Until I die in a wave of fucking mystery

[sovay]

So while I had known for some time about Dolly Wilde, Oscar's niece, I had somehow never heard of the fellow ambulance driver with whom she had an affair in WWI Paris, Joe Carstairs. I am going to be neutral about their pronouns because I don't want to get them wrong—all the sources I'm finding treat Carstairs as female, and it's pretty narrow to think that short hair, tattoos, tailored suits, and speedboats automatically make a man, or at least not a woman, but when a person renames themselves "Joe" from "Marion" and says of themselves, "I was never a little girl. I came out of the womb queer," I feel I should try to take them at their word. It's easy to see why they attract biographers and Tumblr posts. The part where they ran an all-female driving service in London—"X Garage"—is pretty great. The part where they were the only one of Marlene Dietrich's lovers to call her "babe" and live is amazing. The part where they bought an island in the Bahamas and effectively ruled it for forty years is like something out of Conrad, which is a little harder to enthuse about, but it definitely is different.

I can't find a better version of this photo, but it's the first one I saw: it's Carstairs with Lord Tod Wadley, the doll that was a gift from a serious girlfriend in 1925 and became Carstairs' lifelong companion.



Obviously that got my attention. This looks like the same photoshoot in 1931, with a better view of the tattoos:



And this, some years later, doesn't do much for the tattoos, but it's a nice bike:



I think I like this one best: Joe Carstairs hanging out with Gar Wood in 1944, one motorboat racer to another.



And twenty minutes ago I'd had no idea. I love the people that history contains.