There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold and she's buying a stairway to heaven

I Was a White Slave in Harlem by Margo Howard-Howard

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. Although not without sordid moments, Howard-Howard's misadventures while hustling on the Upper West Side are told with a flair for black comedy and an emphasis on the dramatic, whether he's being shot at or falling out of sixth-floor windows, and the acquisition of his first mink coat reads like a demimondiste's dream. 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 gemsespecially a spat with Truman Capotein this frothy look back at some truly desperate living. In 1964, she met Leroy "Nicky" Barnes, the biggest heroin dealer in New York City, and claims to have become "kept" by him, not leaving his apartment in the Lenox Terrace co-op in Harlem for four years. His life was a breathless walk on the wild side. Stories were for embellishing, rules for breaking and people either fools or toys - or, less often, mythical figures of the sort that Howard-Howard, the grand drag queen, manifestly considered himself to be. For decades, until his death in September, he breezed through a slick New York scene of transvestites and tricksters.