Amazon.com
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 Smith
From Publishers Weekly
A cross between Midnight Cowboy and Boogie Nights, this tell-all memoir of a Hollywood Boulevard-heterosexual-teen-boy-male-hustler in the 1970s has all the makings of a week's worth of Jerry Springer shows. Emerging from a slightly dysfunctional upper-middle-class family of British emigres (where father was domineering and distant, and mother's female friend turned out to be her lover), teenaged Sterry fled to a Catholic college in Los Angeles and found himself working for an escort agency as well as attending classes and dating a nice girl. While the material here is fascinating, Sterry doesn't seem to trust its basic appeal and relies on a gimmicky, Hunter Thompsonesque prose style "I can do this. Woman's pleasure. Loverstudguy" to pump up the volume. This same lack of trust shapes the tone of the book. Attempts to shock fail, as when Sterry is hired at an s&m costume ball, because he portrays his clients as bizarre rather then empathetically displaying their humanity. The book's climactic, Midnight Cowboy-esque scene, in which Sterry gets violent with one of his few male clients and finally quits the life, may feel good for the wrong reasons. Sterry's book is an easy but not an insightful read. (Feb.) Forecast: An NPR syndicated feature and four-city author tour may draw aspiring Dirk Digglers or Mrs. Robinsons to this title from among literate vicarious thrill seekers, but it is unclear how many of them would be caught carrying it around.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
See all Editorial Reviews
(33)
$11.90
(4)
$15.56
(1)
$16.95
David Henry Sterry sent the following post to customers who purchased Chicken: Self-Portrait of a Young Man for Rent