I was a white slave in Harlem

Margo Howard-Howard, Abbe Michaels, Quentin Crisp

Drag queen extraordinaire Margo Howard-Howard, born Robert Hesse, was not so much a slave to Harlem as he was to heroin. This chronicle traces the blue blood's descent into a subculture of drag queens/prostitutes/dope addicts, driven there by an overwhelming appetite for drugs. The work spares the reader the grimmest details of hard drug addiction and concentrates instead on the glamorous haut monde figures who have crossed Howard-Howard's path. Some of these encounters amount to no more than name-dropping (James Dean, John Cardinal O'Connor), while others prove to be priceless gems