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.
