"Meat Rack Boy" by Michael Tarraga

This is a very short memoir.

Abandoned as a baby by his prostitute mother, with his twin brother and two-year-old sister, Michael grew up with foster-parents who systematically abused him from before he was six: he was anally raped repeatedly by his foster-father while his foster-mother prevented him from screaming or struggling. As a child he was forced to have oral sex with his sister while being filmed. His foster-parents rented him out to other men including, so he claims, Ted Heath (before he became Prime Minister).

Unlike the two other rentboy memoirs I have read recently (I am researching a character in a novel I am writing), Making Beds in Brothels and Street Kid, Michael is straight and practises heterosexual sex since  escaping his abusive childhood; the remainder of this memoir (written at the age of 70 and dying from cancer) describes his failed marriages, his drug addiction, his working life, and his crimes.

Simply written.

Some memorable moments:

• “You know Peter, God loves you. But right now I don’t like you very much.” (Ch 5)
• "We have been together for 11 years and have never had an argument, as we can’t be arsed to argue." (Ch 11)

February 2021

Other memoirs and autobiographies 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

"Making Beds in Brothels" by Adam Brock

Following a horrendous childhood, in which he was regularly beaten and possibly sexually abused by his father, a man who exhibited symptoms of mental illness, Adam was raped as a young teenager in a gay bar in Manchester. He became a child prostitute before working as a rent boy in brothels in Amsterdam and London. Somehow he survived. 

In this memoir, Adam reserves his strongest condemnation not for the clients who hired him. “I dislike categorising all those who pay for sex as somehow predatory or deviant; they are drawn from as wide a pool as any other group of humanity.” (C 17) He has compassion even for Mitchell, a long-time friend, who stole from him: “what kind of person steals the crutches from a man with a broken back?” (C 23). He feels that, as a child, he was repeatedly failed by the system. “Three times I went to the austere police station in the centre of Mobberley and reported that my father was abusing me. Three times nothing was done. No social workers were called, no review or check by the police, not a single investigation. All that happened was that each time I was returned to my father, and later received the beatings of my life as a result.” (C 5)

The youth leaders of his gay teenager group encouraged them to go to the bar where he was raped and, later, rented. A teacher refused to discuss his sexuality with him (it was illegal at the time for teachers to 'encourage' homosexuality under section 28 of the Local Government Act). Still well underage, he plied his trade unchallenged: “I regularly worked on the streets, between the age of fourteen and seventeen, and was never once stopped and asked what I was doing by a police officer, not a single time. And I was doing it in broad daylight, in a public area for the entire world to see, often under high spec surveillance cameras.” (C 9) “After escaping my father and moving to Manchester, aged fourteen, I was placed in local authority care with ‘Mad Anne’. Anne had a different man home every other night. Then, at sixteen, there was the city homeless shelter at Downing Street, a square red brick building with dormer roof, long demolished. I was a small, vulnerable kid living with city down and outs; the insane, the hopeless. My abiding memory of that place was simply how scary it was.” (C 13)

Many memoirs suffer from their 'one thing after another' structure (as opposed to novels in which the novelist is able to shape the narrative so that it grows and swells and creates meaning). I didn't notice it so much with this book, perhaps because of the shocking nature of the subject. It isn't strong on the detail of the sex, perhaps because Adam has become a born-again Christian; if you want to know about what goes on between a rentboy and his client I recommend Street Kid by Ned Williams. Both Adam and 'Steven' were sexually abused by their fathers; both identify as gay. Adam has a considerably longer career as a sex worker than 'Steven', perhaps because he spends most of his time in the more controlled environment of the brothel. But he ends up more damaged; 'Steven' starts his narrative with a nostalgic return to the streets and bars where he plied his trade.

The last part of the book describes Adam finding God. It makes interesting reading if you are concerned about the Problem of Evil, the idea that God cannot be both omnipotent and good because people suffer: 

• “There seems no need for a fiery hell elsewhere anyway, because many of us already dwell in it” (C 24)
• “there is a causality between God and sinfulness. Not that God inspires sin, but rather that we are of God and the world is of God, and sin happens through the sinner’s own freewill.” (C 24)
• “Sometimes my relationship with God seems to mirror my relationship with my father. Why does the omnipresent Deity, who ultimately oversees everything, allow me to suffer so much? If I deserve it and I’m being punished, are the words we are fed about a compassionate God who is radically forgiving, meaningless, empty promises meant simply to placate us? Presumably you can’t be both loving and drive someone into an early grave.” (C 27)
• “God says, I oversaw your abuse, you inevitably strayed due to the damage and de-normalisation of childhood trauma, now I’m going to punish you, perhaps till the strain becomes too much. But this is okay, this is the way to your redemption.” (C 27)
• “If hell is redemptive, as someone once told me, then it’s a bitter cup for all of us who have already suffered it.” (C 27)

Selected quotes:

• “Mobberley struggles along the bottom of a narrow valley, the town clawing unsuccessfully up the sides of the Pennines. The terrain halts the spread of development and the town remains low, dense and grey” (C 2)
• “It was a tough, unattractive place, hard on the lungs. You tasted the toxins in air, which gave the atmosphere a soupy, viscous quality that caught in the nostrils.” (C 2)
• “he grinds his strong white teeth into my face, pushing my head hard against them.” (C 3)
• “We didn’t learn the normal ways of regulating anger that children do. We didn’t throw tantrums or disobey in the normal way, everything was suppressed for fear of retribution.” (C 3)
• “for all the religion in that house there was an absolute absence of God.” (C 4)
• “He claimed that during the time he spent at his grandparents, he was aware of the dead that his grandmother invoked and that they tormented him in the dark.” (C 4)
• “Sometimes she forgot to fry the eggs, the yolks floating in viscous clear whites on your plate, frying the peas instead and boiling the chips.” (C 7)
• “Why did I keep going back after he had done so much? Because I was lonely. Because there was security in our familiarity. If I’m honest, I had no one else.” (C 7)
• “It may seem unlikely but If you want to know about good and bad people, ask prostitutes. A prostitute who doesn’t develop a nose for people’s hidden character – for what they are not telling you, or what they actually want as opposed to what they are saying they want – isn’t going to survive very long.” (C 10)
• “I once knew a man, a regular in the Old Reform bar in Manchester, who told me he purposefully supplied his lovers with drugs till they eventually become addicted, and then took pleasure in watching their lives fall apart. What he did was promote behaviour that might lead to these young men’s death; playing with their lives. He justified himself by saying that the men deserved it in some way: that they were using him and this was his means of revenge.” (C 10)
• “Both of us had been handed the sticky end of the lollipop and felt the world owed us something but we owed it nothing.” (C 10)
• “The Earl’s Court of my recollection smells of dust, the stink of the cars. Dust clings heavy to the buildings, trees, streets with the tenacity of lint, like static adhered to laundry.” (C 13)
• “Every surface is covered with thrift store tat” (C 13)
• “Her perfume is her most memorable feature. It is mixture of patchouli, cannabis, stale sweat and the yeasty scent of body parts best not thought of; your nose knows of her presence long before your eyes” (C 13)
• “Would I know if I was dead? How do we know which of us are restless spirits that seek to undo what has been done, to untangle the Gordian knot of our lives?” (C 13)
• “One day you are young, the party is in full swing, then you blink, and everyone has left, and you are forty-nine, working reception in a doss house.” (C 13)
• “This was a business where not taking care of the product, in other words ourselves, was counterproductive. If I was going to survive and thrive, I had to take self-care seriously.” (C 15)
• “Commodification of the individual makes it possible to regard ourselves as any other product that is influenced by supply, demand or quantity.” (C 16)
• “I objectified myself as a means of meeting market requirements; I adjusted my appearance and persona.” (C 16)
• “A good scenario could reduce the time of the ‘massage’ considerably, the customer often becoming overwhelmed by the excitement.” (C 16)
• “We were the equivalent of a gourmet hot dog. Street enough to make the men feel as if they were buying into the ghetto fantasy, but without the risk of developing salmonella.” (C 16)
• “When you were in the sex-worker bubble, you ... lived, slept, socialised and worked in a very small area, so it was easier sometimes just to stay in character. The risk is, that you inevitably lose yourself to a greater or lesser degree, when you live a lie over an extended period of time.” (C 16)
• “There is a click and the room is suddenly brightly lit. The glass door in front of us, which initially looked like smoked glass, becomes an impenetrable mirror, through which we can see nothing other than our selves reflected back. In the darkness of the hallway, however, the customer can see each of us clearly under the bright spot-lights. We pull in our stomachs, pout our lips, predicating the duck face of the ubiquitous selfie by decades, as we try to make ourselves irresistible. A few moments pass. There is a sharp tap on the window, and the lights go out.” (C 17)
• “Being the first is almost talismanic, for it means you can relax – anything else will be gravy. Once you have that first client out of the way, everything will be all right. The anxiety is always that you won’t work that day.” (C 17)
• “There is an old saying about prostitutes, two great years, two okay years and two shit years.” ( 21)
• “My needs were always immediate. The immediate need for accommodation, for money or food. I needed drink and drugs to suppress the inevitable anxiety.” (C 21)
• “I needed to polish off entire bottles of neat whiskey to bring myself down from the drugs long enough for a few hours’ sleep.” (C 23)
• “That morning, suffering from drug-induced psychosis and under the impression I was under attack from demons waiting outside my door, that something that I could hear laughing and cajoling me with murderous intent in their voices was about to enter the room and consume me, I defenestrated myself, in spectacular fashion, hurtling myself out of the third story window, and falling in a shower of broken glass. I felt no fear as I flew through the air, toppling towards the concrete below.” (C 23)
• “I was surrounded by voices of the dead who screamed into my ears, arguing whether I should live or die. I swear that, at that point, I felt as if I was overhearing a conversation taking place around me. That these spirits and others would decide my fate.” (C 23)
• “The most painful lesson you will ever learn is to understand that it is you yourself who is often the chief architect of your own misery.” (C 24)
• “Perhaps death has a quota that needs to be met, and my chance survival has put me on death’s list of escapees.” (C 24)
• “for years I had socialised with those who contributed to my exploitation. I saw these men walking down the street and rather than rushing over to them and screaming in their faces, striking them with my fists, I did nothing. I would sit next to them in a bar, and even nod acknowledgement to them. This normalisation now strikes me as perverse and it’s that normalisation that allows it to continue.” (C 25)
• “when you are hopeless you cling to any possibility that life will improve.” (C 27) Except he didn't. At one stage he tried to kill himself.

Mesmerising reading. December 2020

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

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

"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

"City of Night" by John Rechy

 Written in 1963 and with a distinct flavour of Kerouac's On the Road, this novel follows a young gay hustler as he moves from New York to Los Angeles to Hollywood to San Francisco to Chicago and to New Orleans. It describes the underworld of studhustlers and youngmen and scores and queens and vice cops in a time when a transvestite could be arrested for 'masquerading'. It describes the different demands of the clients (for a book centred on gay sex for sale it is, due to the date of publication, cleverly coy about exactly what it describes). There are remarkable and colourful characters that flit through this book but the focus is always on the narrator, a youngman who is compelled to discover the world with as many different people as possible. 

In common with the literature of the time, Rechy is experimental in his language. Often he runs words together into one, as illustrated above, and, for example, when he describes roles played by hustlers in New York: "There are a variety of roles to play if you're hustling: youngmanoutofajob butlooking; dontgiveadamnyoungman drifting; perrenialhustler easytomakeout; youngmanlostinthebigcity pleasehelpmesir." (Part I: p 26) This and the sometimes breathless quality of his prose, as well as the subject matter, is what gives an impression of the works of Kerouac, or, for example, The Book of Cain by Alexander Trocchi.

He can produce spot-on descriptions:

• "The needlepointed dust." (Part I: p 4)
• "Phallic palm-trees with sunbleached pubic hair." (Part II: p 79)
• "In the eery mottled light of a distant lamp, a shadow lies on his stomach on the grasspatched ground, another straddles him: ignoring the danger of detection in the last moments of exiled excitement ..." (Part I; p 50)
• "Along the panel of amber mirrors at Harry's bar, a panorama of searching eyes emerges out of the orangy twilight of cigarette smoke and dimlights: a stew of faces floating murkily in the smoky darkness." (Part II; Skipper-1; p 138)

He is also able to meet someone and understand their inner core. This is his real strength: the perception of character. Many of the 'chapters' of this work are in-depth analyses of some of the memorable characters: scores, dragqueens and studhustlers, he has encountered:

• "There is a consuming franticness about Skipper which seizes you the moment he begins to talk - the words coming often in gasps - his eyes burning - at times as if about to explode with intensity, at times on the brink of closing, giving up. Constantly, he flexes his body, looking down at it, studying it, as if to make sure it is still intact." (Part II; Skipper-1; p 144)
• "When two homosexuals who have no Sexual interest in each other talk in a bar, they seldom look at each other - their eyes scan the bar for a new Available anyone." (Part III; Lance-1; p173)
• "They are the astonished eyes of someone who after years of wearing sunglasses is forced suddenly to remove them in the savage stare of the sun." (Part III; Lance-4; p189)

And there are many other wonderful moments:

• "Later I would think of America as one vast City of Night ... jukebox-winking,rock-n-roll-moaning America at night fusing its dark cities into the unmistakable shape of loneliness." (Part I; p 3)
• "Even Milton, the poet, in his epic poem, was on the side of the rebellious angels." (Part I: The Professor-3: p 68)
• "A franticness to get what the world had offered others and not extended readily to them." (Part I: The Professor-3: p 68)
• "As long as the hustler goes only with queens - and with other men only for scoring ... - he is not himself considered 'queer' - he remains, in the vocabulary of the world, 'trade'." (Part II; Miss Destiny,-1; p 88)
• "Shakespeare, my dears - a very Great writer who wrote ladies' parts for dragqueens in his time." (Part II; Miss Destiny,-1; p 88)
• "I figure: So I make a few bucks working, I blow them - jes like that"! Shoot, I get along jes as good without. Why hassle moren you got to?" (Part II; Chuck-1; p 116)
• "The best way to get there ... is to take it slow." (Part II; Chuck-1; p 117)
• "Once, man, we got so fuckin drunk ... we jes started throwing rocks at the sky" ... jes like, you know, to make sure it's there ... But those rocks, man, they jes kept comin right back at us." (Part II; Chuck-2; p 125)
• "Like - yeah - like you got Heaven roped by the neck." (Part II; Chuck-3; p 129)
• "For the homeless drifters there is also the panic that one day youll wake up to the fact that youre through on the streets, in the bars - that everyone has had you, that those who havent have lost interest - that youve been replaced by the fresher faces that come daily into the city in that shifting wave of vagrants - younger than yo u now (and Youth is at a premium)" (Part II; p 137)
• "People come to Harry's primarily for one of two purposes: to buy or be bought." (Part II; Skipper-1; p 140)
• "Life, perversely, may make one a caricature of oneself, a wandering persistent ghost of the youngman that was, once." (Part II; Skipper-1; p 144)
• "That stud walks more miles in a day than I do all mammy-screwin week long ... but he always ends up where he started from." (Part II; Skipper-1; p 145)
• "The disdain of those who know that beauty rules anarchy." (Part III; Lance-1; p172)
• "For the chorus to claim its victory, the God must admit his fall." (Part III; Lance-1; p174)
• "At the Ranch Market on Vine Street, a cockeyed clock winds it hands swiftly backwards. Longingly I stand before it." (Part III; p 202)
• "I told myself it's wrong to fight yourself when so much is fighting you already." (Part III; Someone-2; p 214)
• "New Orleans is now the Pied Piper playing a multikeyed tune to varikeyed ears." (Part IV; p 270)
• "When Ah first met him, he was re-al masculine ... He turns swish ovuhnight ... swishin like a ballerina. When Ah met him, he was hustlin the Quartuh too - the butchest, straighest numbuh y'evuh laid yuh eyes on." (Part IV; p 273)
• "The ice age of the heart." (Part IV; p 326)
• "I want to tell you something before we leave. Im not at all the way you think I am. Im not like you want me to be, the way I tried to look and act for you: not unconcerned, nor easygoing - not tough: no, not at all. ... Like you, like everyone else, Im Scared, cold, cold, terrified." (Part IV; p 326)

Unconventional but wonderfully descriptive; you feel you know the world of the desperate youngmen for the inside.

August 2020; 363 pages

"Rent Boys" by Michel Dorais

This book is based on an academic study of forty young male prostitutes in Quebec and Montreal. The author has also written the equally readable Dead Boys Can't Dance, a study of male homosexuality and suicide.

The 3 most common arenas for male prostitution are street hustling, stripping and escorting. On average they were twenty when they started sex work. Nearly half said they were gay, the others were more or less evenly divided between heterosexual and bisexual. On average in North America one in 6 boys are victims of child sexual abuse but over half the prostitutes reported such. Many were unsuccessfully fostered or adopted because of unstable family backgrounds. The vast number were ill educated, only 5% attending university and none graduating. Most or all of their clients were male although sometimes they had threesomes.

There are four groups of people involved: prostitutes, clients, entrepreneurs (eg owners of clubs etc, pornographers, drug dealers, hoteliers etc) and judges. The book also categorises the rentboys themselves into four types:

• Outcasts: often younger men, usually destitute, often runaways from difficult childhoods and nearly always addicted to a substance; they are living from day to day, usually street hustling. These boys have very low self-esteem: "I see myself as a garbage can that's been soiled, washed, bleached, but it's still dirty" (p 37)
• The Part-Timers are often heterosexual men who are using sex work to supplement their income; they often have a family  from whom they keep this work entirely separate. They usually work in the 'higher status' stripping or escorting and they almost always insist on safe sex.
• The Insiders grew up in the sex trade, often having a parent who was a prostitute. Thus, sex work is normal and it gives them a sense of belonging: "the street is yours, it's your playground, it's a part of your life." (p 41)
• For the Liberationists "prostitution is a way of living out fantasies, exploring new experiences and partners, and profiting from those discoveries." (p 41) But they may become disillusioned: "We're paid for dreams, and we wind up living in a world of dreams." (p 42)

• "rent boys are seeking adventure and, especially, ready cash, but they find themselves in an activity in which idealism and disillusion lock horns. Though they may lack the features and physique of cult film idols, they have learned to act as if they possessed them. In fact, the male prostitution market is a universe shot through with illusions. Fantasy reigns supreme, whether deliberately cultivated by sex workers in order to entice their clients or projected by clients onto the young men whose services they hire." (p viii)
• "Prior to the emergence of the homosexual/ heterosexual dichotomy in the public mind, male-to-male relations were, as in antiquity, considered acceptable from the vantage point of the active partner." (p 15)
• "Poor youths, finding themselves unemployed and destitute or simply unable to find female partners, have willingly prostituted themselves to men." (p 16)
• "Intimacy and virility are what the client requires ... hence the young hunk, muscles rippling from bodybuilding, heterosexual in appearance even though he has sex with other men." (p 21)
• "everyone is involved in watching each other. Sex workers have to attract clients ... they keep a low profile with respect to police or local residents. Clients clearly put a premium on discretion." (p 23)
• "All forms of sex work - street hustling, stripping, escorting - are trades learned by contact or apprenticeship with more experienced individuals, for example family members, peers, or clients" (p 26)
• "Clients are brutal with me at times, especially the big tough ones. They get violent when I suck them off. They hold my head and jam their dick down my throat until I choke. When I have anal sex, some of them try to hurt me on purpose, as if they wanted to bust me open." (p 27)
• "Street hustlers ... are easily identifiable ... by the way they lope along the sidewalk trying to entice potential clients: 'It's all in the body, the attitude, the posture, especially the look in your eye,' ... For others, the clothing and what it suggests count for a good deal." (pp 27 - 28)
• "Mutual masturbation costs less than oral sex, which costs less than anal sex or 'extras' such as sadomasochistic relations." (p 28)
• "You have to have short hair, wear nice clothes, be really clean, and sit there like you're part of the furniture." (p 29)
• "make sure the client undresses first, so as to examine his body ... ask the client to put the money on the night table in advance so as to avoid any misunderstandings." (p 29)
• "Strippers are paid a minimal base wage for their stage show and earn extra income by offering various services. ... First the stripper begins to undress to rhythmic music, baring his torso or somewhat more. He then performs a slower, more lascivious dance to a ballad, undressing completely or almost." (p 29)
• "Surveillance is claimed to be vigilant so as to prevent acts such as genital fondling or fellatio that are illegal in public, but the reality is that the darkness of the room, the amounts of money changing hands, and the guards arbitrary judgement militate in favour of more relaxed enforcement." (p 30)
• "No stripper will say he turns tricks, not even me, and I do. Nobody wants to be taken for a hustler. The guys want to preserve their male image." (p 31)
• "It is no exaggeration to say that strippers watch their clients as much as their clients watch them. Most strippers consider their own attractiveness to be a function of their gaze as well as their physique." (pp 32 - 33)
• "The merciless reality of the male prostitution market dictates that popularity waxes and wanes as a function of ephemeral traits such as youth, beauty, and physical fitness. Therefore, mobility tends to be downward with age." (p 35)
• "If you want to hustle, you can't love yourself. It looks like an exchange of services, but basically what you are is a garbage can for society ... You're immediately overcome by drugs, violence, rejection - it all comes with the territory. It's inseparable from prostitution." (p 45)
• "No employer acknowledges their experience as having any value; on the contrary, most perceive it as something negative, degrading and contemptible. Where the job market is concerned, these men are usually better off keeping their past a secret." (p 86)
• "even those who had ceased their sex-work activities remained in or on the periphery of prostitution." (p 87)
• "Sex work ... offers no easy exit." (p 87)

This is a fascinating study of a hidden world and it is extremely well-written. March 2017; 100 pages

"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