"Street Kid: A Rent Boy's Tale" by Ned Williams

This is the memoir of a boy who was abused by his father from the age of six, realised he was gay by the time he was twelve, and started working as a rent boy at the age of fourteen, before retiring at nineteen. Set in the early 1960s, when having gay sex was still illegal, let alone being an underage rent boy, 'Steven' ('Carl' on the 'racks') somehow managed to compartmentalise his life so that his emotionally stunted and controlling mother never found out he was gay (despite a hilarious scene when a dozen of his rentboy colleagues invite themselves to his place for coffee), his schoolfriends never knew he was a rentboy (despite the boys in his class queuing up outside a disused station waiting room for him to give them a blowjob, one by one), his (office) work colleagues never knew he was gay let alone working as a prostitute, his rentboy companions never knew of his gay love life, or that he had fathered a child; in short, huge parts of his life were compartmentalised and secret. 

There are some fantastic characters:

• Andy, the narrator's rent mentor, who is straight with a wife and child but earns money through gay sex
• Jacko who has "an arse like a reservoir"
• Paolo, bitter about new rents on the racks
• Zenda, who read a book once and took his name for it, perhaps the most compassionate of the rents, who becomes impotent, except when he can have sex in a threesome with the narrator
• Lorna the lesbian prostitute with whom he shares a flat
• Larry the drag queen
• Roger who, the narrator discovers after they have shared a bed, likes sweetcorn
• Deaf Joey
• Marti and Matthew
• Mikki
• Brian his school friend who has a girlfriend who won't do oral so would Steve mind ...
• Sophie from work, her uncle Winston who invites Steven into his home to discuss classical music, his gay son Leonard who has sex with Steven, Leonard's sister Tamara with whom Steven has an affair ...
• Alan, the teacher, who organises parties of young men
• Sheba, also from work, desperate to lose her virginity but all her boyfriends want to wait,

There are mind-curling stories about the tricks he turns: the completely black room behind the coffee bar where clients and rents get naked and have orgies, no one knowing who is doing what to whom; the man who likes to be urinated on in the bath; the country house orgies he attends;  the queue of clients in the toilet waiting to take turns buggering the boy in the stalls; the time when he has sex with a girlfriend who uses contraceptive foam which sets and glues them together by their not-so-private parts. It was shocking and disturbing and hilarious by turns.

But in the end it was mostly about a child being paid to be abused by older men. Again and again and again.

Some of the most memorable moments:

• “From the age of about six (or it could have been even younger) until just before my teenage years, my father used, or rather, abused his privileged position of trust by ‘having a bit of fun’ with me – at least twice a week. This ‘fun’ never extended much beyond masturbation and oral sex but for a little boy who, even if I do say it myself, was rather sensitive – it was bad enough. He always impressed upon me the importance of not telling anyone else, “Especially your mother. She wouldn’t understand”. Like a fool, I obeyed.” (A very normal childhood)
• “Because it was virtually the only show of affection I ever received from him, I felt honoured and hankered after repeat performances.” (A very normal childhood)
• “I wonder what would have been said had she known how often she’d rushed through the front door and dashed up to use the lavatory, not realising that the last thing to be flushed away was my father’s sperm, dutifully coaxed from his straining penis by her puny little brat of a son.” (A very normal childhood)
• “In the daylight they were dark, claustrophobic, narrow and faintly sinister. At night it could easily have been taken for a landscape created by a modern Bosch or one of the regions through which Virgil guided Dante. The poor lighting made it even more grotesque and disturbing. Crumbling public houses struggled to make ends meet from their limited catchment of locals. Shops were converted into dubious coffee bars. Illegal clubs furtively catered for speciality amusements and existed in the back rooms of private houses. Cellar bars with little or no ventilation, peeling walls and tiny, intimate dance floors. There were bombed churches where only weeds, desperate lovers and the occasional stray cat formed the congregation. These, and other places too numerous to mention, were the markets where anything could be bought by the punter who had the craving and the cash – and sold from a supplier who had the time and inclination to close their sordid little transaction.” (You Dirty, Old Town)
• “Everywhere one explored, unexpected niches and dead–end tracks honeycombed this small, desolate, self–contained world. The only people to be found were those misfits in society who felt the desire for adventure, danger and solitude. Many tried to find some meaning and outlet for their doleful lives through the bottom of a meths bottle or squirted from the point of a syringe. To parody the old maps – here be meat racks for every form of pleasure, for whatever fantasy a mind could devise – no matter how debauched. It was a depressing stigma on the surface of the city that frequently and unpredictably exploded into crazed violence. But, lest you think there was some sort of inverted romance about the place, I regret to inform you that, in the main, it was merely an irksome wasteland of abandoned buildings which attracted few sightseers and even less attention from ‘Lily Law’, the police. The many ill tended, unlit public toilets erected as monuments to Victorian aspiration had become, instead, nocturnal orgy rooms.” (You Dirty, Old Town)
• “School teachers became drag queens; men of the cloth became leather submissives; off–duty policemen became happy members of the community which, whilst on duty, they persecuted so vigorously.” (You Dirty, Old Town)
• “It was romantic – but it was the romance of a consenting pair of sado–masochists.” (You Dirty, Old Town)
• “I had something for which older men would pay. It had also given me a delicious feeling of power.” (A First, Tentative Step)
• “I had discovered I had a jewel to sell, but I didn’t know the location of the pawnbroker.” (A Semi Regular)
• “There were some clients who enjoyed having a collection of local kids around for a low–key orgy. At these parties, I always half expected to meet some of my school friends, but I never did. The main supply came from either the local grammar school, or the public school that resided in our borough.” (Rates and Brian)
• “The meagre pocket money I received from my parents was still in the area of single figures from the shilling department. The income from my other life amounted to the grand average of about twenty pounds a week, which was, in the late fifties, the wage of a well–paid grown man. It was a size of income, which could have reasonably housed a family of four in some comfort.” (Rates and Brian)
• “My nerves were shaking my guts about like a pair of Jack Russells fighting over a favourite toy.” (Andy)
• “Colour and patterns of paintings held me spellbound and I adored the challenge of trying to recreate the work of the great masters.” (Crisis Time)
• “It was my Pandora’s Box where Degradation rather than Hope was left behind.” (Crisis Time)
• “There was a lot of competition from other rents. I had no idea there were so many boys and young men who were on the game. Many were students who topped up their meagre grants by selling their bodies. It was easier, quicker and far more lucrative than serving bitter coffees in clapped out cafés.” (Crisis Time)
• “Because it was so dark, it was impossible to know who you were feeling, wanking or fucking. The only brief respite from the gloom occurred when the curtain was lifted and the door opened to allow the access or exit of a client. The room was usually packed with sweating bodies and, on especially busy nights, there was a queue in the café itself, waiting for ‘Calcutta’ to empty a little. I dread to think how many arses my young, eager cock stretched. By moving to another part of the room, it was easy to avoid being screwed, although many people tried, Also, if someone was busy working on me, I could easily remove my weapon from the grip of their hands, lips or bottom and make out I was shooting my load in copious quantities, which, of course, I wasn’t. It was fun and quite exciting having to feel for sex. In the dark, heads, and bodies contorted in all sorts of seemingly impossible positions. Hands groped and enjoined with adjacent mini–scenes. There was one time I remember when I had two open mouths on my cock, one on my balls, a couple more tonguing my arse and more who were licking and feeling my body. I must confess, that time, I did come. Well, who wouldn’t?” (‘Alfio’s’)
• “I had no desire or intention of becoming submissive. Andy was more versatile – he didn’t care. I’ve lost count of the number of times our pick–ups played ‘piggy–in–the–middle’. Me shafting and Andy being shafted.” (Four’s Company)
• “His eyes, mongoose like, were mesmerised by my hidden but bulging trouser cobra.” (Prodigal Sons)
• “On a slack night, the evenings produced about five to ten punters. On a busy one, I could get through as many as twenty or thirty.” (Aftermath)
• “I had to wear a jacket, trousers, shirt and tie. Strangely, on the racks, my popularity grew slightly. Don’t ask me why. I had always believed that the punters hungered for the scruffy look – a nice bit of young, rough trade. It’s true, a lot did – but I found there were many who didn’t. The clean–cut look was as much in demand as the ruffian. A youth who looked much younger than his age but dressed to look older was, to many, highly attractive.” (Freedom)
• “Looking about twenty, he was tall, blond and built like the proverbial brick shit house. His light blue, open necked shirt contrasted with and broadcasted a dark, all over tan which could only be associated with an outdoor existence. His tight, bleached out blue jeans showed off his slim waist and muscular thighs to perfection.” (Farmer Joe)
• “He had about him a pure animal physicality that crept out and stalked any viewer's senses.” (Farmer Joe)
• “I've often found that the more butch a guy looks the bitcher he wants to be treated.” (Farmer Joe)
• “He was staring, unseeing at a scrawny Buddleia, which was trying to draw nourishment, from a toppled wall.” (Further Adventures)
• “But, I got into this game for the fun – the excitement – not just the cash.” (Pam)
• “Those guys are in there to buy and be bought. I am here to be bought. You have to accept that.” (Sign Language)
• “He brought in from the freezer two trays of ice cubes. “I want you to make use of these.” Puzzled, I said, “Okay.” He knelt on the floor. I thought a little clarification was needed. “Um, Matthew. I hate to sound completely stupid but – what do I do with them?” He bent over and spread his legs. “Shove ’em, one by one, up where the sun don’t shine – right up inside me.” Luckily, he was facing away so he couldn’t see the horrified look of revulsion that I must have worn. ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘this will be a first.’ As he wiggled his posterior in delicious anticipation, he gasped, “I simply adore the coldness. The pressure on my colon slowly being eased as the ice melts is very satisfying. You should try it.” “Thanks, but if it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll give it a miss.” It was strangely phenomenal to observe the cubes being sucked up into his ring. His muscular control to keep the frozen enema inside was admirable. I wondered if Matthew’s little bottom abuse with the ice cold mini–dildo’s was healthy and what internal damage he might be doing to his body in the long term.“ (Marti and Matthew)
• “I was sixteen, a rent boy, unhappy at home and, in many ways, immature.” (Marti Revisited)
• “Even if, as I suspected, my sperm couldn’t be bothered to plunge on and power–swim to Marti’s egg, I was having a lot of fun firing the starting pistol.” (Marti Revisited)
• “Two young lads, who were an affair, broke onto the scene. They were both exhibitionists but they didn’t want anyone else involved in actual physical sex. They offered Tableaux Vivant which entailed them posing, frozen in set pieces of a highly sexual nature so that the clients could get off on the vision the lads created. I suppose you could think of them as performance artists who had become living pornographic photographs. All their ‘pictures’ were highly elaborated and catered to any fantasy their clients desired. Their motto was ‘Look – even closely, but don’t touch.’” (Racking)
• “From that moment on, she grabbed almost every nettle and practically threw herself at anyone and everyone who she believed would score the goal in her hungry net.” (A Pregnant Pause)
• “He leaned forward and whispered something so excitedly and at such a high pitch, it was utterly incoherent except, perhaps, to dolphins, dogs or bats.” (Pop Goes My Weasel)
• “I looked around the room and, apart from my mother, I’d had sex with every single one of them.” (Party Time)
• “The major stumbling block was that we were both a couple of slags and not yet ready for any long term commitment.” (Flat Life)
• “Using all her skills as a woman of the night, she’d done herself up to the nines – actually, it was more to the ninety–nines.” (Shattering My Chains)
• “He was a sweet lad who inhabited the wrong side of dim.” (Three’s Company – or Not)

Is it fact or fiction? It purports to be a memoir and I suspect it is. It has a rambling structure, a sort of picaresque, in which one thing happens after another, to a large cast of characters; most of the stories are unresolved; in short, a typical novel would have been neater and better organised. So I suspect it is true. 

It ought to be dreadful. It is fundamentally about older men abusing a young child. It is about exploitation. The fact that the narrator was lucky and survived the experience, psychologically as well as physically, should not make what happened less dreadful.

But it is well-told. The author is a born raconteur. It is stuffed full of anecdotes and, as listed above, it has a most wonderful cast of characters.

It's a long book but it is worth every moment of the investment. An excellent read. 

Other memoirs and autobiographies reviewed in  this blog may be found here. 

October 2020 

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Thief's Journal" by Jean Genet

This is the rambling account of Genet's early years as a thief and rent boy in Spain and France and other places in continental Europe. For a foundling brought up in an orphanage who spent his early years begging, stealing and prostituting himself, Genet is remarkably articulate: it seems that you don't need a great education to write wonderful prose or poetry. 

He has some remarkable insights into the human condition. He discerns tenderness in the sex act but he isn't sentimental: poverty is ugly, the police can be brutal, and a street free of prostitutes means a street full of cops.

• “The glances exchanged by the two friends ... were the subtlest emanation of a ray of love from the heart of each. A ray of very soft light, delicately coiled: a spun ray of love. I was amazed that such delicacy, so fine a thread and of so precious, and so chaste, a substance as love could be fashioned in a so dark a smithy as the muscular bodies of those males.” (p 61)
• “The poor are grotesque.” (p 133)
• “Cops aren't picked from among choir boys.” (p 161)
• “When the whores aren't around, the cops are.” (fn p 220)

There are some wonderful and original descriptions. Who else would describe the choreography of cottaging and how a dog defecates?

• “In the urinals ... the behaviour of the faggots would make matters clear: they would perform their dance, the remarkable movement of a snake standing on its tail and undulating, swaying from side to side, tilted slightly backward, so as to cast a furtive glance at my prick which was out of my fly.” (p 50)
• “The palms! They were gilded by a morning sun. The light quivered, not the palms.” (p 63)
• “He filled out all the space in our bed with his legs open in a wide, obtuse angle, where I would find only a small space to curl up. I slept in the shadow of his meat.” (p 184)
• “The pathetic attitude of a dog shitting. It squeezes, its gaze is fixed, its four paws are close together beneath its arched body; and it trembles, from head to reeking turd.” (p 187)

But I find it really hard to read. It is unchaptered and without any discernible formal structure. It rambles, it wanders here and there; perhaps it is modelled on the picaresque. It reminded me of the work of Kerouac, or perhaps the deliberately cut-up work of William Burroughs (eg The Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, The Wild Boys), although it was first published in 1947 so it cannot have been influenced by them (perhaps the influence was the other way around). Other autobiographical accounts of poverty include John Rechy's City of Night (about being a rent boy in the USA) which has as little plot but a much clearer structure and George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London but Orwell's journalistic style is much clearer and more lucid. 

A substantial part of its appeal must lie in its subject matter: one rarely gets granted an insight into the lives of the low-lives. But the reason for it being a classic has to be the originality and clarity of its observation of the world. Who else would link a riot to the corrosive effect of urine? “During the 1933 riots, the insurgents tore out one of the dirtiest, but most beloved pissoirs. It was near the harbour and the barracks, and its sheet iron had been corroded by the hot urine for thousands of soldiers.” (p 52)

Selected quotes:

• “Though they may not always be handsome, men doomed to evil possess the manly virtues.” (p 5)
• “Erotic play discloses a nameless world which is revealed by the nocturnal language of lovers. Such language is not written down. It is whispered into the ear at night in a hoarse voice. At dawn it is forgotten.” (p 5)
• “Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating: they can breathe it. ... [It] smells of sweat, sperm and blood.” (p 5)
• “I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and hankering for danger. It can be seen in a look, a walk, a smile, and it is in you that it creates an eddying. It unnerves you. This violence is a calm that disturbs you.” (p 9)
• “The earth did not revolve: carrying Stilitano, it trembled about the sun.” (p 30)
• “I used to toss my things any old place when we went to bed, but Stilitano laid his out on a chair, carefully arranging the trousers, jacket and shirt so that nothing would be creased. He seemed thereby to be endowing his clothes with life, as if wanting them to get a night’s rest after a hard day.” (fn p 51)
• “Foreigners in this country, wearing fine gabardines, rich, they recognized their inherent right to find these archipelagoes of poverty picturesque” (p 135)
• “Having already been convicted of theft, I can be convicted again without proof, merely upon a casual accusation, just on suspicion. The law then says that I am capable of the deed. I am in danger not only when I steal, for every moment of my life, because I have stolen.” (p 175)
• “He had dared, not unconsciously, to depart from moral rules, with the deceptive ease of men who are unaware of them. In fact, he had done so at the cost of a mighty effort, with the certainty of losing a priceless treasure, though with the furthest certainty of creating another, more precious than the one he had lost.” (p 182)
• “Stealing determines a moral attitude which cannot be achieved without effort; it is a heroic act.” (p 185)
• “I love outlaws who have no other beauty than that of their bodies.” (p 222)

Also read?

• Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin is a novel about a homosexual relationship in 1950s France
• At The End of the Sidewalks by Baptiste Thiery-Guilbert, a modern account of gay life in the south of France

More French books reviewed in this blog may be found here

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Sins of Jack Saul" by Glenn Chandler

John Saul, aka Jack, aka Dublin Jack, was a blond, beautiful and stunningly well endowed young man who became a rent boy. This is his biography.

 He started part-time as a young boy, walking out with soldiers in Dublin in the 1870s when sodomy but not homosexuality was illegal. High profile friends got him a respectable job in service with a Dublin doctor. But he was caught in what appears to have been an attempted burglary. He was acquitted (it seems that the people he stole from were unwilling to come forward, perhaps because they had had sex with him) but lost his job and his good name so went to London where he became, like so many runaways since, a rent boy in Piccadilly Circus.

He was obviously rather good at his trade.

Early in his career he attracted the attention of a pornographer who persuaded him to write a 'memoir'. The Sins of the Cities of the Plain became notorious. The British Library copy is the only remnant of the 250 strong first edition although it has since been republished.

Shortly afterwards he was taken back to Dublin to testify against two former customers who were accused of sodomy. His evidence was never used, probably because it related to encounters prior to the time frame of the charges. But the 'Dublin felonies' became a major scandal in the aftermath of the Phoenix Park murders.

He returned to London and resumed his profession. By now homosexual relations had been made illegal. One day he attracted Lord Euston (I was at school with a later Lord Euston) and brought him back to the male brothel at 19 Cleveland Street where he worked. Other famous people using the brothel (if not Jack) included Lord Arthur Somerset, Equerry of the Prince of Wales, and a banker whose family bank later became Barclays. Royalty knew these people and there are persistent rumours that Prince Albert Victor, eldest son of the Prince of Wales who later became Edward VII, famed dissolute and one of the many Ripper suspects, attended the brothel. As well as Jack and a number of professional 'Mary-Anns' there were some part timers who worked as telegraph boys at the Post Office. One of these was caught and confessed; Inspector Abbeline (of the Ripper murders) investigated but his superiors refused to bring prosecutions (too many important clients), a paper found out and published names, Lord Arthur Somerset fled abroad (and lived out the rest of his days in exile in the south of France) and Lord Euston sued for libel. The only person prepared to testify against his noble lordship was Jack Saul. The Cleveland Street case became a cause celeb.

There is a slight difficulty in knowing what moral stance to take. On the one hand the prevailing view today is that homosexuality should never have been made illegal. And today sex workers are thought to be victims rather than corrupters. So it becomes necessary to disapprove of their clients. But these men were homosexuals finding love where they could. So it becomes difficult to tell a story of good versus bad.

Chandler can be witty. I particularly liked the way he takes the rise from some of the euphemisms of the time, for example the idea that gay men are necessarily musical ("All of the witnesses seemed to be of a musical bent with good singing voices. They certainly used them."). My favourite line is the rent boy on the witness stand who testified "he had obliged Cornwall reluctantly and was disgusted, though he had gone back to his house to be disgusted on two further occasions" (p 103).

This was a fascinating account of male prostitution in Victorian London told by a man who can tell a good story and keep you interested. February 2017; 282 pages