For Hazlitt, Hugh Ryan attempts to document the many personas of mid-1900s drag performer Malvina Schwartz, bringing color to the landmarks and styles of a queer world that sometimes threatens to be forgotten. Ultimately his work illustrates the piecemeal nature of queer historiography and the intermittently rewarding and disheartening detective work of pursuing these stories:
The history of that recording is a microcosm for queer history itself: fragmented, discontinuous, and surprising to the modern ear. It came to me sideways, passed from queer hand to queer hand—from Kent to Nestle, from Nestle to the author Lisa Davis (who used it as research for her period lesbian murder mystery, Under the Mink), and finally from Davis to me.
