With a preface by Quentin Crisp, the memoirs, co-written with Abbe Michaels, describe Howard-Howard's privileged childhood in Singapore under her given name of "Robert Hesse," her rape aboard a British Navy vessel escaping the Japanese at the start of World War II, and lifestyle as a drag queen and prostitute in the 1950s and 1960s in Manhattan.
In 1964, she met Leroy "Nicky" Barnes, the most prolific heroin dealer in New York City, and claims to have been "kept" by him, not leaving her apartment in the Lenox Terrace co-op in Harlem for four years.
Howard-Howard claimed to have ultimately escaped Barnes and recovered from her heroin addiction with the help of a methadone program run by the Handmaids of Mary convent on West 124th Street.
[1] In her post-Harlem years, she wrote she met Judy Garland, Martha Raye, Andy Warhol, Jackie Curtis, Brooke Astor, Tallulah Bankhead, Madonna, and Queen Elizabeth II, and others.
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 [herself] to be.