City Male Impersonator | Pepi Litman Born

Pepi Litman remains a historical ghost—a performer whose gender-bending act was once a draw on Second Avenue but whose personal origins have been lost to time. The absence of her "born city" is not a failure of research but a testament to the precarious nature of popular entertainment, especially that of women, immigrants, and Jews. To remember Pepi Litman is to honor the unnamed, the unplaced, and the brilliantly disguised.