I'm completely exhausted with the horrible news and scenes of destruction and threats of martial law and plague. So if you need a break like me, I would like to take you away from it all and introduce you to the lesbian (or possibly trans) legend Marion Barbara "Joe" Carstairs.

Joe Carstairs was born in 1900, in relatively humble circumstances: her mother was a mere Standard Oil heiress and heroin addict. (Seen here with ram. No, I don't know why.) All that is known about Joe's father is that his name was Carstairs.

(Joe's mother was best known for her later marriage to Dr. Serge A. Voronoff, famous for experimenting in physical rejuvenation by transplanting thyroid glands & testicle tissue from monkeys into humans; he was the basis for the doctor in Bulgakov's "Heart of a Dog".)

From her first breath, Joe was different. She said: "I was never a little girl. I came out of the womb queer." She said her "real life" began when at 5 she was thrown from the back of a bolting camel at London Zoo and knocked out. She was fine, earning her the nickname "Tuffy."

(A note: I will continue using she/her pronouns here because, as far as I can find out, they were what Carstairs always used.)

In 1916, at sixteen years old, Carstairs took off for the battlefields of France, where she served as an ambulance driver. She also shared a flat in Montparnasse with other girl drivers, including her first famous lover, Dolly Wilde, the niece of Oscar.

Dolly Wilde was a great character in her own right. She was known for dressing like (or even *as*) her famous uncle. She was a member of the openly lesbian circle around Natalie Clifford Barney's Paris salon and one of its most tragic and louche figures.

One story about Dolly Wilde is that "when Dolly was very young, she used to like to take lumps of sugar, dip them in her pretty mother Lily's perfume, and eat them.” She grew up to be a sad and suitably decadent figure, addicted to various drugs and to glamorous and cruel women.

Joe was a different sort altogether. Largely impervious to Wilde's attempts to introduce her to the artistic culture of Paris, she was unflappably cheerful and all action. Even her post-war job of reburying the bodies of British soldiers seems to have left her in good spirits.

Upon her return to London, age 20, she opened the X Garage, a London chauffeur service where all the drivers were women. Carstairs lived in the flat over the garage, with a band of drivers, friends, and lovers.

She cut her hair in an Eton crop and wore ties and trousers. She had an affair with the actress Tallulah Bankhead and began to develop a passion for power boat racing.

An aside: my favorite Tallulah story: https://twitter.com/sannewman/status/1088310475169951746

It was in this period that another lover gave her "a weird little man-doll, just over a foot long, made of leather by the German toymakers Steiff."

Carstairs named him "Lord Tod Wadley" and carried him everywhere for the rest of her long life. She had his clothes made on Savile Row, put his name with hers on the plaque on her house. "He’s me and I’m him. If everybody had a Wadley there’d be less sadness in the world.’

She also gave him credit for her boat racing victories, which were legion. In the 20s, she won Duke of York’s race, the Royal Motor Yacht Club International Race, the Daily Telegraph Cup, the Bestise Cup and the Lucina Cup.

Meanwhile, she was a prolific, faithless lover of women. She boasted that she was great in bed: ‘Everybody else thought so, so I thought so too. I would have liked me.’ She once asked a male friend, ‘You let them sleep in the bed with you afterwards?’

I mean, just as a pause for contemplation, here is Dolly Wilde

Of course Joe was followed everywhere in her exploits by a flock of adoring girls. They remained loyal when her new boat turned out to be a dud, and she started losing races. However, the press (which had once adored her too) turned sour.

There was a widespread backlash against "inverts" at this time, and the coverage began to be about her mannish persona rather than her sporting prowess. Of course the newsmen also began to ridicule her doll: "an absurd manikin."

So, what do you do when you're feeling misunderstood and under-rated? You buy a private island in the Bahamas and establish a personal lesbian kingdom there.

The island, Whale Cay, was then inhabited only by a lighthouse keeper and his wife. Joe said: "I am building roads and a residence, but my only means of transport will be two dinghies. The island is 1000 acres in extent and is nine miles long. I cannot say if I will ever return.’

So in her next incarnation, she was the "Boss of Whale Cay." She populated the island with hundreds of workers and ruled it as a fiefdom. She built a fish cannery, a school, a church, a general store. Her lovers came from all over the world; they included Marlene Dietrich.

She ruled by money and force of personality. Shortly after she arrived, she killed a snake by throwing her knife. ‘And by God I cut that goddamn snake’s head right off.’ This positively impressed the locals, who also regarded her ever-present doll as an instrument of witchcraft.

(I am aware that this is actually her Milkshake Duck moment, don't get me wrong. It's all insanely problematic. On the other hand, if you just squint your eyes REALLY hard, she had a lesbian island kingdom where she fucked Marlene Dietrich. So.)

(I mean, she also had a private police force which she armed with machetes, and punished her plantation workers for adultery while she was fucking Marlene Dietrich in the main house, so there is nothing about this that isn't BAD AS HELL. I mean, this photo.)

Ok, another problematic moment: the Duke of Windsor and his wife Wallis Simpson (notorious Nazi sympathizers), visited the island. Joe introduced Wallis to her doll: ‘That’s my boy, that’s Wadley.’ ‘My God,’ Wallis said, ‘he’s just like my husband.’ True of so many powerful men!

Anyway, she got older and weirder, concocting an ever more elaborate fantasy life for Lord Tod, whom she now claimed knew JFK well and had been a "moon astronaut." And her subjects naturally became disaffected with her rule and began to flout her openly. So she sold the island.

She retired to Florida (!!!) and gave her time to watching boxing on TV and tending Wadley and his friends – a massive collection of dolls and stuffed animals she'd amassed. When she died in her nineties, she was cremated with Wadley and their ashes were placed in a single grave.

OK, all done. For further reading: almost all the details here are from this LRB article https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v20/n05/terry-castle/if-everybody-had-a-wadley, which is in its turn a review of this book: http://bloomsbury.com/uk/the-queen-of-whale-cay-9781408830512/