Beautiful

A once-legendary but now nearly forgotten female impersonator from the early twentieth century may seem like a quaint curiosity, far-removed from our gender-fluid, modern age. But as Andrew Erdman demonstrates in Beautiful, Julian Eltinge's convincing portrayal of women on the stage made him not just admired, but hugely successful-the most famous practitioner of his day, doing what we might call 'precision drag.' In an age before TikTok filters, he created his own analog illusion, which Beautiful makes colorfully clear. * Mary Birdsong, actor/comedian (Succession, Reno 911, The Daily Show, The Descendants) * Andrew Erdman delivers a resounding, king-sized answer to the vexing question that stalks our modern culture: just what is, or isn't, 'masculine,' anyway? And who gets to decide it, sweetheart? Beautiful is not just a biography, it is a profoundly immersive, compulsively readable tale told with rich and decadent accuracy, a bite into a Big Apple long gone by, loaded with juicy, eye-popping characters you can hardly believe were real, but wow were they ever. This hilarious and neatly detailed exhumation of the origins of modern drag, told wittily and lovingly through the lens of one of America's most fascinating and rebelliously gender queer superstars, will leave you obsessed with Julian El tinge long, long after the final curtain drops, and Erdman's last delectable page is turned. * Andy Corren, comedian, essayist, and author of Dirtbag Queen *