include the photoessay A Novel Idea, travel memoir Strange Museums, short story collection Suck My Toes/Dirt, which won the Steele Rudd Award, and the underground classic chemical palace. Fiona is known for an extensive repertoire of performance art with a focus on the body, duration and endurance. She has been active in Sydney’s queer culture since 1990. Enjoy.
Fiona: When I was 28, I published my second book, a collection of interlinked short stories called Suck My Toes. It was 1994, and to give you some context, homosexuality had been decriminalised for only 10 years in NSW, in Queensland for 4 years, and not at all in Tasmania. Lesbians were barred from accessing IVF. Queers couldn’t adopt. People were dying of AIDS and Hep C; I myself had been diagnosed with hep C and B the year before. Partners were often refused access to lovers’ bedsides and cut out of wills. Gender identity was restrictive. Suicides in the community were not uncommon. But we were so much better off than the generation before, we knew were gaining ground, so we had a lot to be happy about.
There were huge gay parties at the Showgrounds – RAT, Sweatbox, and of course Mardi Gras, accessibly priced because the land didn’t yet belong to Murdoch. They were male dominated, but Sleaze Ball, the Easter to Mardi Gras’s Xmas, was more underground so you’d see more women, more kinksters and more gender non-conforming folk. And there were alternative parties, and that’s where I gravitated. The parties went til 8, sometimes 10am. And you can imagine how badly we needed to dance together as an escape from the traumas of everyday life. So these parties were political, they were our mourning and our celebration.
To put it in a nutshell, on Oxford Street, gay culture flourished, alongside gay bashing. And while those parties were huge, and our community numbered into the tens of thousands, we barely existed in the media. So into this world my little book came, reflecting those experiences. The stories in Suck My Toes spanned Sydney to Melbourne, Queerness to heterosexuality, bourgeois suburbs to inner-city grunge. They weren’t exclusively queer, but they were still a shock to many readers. Maybe they’re timorous by today’s standards, but I can guarantee the book features the first dyke fisting scene in Australian literature.
This is significant because explicit queer content had never been published by mainstream publishing houses. In the same year, Dorothy Porter’s verse novel The Monkey’s Mask came out with a small press. It went on to great acclaim, being made into a film, and reissued by a major publisher. The following year, Christos Tsiolkas’s Loaded was published by Vintage.
So the floodgates were open.
It’s worth noting that a lot of my early supporters were straight while some detractors were queer. About Suck My Toes, one lesbian critic opined, ‘Why can’t we have stories about lesbians with mortgages instead of lesbians with manacles’, and the reason I remember this, is that when Scribe reissued it as an e-book called Dirt, they put this quote on the cover as a blurb.
Somehow, two years in a row, I had literary gigs the day after Sleaze Ball. I always turned up, because I have a strong work ethic. I mean, I turned up to my dealers’, and then I turned up to the dancefloor, as was my cultural duty. And then the next day I turned up to my literary gigs. In 1994 I was programmed to read with crime writer Peter Corris and someone else at the Spring Writers Festival. There was no Sydney writers festival then. I fell asleep on stage while Peter read. I don’t think he minded, he had a lot of bohemians in his books, let alone criminals. But I think the organisers did, I didn’t get invited back.
The following year in 1995, Suck My Toes won the Steele Rudd award for best book of short stories, and this was given in Brisbane as part of the Queensland Premiers Awards. It was amazing for a book with dykes, drugs and dance parties in it. So when I found out the ceremony was the night after Sleaze Ball, I wasn’t going to let it stop me attending.
Off I did to do my duty. We danced til dawn. We went for a morning cocktail to Gilligan’s, at the Oxford Hotel where the staff were as drug-fucked as the clientele, and recovery Sundays went til Monday. I’d scored enough speed to keep me going but to my horror, I’d been ripped off. I remember mixing up a massive pile in the spoon like this, shooting it up, and then feeling nothing.
So we went back to a friend’s house and everyone pitched in to help me. Someone gave me a line of coke. Someone made me a coffee. A third person pulled out a pill and said, This is a new drug called Prozac. I said, What does it do? They said, It makes you feel good. I said, okay I’ll have one, thanks!
I still couldn’t feel anything. But I made it to the airport. In Brisbane, I checked into the hotel, and then I went down to the prize ceremony. I still had my party haircut, shaved on the sides, with a band of hair in the middle sprayed stiff with gold paint, pulled into points like nails. I had changed my clothes! To the party I’d worn this long sheath-like transparent dress, like a condom, so you could see everything but I was protected. I changed into leather trousers and a pink t-shirt with this logo on it with the fingers like that, and red fingernails, and the brand name was savage.
So. Queensland, you must remember, had only been a few years out of the long, corrupt, and fiercely right-wing rule of Joh Bjelke-Petersen. It was the most conservative state in Australia.
My publisher, McPhee Gribble, had just been bought by Penguin, so the staff I’d worked with on my book weren’t there. Penguin’s big star of the festival was Amy Witting, an octogenarian writer discovered late in life, with a rapier wit. And when I walked in, The Penguin people looked very embarrassed, and ushered Amy away from me.
The rest of the dinner passed in a blur. The judges were very nice to me. I ate my first proper meal in two days. I gave a little thank you speech. And there’s a really funny photo of me holding the award with the Minister for the Arts on one side, and the festival director on the other. And me in the middle with my nail-head, very wide-eyed and bushy-tailed.
After the ceremony I went back to my hotel room. No groupies. That’s a myth. Women don’t tend to get groupies. Nor writers. Well, if they do, I never have. Anyway, I should have been exhausted but to my surprise, was still wide awake. Youth!
I tried to read but couldn’t concentrate. I mean shit, I was drug-fucked and supposed to be celebrating! My girlfriend was dancing at Phoenix, besides which, interstate phone calls cost a fortune. There was no internet, no mobile phones. So I scanned the TV – crap movies, maybe Rocky 1, 2 or 3, a nature documentary. Then to my delight I found … The Adult Channel. Perfect. I’d have a wank, and that would help me sleep.
But of course, as I was in Queensland, it was straight porn. But that’s okay. We all like a bit of straight action now and then, don’t we? But this porn was weirdly uneventful. It was just people knocking on doors, going into houses, greeting other people then taking off their shirts. You’d see a kiss, maybe a bit of skin, but there was no actual fucking. Maybe I had ADHD. No, no such thing in those days. Maybe I was cat-napping in the sex scenes. Maybe I needed to rewind to find them and I’d missed them. But no, I’d seen that cheap bit of plywood. I’d seen that guy cleaning the pool. I’d seen those silicone tits. God, I just needed acum shot! Maybe if I fast forwarded I’d find it. Rewind rewind. Fast forward. God, it was so frustrating!
So after a while, I gave up, and relied on my imagination.
Next morning, checking out was just a matter of leaving the keys at reception. But the receptionist barked at me to come back and pay my bill. I was confused. Hadn’t the festival paid for the room? She snapped, There are other charges! I said, But I didn’t use the minibar. She made a face of disgust. Even though I’d slept, the haircut wasn’t affected because it was shaved on the sides. So, I just thought she was making a face at my look, and I was used to that.
So I tried to walk away again, she pushed a piece of paper across the counter. It was a bill for $75 for accessing the Adult Channel. Apart from the fact that I hadn’t read the fine print about cost, apparently I’d watched the film five times. This was a fortune in those days! It was like $250, I was a poor artist!
So I dug the last of my cash out and paid, feeling really ripped off. But I did claim it as a tax deduction. And it was!
It wasn’t til I was on the plane that I realised the movie had been censored. And that every time I rewound or fast forwarded, I got charged for watching it again. They hadn’t just taken out the cum shot, they’d taken out all the sex scenes! It wasn’t even porn because porn was illegal in Queensland! Fuck! Or, actually not.
So maybe that’s the why the hotel receptionist disapproved. Maybe she was a porn star in a day job and was just appalled at my stupidity for watching a bad, expensive film over and over. So you see how much easier it is these days. You’ve got your iPads, in fact I’ve memorised this, Porn Hub, and you’ve got no shame in admitting straight action can be sexy. But you can’t dance til 10am in venues anymore. And that’s a revolution worth fighting for. Thank you.
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