"About as funny as anything I've ever read." - Graydon Carter, former editor of Vanity Fair, in The New York Times, 2025
"Satirizes Hollywood in almost libelous terms… the worst features of Sodom and Gomorrah." - TIME Magazine, 1931
A lost Hollywood classic returns, now fully performed, with an authentic Jazz Age soundtrack woven throughout. A must-listen for fans of Seth Rogen's The Studio. Queer People is the original Hollywood takedown that paved the way.
Note: "Queer" is used in its 1913 Webster's Dictionary sense, meaning odd, singular, or strange. It celebrates the wonderfully oddball characters of 1920s Hollywood. Not an LGBTQ+ title.
Hollywood has always been messy, but in 1930 it was gloriously unhinged. Queer People said the quiet part out loud: the studio system ran on ambition, spin, and scandal, and everyone was in on the game. Written by two brothers who lived inside that machine, it hit pre-Code Tinseltown like a brick through a studio window. Nine printings in a single summer, then buried for over fifty years.
Multi-award-winning NY Times bestselling narrator Daniel Henning brings the whole boozy circus to life: the fixers, the publicity sharks, the fading stars. A period jazz score pulled from original 1920s recordings pulses underneath. This is the rare audiobook that doesn't just tell you about a Jazz Age Hollywood party; it drops you inside one.
Follow Whitey, a broke, gin-soaked newspaperman who blows into Prohibition-era Hollywood and straight into a world of backstabbing, blackmail, casting couches, and murder, all washed down at wild bootleg parties where nobody means a word they say.
Real moguls, real stars, real dirt: Irving Thalberg, John Gilbert, Louella Parsons, and many more, barely disguised. Howard Hughes bought the film rights. Even he couldn't get it made.
Sharp, funny, and shockingly honest, Queer People shows Hollywood before it learned to hide the bodies. Metaphorically, of course.
©2026 Starshells of Madness
