Margo Howard-Howard

Who was Margo Howard-Howard?

Margo Howard-Howard was a New York City drag queen who wrote memoirs titled I Was a White Slave in Harlem shortly before her death. 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 prostitute in the 1950s and 1960s in Manhattan. In these years, she supported a drug habit though prostitution, theft, and the exploitation of a wealthy but mentally ill old woman. She claimed to have had encounters with James Dean, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and Truman Capote during this time as well. 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. Thereafter she achieved some kind of prominence with a cabaret act and tributes to Mary Stuart. In her post-Harlem years, she wrote she met Judy Garland, and Martha Raye, Andy Warhol, Jackie Curtis, Brooke Astor, Tallulah Bankhead, Madonna, and Queen Elizabeth II, among others.