There are books that feel like whispered legends told in the narrow stairwells of old Manhattan walkups, and there are books that burst onto the page with such unrestrained theatricality that the reader is never entirely sure whether they have encountered a memoir or a very ambitious drag performance in print form. I Was a White Slave in Harlem by Margo Howard-Howard, written with Abbe Michaels and ushered into the world with a preface by Quentin Crisp, belongs squarely to the second category. It is a memoir that not only defies categorization but also refuses to sit still long enough for its truthfulness to be measured. Instead, it twirls, flings off sequins, curses, kisses, and occasionally throws a punch, all while insisting that the reader sit down and stop questioning the lighting.
Margo Howard-Howard, who claimed birth in Singapore in 1935 under the name Robert Hesse, presents a childhood of privilege, servants, and tropical glamour. According to her account, this idyll ended with her escape from the Japanese at the start of the Second World War. The defining moment of that escape, she wrote, was a rape aboard a British Navy vessel, an experience that she presents not as a tragic interruption of innocence but as a dark pivot around which her life began to spin into its own strange orbit. This early trauma, rendered in her characteristically breathless prose, is offered to the reader as the seedbed of the extravagant, wounded, reckless persona that would later be known in New York City as one of its most audacious drag queens.
When Howard-Howard arrived in Manhattan, she stepped directly into a world she would later describe with a mixture of wicked humor and genuine heartache. Her stories of the 1950s and 1960s paint a portrait of a city that was simultaneously glamorous and rotten, a place where the rich and the desperate danced together in hotel bars, cabarets, and tenement apartments. Howard-Howard wrote about supporting a drug habit through prostitution, theft, and morally ambiguous caretaking of a wealthy but mentally ill woman whose funds she freely accessed. She placed herself in the orbit of figures who occupied every rung of the social ladder. Some of them were genuinely famous, some infamous, and some merely the sort of people who drift through downtown life while leaving behind vivid impressions. She claimed intimate encounters with James Dean and Truman Capote, passing meetings with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and moments of showgirl camaraderie with Jackie Curtis and Tallulah Bankhead. Andy Warhol appears in her stories as easily as a neighbor passing in a hallway, and Queen Elizabeth II emerges in one anecdote with the same casual inevitability as a late-night cab driver.
After her years in Harlem, Howard-Howard describes a renewed ascent into the nightlife world through cabaret acts, sharp-tongued comedy, and performances that paid tribute to Mary Stuart, who seems an unlikely muse until one considers Howard-Howard’s appreciation for tragic queens. In the later chapters of her life, she narrates meetings with Judy Garland, Martha Raye, Brooke Astor, Madonna, and others. Whether these connections were real, embellished, or entirely imagined, they help create the shimmering collage that defines her voice. She presents her life as a perpetual performance set against a backdrop of New York’s stranger corners, a realm that Tama Janowitz and Jay McInerney wrote about but never fully inhabited, according to the book’s promotional materials. Howard-Howard insisted that she had lived the nightlife they romanticized, and she did so with more bruises, more lovers, and more laughter than they ever dared to write.
When the memoir was published in 1988, the New York Times responded with a tone that was both amused and exasperated. The reviewer described Howard-Howard’s life as a breathless walk on the wild side. The review noted that stories were for embellishing, rules for breaking, and people for using as either fools, toys, or mythical figures. It acknowledged the possibility that Howard-Howard might be a mythmaker of her own life, but it also recognized the sheer energy of her presence in the downtown scene. Regardless of accuracy, she had undeniably dazzled, irritated, attracted, and offended her way through Manhattan for decades.
Then the trouble began. The publisher added an afterword to the memoir explaining that much, if not most, of Howard-Howard’s stories were false. The statement addressed her childhood claims directly and essentially withdrew them from the realm of nonfiction. The photographs in the book, none of which date earlier than 1988, did nothing to verify her earlier tales. Around the same time, the New York Times published articles reporting that Susana Ventura, better known as Penny Arcade, had created a performance character named Margo Howard-Howard. According to these reports, the character was a composite of real Lower East Side residents and was deliberately unbelievable. This led to confusion about whether the published memoir described a real person or a fabricated persona that had escaped the stage and wandered into bookstores.
The truth is that Howard-Howard did exist as a performer and did receive an obituary in The Village Voice. Friends and fellow artists confirmed her presence in the Lower East Side scene. Penny Arcade herself had built performances around many real people, such as Andrea Whips Feldman, so the possibility that she borrowed details from Howard-Howard for stage work does not contradict the existence of the drag queen behind the book. The problem is that the memoir blurs the lines so thoroughly between lived experience and theatrical exaggeration that sorting them is almost impossible. Even basic facts, such as her birth year, shift depending on the source. The Village Voice lists 1937 while the memoir claims 1935, and no firm documentation has resolved the discrepancy.
I Was a White Slave in Harlem still holds a place in the peculiar canon of queer memoirs, not because it conveys verifiable truth, but because it conveys the unruly spirit of a certain kind of queer survival. It is the story of a drag queen who insisted that her life was a legend and demanded to be remembered that way, even if memory had to be rewritten, resequined, and reapplied like stage makeup. Whether she was recounting real events or indulging in outrageous invention, Howard-Howard created a portrait of a world where glamour and danger lived side by side, where desire was both a weapon and a compass, and where identity was never a fixed point but a shimmering costume worn for one more entrance into the lights.
In the end, truth or fiction matters less than the electricity running through the pages. Howard-Howard’s memoir is not a reliable historical document. It is a performance, a confession, an accusation, a seduction, and sometimes a joke told through red lipstick and cigarette smoke. It is the life story of someone who lived as if every moment were an audition for immortality. Whether she earned that immortality or fabricated it hardly matters. She has it now.
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