Ed Limato was a razzle-dazzle agent who provided “the bridge between old-time Hollywood and Hollywood present”, according to his client Richard Gere. Decades earlier, Limato had been a confidant to the drag queens and “femme illusionists” who frequented New York’s underground joints such as 82 Club and the Cork Club in the 1950s and 60s, back when it was perilous and even illegal to cross-dress in public, and bars could be shut down if caught serving alcohol to a man in makeup. The queens, who labelled themselves the Boomatzas, wrote to Limato in fluent drag lingo, spilling the tea about what they had mopped, the current state of trade and the secrets of their pancake scene – terms that won’t need unpacking for gen Z readers raised on drag brunches, RuPaul and Paris Is Burning.
Four years after Limato’s death in 2010, these letters were found by Craig Olsen; he went on to produce the 2020 documentary P.S. Burn This Letter Please, which used new interviews with the surviving correspondents to create a moving portrait of the pre-Stonewall era where sisterhood flourished in the face of ubiquitous police brutality. Having helped bring the stories to life cinematically, Olsen now returns them to the page. He structures this version as a literary detective story, eliding any mention of the film so that we appear to be reading about how he researched this book – though it wasn’t proposed until after the movie’s premiere. As he tells it, his quest into New York’s drag herstory is inflamed by the memory of how Limato had once reacted angrily to a Polaroid of Olsen dressed as a woman. What was the old bird hiding? “I was determined to have my questions answered.” Fortunately for him, Limato lends the project his blessing from beyond the grave. “You found them, kid,” Olsen imagines him saying after he discovers the letters. “You found them!”
