When I tell people the premise of Undercover in Sequins, there’s usually a pause. An NYPD detective goes undercover as a trans woman on a touring drag revue. I know what that pause means. Stories about a man in a dress have a long, ugly history of making the dress the punchline, or the trans woman the trick. I didn’t want to write either of those books. So before I wrote a word, I set myself some rules.
The women on the tour are not the costume
The performers on The Mirage Tour are real people, with real first-night disasters and real friendships in a dressing room the size of a closet. Early on, Cole sits among them and realizes something that stays with him for the rest of the story: they aren’t lying about who they are. He is. That’s the moral center of the book. The deception belongs to Cole, and he has to carry it.
The cover exists because of the crime
Viktor Hale doesn’t pick his people at random. He finds women who’ve been turned away by family, employers, churches, and the law, and he offers them a stage, a paycheck, and a door that locks from the inside. Then he asks for a favor. The FBI needs someone inside because Hale has built his empire out of the people nobody protects. The most unsettling thing about him is that his read on how the world treats these women is accurate. He’s just the only one offering to do something about it, and what he offers is poison.
Celeste’s history had to cost something
Cole’s cover story is a girl from West Virginia coal country who found her way to a back-room bar off Rampart Street. It isn’t invented out of thin air. Inside the story, it’s built from the files of women Hale already used up. Cole knows that. Every time he recites it, he’s borrowing pain that isn’t his. I wanted readers to feel that weight too.
No easy jokes. No easy answers.
Cole did Rocky Horror in college and insists it was just a costume. The book takes him at his word, then quietly asks whether that’s the whole truth. You’ll see it in the prose: when Cole is thinking, deciding, or afraid, he’s “he.” When the room is watching, she’s Celeste. As the tour rolls from city to city, that line gets harder to hold.
What the book is, and isn’t
Undercover in Sequins isn’t a book about what it means to be trans, and it doesn’t pretend to speak for anyone who is. It’s a noir about a man who lies for a living, sent into a community of people who’ve paid dearly for refusing to lie about themselves. The question at its heart, Who are you when no one’s watching?, belongs to Cole. It’s his to answer, not anyone else’s.
That’s the line I tried to walk. Come along, and tell me if I walked it well.
— P. B. Pearl
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