Craig Olsen - P.S. Burn This Letter Please

There is the film and there is this book – same title but different experience. The film is poignant, a really good watch, and you can find it on Apple TV, while the book is more detailed, more sexy, more period. Craig Olsen has sifted the set of letters he inherited from his Hollywood agent-buddy, Ed Limato, and drawn out a lot of the stories and the characters whose lives the stories tell, and strung them along a line of history and period, with the images of the letters and lots of photographs, - to do what? To let us have the ultimate lowdown on what it was to be drag in the 1950’s. “To be drag”? not “to do drag”? To “be” drag, for sure. These are lives not acts, or only incidentally acts, and performance of gender, as we so often think about it now, was a matter of survival not entertainment or artistic success. The 1950’s, - neither the postwar spree they might have been nor the frowsy pause they’re often shown as, but authentically uptight, conservative, repressed and punishing of any male who felt a glimmer of a girl in them. This is pre-Stonewall, pre-AIDS, pre-Rupaul and every act of gender-imitation feels like a new invention, a discovery, a canny improvisation to manage the needs of the gay gene. Dresses, wigs, work, transport, club admissions, money, avoiding the police – all a hectic set of adventures which needed sharing to make them negotiable. Hence the letters to Ed Limato, himself a former scene queen, and later in life emerging from denial. Craig Olsen does something here which he doesn’t do in producing the film – he weaves his own drag story in amongst the accounts of 20+ years earlier. It works, and it bridges us more easily into appreciating just how far away and long ago it all was for a long while, and now, in these retrograde victimize-the-outsiders days, isn’t so much. After a spell overground and in the public eye trans and drag may need to re-learn a few survivalist tricks, and here’s one place to learn them. I wasn’t sure that I’d like this book, but I do. I like it because it shows that before this era’s onslaught of high-profile technical drag there was simply the impulse to play out and swim like a fancy fish in the shoals of sexual attraction. Even now there are times when that’s all I seem to want from it all. And I like it because it’s a close-up portrait of gay community, and whatever this period of trans history eventually turns out to have been about it will have been a time of the extended family, of belonging together. A few small annoyances – he offers images of many of the letters but only excerpts some of them which means that you need graphology skills and fine eyesight to read the bits which are not excerpted. And, of course, there are few enough women in the picture. The ones that are enter the scene as mothers – fraught or sympathetic or abusive – straight scenesters or the occasional hero-allies of clubland. There’s one female performer in view, a proto-drag-king. But that was the 1950’s, that was New York, and that was how we lived then. And what a life!