
Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning and the images published in photographer Nan Goldin’s 1993 volume The Other Side offer an insight into New York’s ballroom scene in the 1980s and drag culture more generally – but Craig Olsen’s book, P.S Burn This Letter Please, goes back further, to the pioneers of the 1950s.
At a time when homosexuality was widely stigmatised as a perversion or a form of mental illness and thus had to be carefully concealed from family and employers, drag queens were seen as socially and politically subversive. They would routinely destroy their diaries and letters, whether out of shame or for personal safety – so Olsen’s discovery of a cache of correspondence kept by his late friend Ed Limato was a revelation, illuminating how queer lives were really lived in mid-century New York.
Written in a distinctive coded language, the letters in P.S Burn This Letter Please are gossipy in tone and full of catty humour but also coloured by the constant fear of exposure, violence or arrest. An elite few drag artists performed in licensed Mafia-run clubs frequented by celebrities and straights – but the authors of these missives were “street queens”, always on the hustle. That they regularly resorted to criminal activity – sex work and theft (including an opportunist raid on the wig room of the Metropolitan Opera House) – just to survive is unsurprising; not only were they socially marginalised, but they were adjudged to be breaking the law every day simply by being themselves.
P.S. Burn This Letter Please, Craig Olsen (Sphere)
Price: £20. Info: here
words BEN WOOLHEAD