Yes there's a place for all of these at Girly HQ. In fact the place is quite infested with the fuckers...

Just as I see it as my duty to seek out urban guerrillas and gun-toting glamour queens to present to my readers, I'm also constantly on the lookout for iconoclastic visions-of-urban-hell streetlife newyorkcity-beatnik-fag-junkie drag subcultural literature to hip you to. Isn't it heartening to think that in the world of fiction we are portrayed almost exclusively as sex-obsessed dysfunctional drug and alcohol-ravaged prostitutes and criminals? It makes me glow with pride.

"CITY OF NIGHT" by John Rechy is a classic of the genre ( along with "LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN" by Hubert Selby Jr - same publisher too - Grove Press) - focusing mostly on male hustlers, but with a big chapter Miss Destiny and her pals in Pershing Square, Los Angeles. This is the book that the young Wayne County read over and over in rural Georgia in the mid-'60s, before eventually searching out Atlanta's gay subculture: "My heart began to beat fast and I turned red. I was thinking 'These are queens! Just like in the books! Just like in City Of Night!'"

Gender Outlaw, Kate Bornstein, Vintage paperback $12.99

This book is stil pretty current and groovy despite its age, and Kate Bornstein is cool. Interesting stuff about being first a freak then an "expert" on Geraldo (US tv show simillar to Oprah), the ins and outs of genital surgery, grappling with ideas of gender and identitiy, sex etc. Not just another tragic/heroic TS memoir, everything is left open for discussion, there are more questions than answers, and to her credit she doesn't claim any special expert status or authority.

RuPaul: Lettin It All Hang Out (Warner Books, £9.99)

I'm not sure about this book. In places its candid and quite funny, but ultimately its pointless fluff, published by one of the worlds largest corporate pig communications monsters. We see Ru at his lowest ebb coming off drugs with no friends, sitting in shopping malls gaining strength from the endless platitudes of Oprah Winfrey, but he does kind of side step race and sexuality in favour of a pseudo new age-y Winfrey-inspired self belief and hard work groove. Towards the end there's plenty of philosophising, and not-a-bad-word-about-anyone generosity, and then its all over. Repeated use of the word "fierce" as an adjective gets a bit annoying.

Hitting the charity shops in '99

Jayne County's "Man Enough To Be A Woman" is a funnier more honest, and even moving read. Jayne is way more deserving of our admiration anyway, and the pics are better. In contrast to Warner Books, this is published by Serpents Tail. It's a little more expensive and may be hard to find, but worth it. Hooray for Jayne!

Arthur Elgort's Models' Manual

Inane and pointless book filled with hundreds of photos of models and artfully arranged soundbites of their dumb philosophical platitudes in a million different colours and typefaces. I Love It! It's expensive at £25, but Charlotte got mine for me with a five fingered discount. Get someone special to steal one for you!

Ed Wood the novelist

A few years ago ED WOOD Jr was not a famous name, remembered best for his worst film,"Plan Nine From Outer Space". In the glossy 1997 Tim Burton biopic we see a charming but naive young transvestite with an angora fetish, obsessed with making films, trying to live his dream in 1950s Hollywood.

His life after the films failed is ignored by Burton. In a downward spiral of frustration and alchoholism, brimming with unfulfilled film ideas, he paid the rent by knocking off sub-standard sleazy pulp novels dripping with sex, violence and his own oddball world-view. Two of these pieces of trash, "Killer In Drag" and "Let Me Die In Drag", feature the Wood alter-ego Glen/Glenda, and have been re-issued since the Burton film.

They are badly written low-grade first-person pulp, but as with his better films, the bizarre narratives peppered with eupehemisms and obsolete slang are quite dizzying, and the momentum just drags you along. This was Wood's unfettered fantasy world: Glen/Glenda, a beautiful boy/girl trapped by circumstance, forced to kill for "the Syndicate" to keep himself in angora sweaters and silk knickers. Throughout both he goes to ridiculous lengths to stress his heterosexuality, scorning queers and writing himself up as the last of the red-hot lovers, sitting by his typewriter drinking himself to a premature death in a roach-ridden Hollywood hovel. It's pathetic and a bit sad.

Mamie Van Doren Vs Jayne Mansfield -Alan Betrock (Shake Books of New York)

Top book crammed with hundreds of photos and movie posters of 50s cheesecake queens Mamie and Jaynie. Don't get me wrong, Mamie is fabulous, and has lots of different hairstyles and amusing film roles, but JM will always be top of the heap at Girly HQ. (see also Playing The Field - Mamie's autobiography, and The Tragic Secret Life of Jayne Mansfield by longtime employee Ray Strait)

Caught In Petticoats, no author credit (Satin Ribbon Fiction Series No 3)

Xmas present! Trashy tranny sex fiction, badly written, spelled and punctuated, with the occasional badly drawn but funny illustration. Laughs all the way. I'd only come across these things once before when I was approached to illustrate one for £20.00 (couldn't face it), but I've seen them advertised in the US mag CrossTalk and laughed at the titles, which are all excellent.

This one features 2 stories, one a forced transvestism-as-punishment yarn, and the other a man-dresses-as-a-woman-for-some-contrived-pragmatic-reason one. These are the two basic fictional scenarios in which the protagoniast discovers that he really quite likes wearing women's clothes types. Difficult to imagine anyone really getting off on them, but what do I care. Incidentally the one I nearly illustrated was about boys dressing as girls to attend a top quality girls-only school and becoming cheerleaders - a bit more imaginative than these two, but with less sex.

MAMA BLACK WIDOW - Iceberg Slim (Holloway House, US paperback)

Iceberg Slim spins hard-boiled tales of Chicago's black ghetto in the late 60s; trashy and exploitative, but always with a strong moral message. Pimps, prostitutes, drug dealers, racist cops and white bigots - really extreme, brutal and lurid, no punches pulled.

Mama Black Widow is the story of Otis Tilson/Tilly, a self-loathing guilt-stricken cock-loving drag queen and her doomed family. Long sections cover childhood spent picking cotton in the Deep South, the move north, and life growing up with tyrannical violent manipulative mother who gives the book its title. More interesting are the bits that shed light on drag/gay subculture in 50s/60s Chicago - clubs, cops, Tilly's drag/TS and dyke pals, her lovers, numerous abusers. Not a very positive portrayal - she eventually gives up trying to be straight after escaping Mom, but dies the tragic lonely suicide of the homosexually afflicted in New York at the end. ItÕs nasty trash, but good stuff.

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