The Emphatically Queer Career of Perkins Harnly is the story of a Nebraska-born artist (1901-1986) who over the course of his long life crossed paths with a staggering array of famous and infamous personalities, including Sarah Bernhardt; Paul Swan, a.k.a. "The Most Beautiful Man in the World," who made women swoon when he danced in his tiny leopard-skin tunic; Rose O'Neill, the free-living artist who invented the Kewpie; William Seabrook, author and occasional cannibal who for better or worse introduced Americans to the zombie.
The narrative traces Harnly's steps from remotest Nebraska through silent-era Hollywood, post-revolutionary Mexico, Depression New York, wartime Tinsel Town, queer Los Angeles in the repressive 1950s, and, in the 1970s, all around Europe and South America, where Harnly traveled to visit the last resting places of famous people, from Vladimir Lenin to Oscar Wilde, Queen Victoria, and Eva Peron.