Chicken: Self-Portrait of a Young Man for Rent Book

David Henry Sterry's account of his nine months as a male prostitute in Los Angeles could easily have been unrelievedly sordid. Instead, because he relates his bizarre adventures in the boy-toy trade with dark wit and considerable compassion, it proves to be that rare walk on the wild side you can thoroughly enjoy and not hate yourself for in the morning. The frank descriptions of his "dates" range from wickedly funny (two women hire him to clean their house dressed in nothing but a see-through black apron while they have sex with each other) to baroque (at a costumed orgy, he performs various acts with "Tinker Bell" while "Peter Pan" whips her) to extremely disturbing (one client has him dress in her dead son's clothes, then vomits after their encounter). It all seems sadly, even touchingly human, thanks to Sterry's matter-of-fact empathy for his disturbed customers. He's tougher on his parents, depicting them as essentially abandoning their 17-year-old son to the streets, but even here he sardonically steps back for the bigger picture, labeling Mom and Dad "embodiments of the American Dream. They came to this country with basically nothing but the clothes on their backs, and after twenty years of hard work, sweat, and sacrifice, they were getting divorced, totally broke, and deep in therapy." Passages like that give Chicken its bite; the book gets its soul from Sterry's nuanced portrait of his growing anguish as the work takes him to increasingly scary places, physically and emotionally. --Wendy SmithRead More