ABSTRACT
In a selective but still wide-ranging survey of how male sex workers are represented in world literature, legendary novelist and memoirist Felice Picano inspects numerous examples of texts in which they are depicted. His examples include the earliest Western epic, Gilgamesh, as well as classical Greek and Roman poetry; seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Japanese and Chinese tales; and modern European, English, and American novels. Among the latter are Proust’s Le temps retrouvé , Ackerley’s My Father and Myself, Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, Rechy’s City of Night, and Samuel Steward’s $tud. He concludes the chapter with a discussion of The Asbestos Diary (1966), a collection of tales by Brian Drexel, writing as Casimir Dukahz, in which the narrator recalls his pick-ups of boy after boy, until “it soon becomes clear that ‘Duke’ is the one being picked up … and that the boys not only have an agenda for their time with Duke and what they can get out of him, but that he has been ‘marked’ by an informal network of boys as a willing victim.” Picano explains that the stratagem played by both client and sex worker in The Asbestos Diary can be found repeated in both ancient and modern literature: “What it comes down to in the end is a deal. Maybe some affection, some fun times together. But really just buy and sell, nothing but a deal.”
