Mama Black Widow

Mama Black Widow tells the tragic story of Otis Tilson, a stunning black drag queen trapped in a cruel queer ghetto underworld. In hopes of escaping the racial bigotry and economic injustice of the South, Otis’ family journeys north from their plantation to an urban promised land. Once in Chicago Otis and his brother and sisters become prisoners to a wasteland of violence, crime, prostitution and rape. This is the gut-wrenching tale of the destruction of a family and the truest portrayal of homosexuality in the ghetto ever told.

Iceberg Slim, aka Robert Beck, was born in Chicago in 1918 and initiated into the life of the pimp at age eighteen. He briefly attended the Tuskegee Institute but dropped out to return to the streets of the South Side, where he remained, pimping until he was forty-two. After several stints in jail, culminating in a ten month stay in Cook County, he decided to give up the life and turned to writing. With a family to feed, Slim folded his life into the pages of seven books based on his life; The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim was the second autobiographical account Slim wrote. Slim died at age 73 in 1992; one day before the Los Angeles riots.