SCREW LOOSE By Peter Blazey

Peter Blazey was a self-described “belligerent old bugger” and it’s extremely gratifying to see his memoirs are available again in a revised edition from new boutique Sydney publisher Gazebo Books.

First published posthumously in 1997, the year of his death, the book has been out of print for a decade or more, but the new edition includes a foreword by the Honourable Michael Kirby and an extremely eye-catching cover. Yes, that is the author himself, in the nude, performing a handstand!

Screw Loose covers five decades in the life of this controversial Australian journalist, biographer and gay activist. He was the reporter who got the scoop on the death of Harold Holt, was appointed Press Secretary to the Environment Minister in the Whitlam Government, and was a participant in Sydney’s 1978 Mardi Gras parade that famously ended in a riot. He later became a pioneering Gay Liberation candidate in the NSW State election with the slogan “Put A Poofter Into Parliament”.

But Blazey also enjoyed the high life, frequenting Studio 54 in its heyday and residing, for a period, in Barbara Stanwyck’s former Hollywood mansion.

In his final years, he agitated for change as an inflammatory columnist and troublesome AIDS activist.

Screw Loose is a wild and rollicking account of a remarkable life that remains vivid, incisive, and raucously entertaining, but after the passing of two decades it has also acquired the distinction of being an important personal and social history. Screw Loose is a very personal and extremely candid account of a particular place and time that will bring back waves of memories and nostalgia for those who remember (some of) those times; while the younger generation are likely to get a rather wicked and disrespectful Australian gay history lesson.