Harlequin’s nonfiction publishing arm has put out a recent title, “Glitter and Concrete,” that captures a history of drag especially in New York. The author’s first on-screen encounter with drag was a film called “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newman” which starred Patrick Swayze, Wesley Snipes, and John Leguizamo as they play drag queens to drive cross-country to get to Los Angeles. When the author got older, they went to their first drag show with their parents, and then to another drag bar in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. And eventually, of course, watched RuPaul’s Drag Race. That notion of glamour triumphing over negativity is a powerful one, that guided the author through self-doubt, self-acceptance, and self-love. They view drag as an art form to be revered. People who are unapologetically themselves.

As the author asserts, it is important to preserve the tales of those who came before, and who have since passed on, as icons within the drag communities. Whether libraries and archives like to admit it or not, and in spite of the push toward more institutions that highlight LGBTQIA+ archival and other materials that should be preserved, the are many political forces that are trying to fight that and the information workers have had to push back very hard.

While other cities have deep histories of drag including Atlanta and LA, New York is the global, urban epicenter of culture and that has always made it a sacred place for drag.

There’s a lot more to drag than what’s on the surface.

The author takes us back to 1865, right at the end of the Civil War, in New York City. Learning about Ella Wesner doing a photo shoot, a woman as a male impersonator, she was also a dresser to male impersonator Annie Hindle. Moving on to the 1910s and early 20th century, readers learn more about what happened, for instance, with the onset and throughout the First World War. Prohibition. How this affected nightclub operations. One of the other performers to have come from this time period was Savoy, and countless others including one readers may be more familiar with, Hollywood actress Mae West. She wrote ‘The Drag as The Pleasure Man,’ and keeping a drag ball as integral to its setting as a Broadway play, despite the calls for censorship. West continued to work with drag performers and with gay men.

Legendary Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes is also discussed in the book, as the author discusses how drag balls continued to find wide audiences. “Local papers and national Black newspapers covered the [Hamilton Lodge Ball] every year.” New York royalty like the Astor and Vanderbilts purchased box seats, as did Tallulah Bankead and other ‘gay icons’ of theater.

As the reader moves to the sections that overlap the Second World War, they also get introduced to the role that the mafia had with nightclubs and how their world pushed up against that of drag.

Some decades are more interesting than the others, and of vital importance is the discussion of the Stonewall Uprising, which became “an inflection point for queer liberation.”

As the decades roll on, the author covers the AIDS crisis that dominated most of the 1980s and 1990s. There’s also some discussion of the documentary “Paris is Burning,” which I won’t spoil for readers, although I will say that Dorian Corey is quoted in this section, which was great. I want to call attention to because I know that this vital piece of queer history and of the ballroom scene is of crucial importance.

Readers also get the history of how RuPaul came onto the scene, including the lead-up to his song, “Supermodel” released in November of 1992.

The section from the 2000s on talks about other drag performers, and while it caps off the book chronologically, it might have been more beneficial to include more prominent figures from today like Leiomy who was a judge on all 3 seasons of the reality series “Legendary,” or to discuss more about the show “Pose” and how it changed discussions of ballroom and drag culture. Overall, it’s a good primer and text that will help people understand more about the subject matter from an insider’s lens.