The Starlet was a Dude

Hack wrote this while nursing a broken heart over “a Hollywood starlet who enjoyed a brief vogue.” In the book, the starlet reveals to herself to be a man in drag after the hero (a thinly veiled depiction of Hack named “Hank Derker”) finally talks her out of her clothes for a night of violent anal sex. Hack refuses to say how much of the story was based on reality but his publisher John Kane (who was close friends with him at the time) insists that the book is an accurate depiction of what happened except that rather than being an up-and-coming film star, the “starlet” was actually a well-known drag queen and that Hack was probably the only person in Los Angeles who wasn’t aware that she was really a dude.