“About as funny as anything I’ve ever read.” – Graydon Carter, NY Times 2025
A lost Hollywood classic returns. A must‑read for fans of Seth Rogen’s The Studio — the original Hollywood takedown that paved the way.

Hollywood has always been messy — but in 1930, it was gloriously unhinged.

Queer People: A Madcap Jazz Age Satire of Hollywood’s Scandalous Eccentrics said the quiet part out loud: the studio system ran on ambition, spin, and scandal, and everyone was in on the game. Carroll & Garrett Graham, who actually lived inside that machine, deliver a cast of actors, fixers, and publicity sharks scrambling through a town where fame is a hustle and morality is optional.

Shrouded in obscurity for fifty years, this restored edition brings the novel roaring back with its full original text plus two smart, lively essays and other historical artifacts that unpack its history and why it still hits a nerve today.
Sharp, funny, and shockingly honest, Queer People shows Hollywood before it learned to hide the bodies — metaphorically, of course.

Follow Whitey, a broke, gin-soaked newspaperman who blows into Prohibition-era Tinseltown. Backstabbing, blackmail, casting couches, murder — all washed down at wild bootleg-and-jazz parties where nobody means a word they say. Real moguls, real stars, real dirt — Irving Thalberg, John Gilbert, Louella Parsons, and many more — barely disguised.

“Satirizes Hollywood in almost libelous terms. Its horrid characters are drawn so plainly from life that they set Hollywood’s hair on end. The hero is a drunken and unscrupulous libertine who, while performing ably as ‘professor’ in a sporting house, receives a splendid tip from a producer whose identity Hollywood sophisticates claim to know. The heroines of Queer People are insistently immoral and the scene of their depravities combines the worst features of Sodom and Gomorrah.” - TIME MAGAZINE (1931)

“The best book I ever received as a gift? Easy. Queer People, by Carroll and Garrett Graham. Bette Midler gave it to me, and it was a complete revelation. It’s about as funny as anything I’ve ever read.” - Graydon Carter, New York Times (2025)

“The best work that has appeared in this field. . . composed with such gusto, such fearless regard for the truth, and so penetrating a knowledge of actual Hollywood doings that it immediately becomes a rather important book. At any rate, it is an extremely entertaining one.” - New York Times (1930)

“As much like the average Hollywood yarn as a Wyoming cyclone is akin to a schoolgirl’s sigh.” - Detroit Times (1930)

“We guarantee that no one who picks up Queer People will be bored.” - Los Angeles Record (1930)

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Queer People

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