THREE MEMOIRS OF GAY HUSTLING, all with happy endings...not THAT kind

ASSUMING THE POSITION: A Memoir of Hustling
RICK WHITAKER
Out of print (non-affiliate Amazon link)
Various prices from different vendors

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Rick Whitaker divulges the complex reasons that drove him to prostitution and reflects on the cost of a life of half-truths and emotional lies. With an unsentimental eye, Whitaker chronicles his descent and eventual resolution.

My Review: That's a pretty sparse description for a pretty intense book. It's a short thing, pared down to its essential points, and purged of prurient detail. (Darn it.)

Whitaker was the editorial assistant to publishing legend Gordon Lish. You know, Raymond Carver? Richard Ford? The one who edited, or quite possibly more than edited, their best stuff. He was, apparently, absorbing a lot from Lish (not a double entendre that I know of) because he wastes no words here describing his descent from broke publishing minion to crack-addled sex worker AND broke publishing minion.

It's amazingly easy to understand and sympathize with Whitaker. He's not some rotten-souled vile being who expresses himself by Doing Shocking Things. He's a guy who needs a center to his life, needs a sense of belonging and of mattering. I speak from experience here: If one needs those things, NEW YORK IS NOT THE PLACE TO LIVE. I watched it eat people alive, make others miserable, and all because the one thing those folks needed was the one thing the city does not reward. Either arrive already centered, focused, or understand that you are driven by a goal...or the city will have you for breakfast with a side of bacon.

Whitaker sold access to his body for drug money, for the momentary illusion of power, and for the sheer hell of it. He ended up not wanting what he found, and got out, and told his story so all the experience would not go to waste.

I like the book, where lots didn't much. I respect sex workers for the sheer magnitude of their performance capability. I admire their generosity of spirit (how many pretty people do you imagine subcontract their sex lives? Lots of old, lonely, ugly, fat folks do). I've had some very good friends (without benefits, thank you for asking) who did this demanding and difficult job. Whitaker's was a story I've heard with variations for years. It's not something I'd suggest one read for titillation, but any moralists who have accidentally stumbled into reading my reviews (you must feel so lost, poor lambs) should give it a whirl, as should those inclined to judge and find wanting all those billions and billions of people not precisely like themselves. (There is overlap in the categories, but they aren't all the same people.)

Empathy can be learned. Try this and see if you can't find some for a man searching for acceptance.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

SECRETS OF A GAY MARINE PORN STAR
RICH MERRITT
Citadel Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Here’s the story of Rich Merritt—the good son, teacher’s pet, Southern gentleman, model Christian student at Bob Jones University, Marine officer, and the not-so-anonymous poster boy for a New York Times Magazine article on gays in the military—whose complicated sexual past caused an international scandal when The Advocate “outed” him as “The Marine Who Did Gay Porn,” putting his life in a tailspin.

It’s the compelling, poignant story of how a boy who never listened to pop music, never cursed, and didn’t have his first drink until he was eighteen exploded into a life of drugs, alcohol, promiscuity, prostitution, and pornography. And above all, it’s a triumphant story of self-forgiveness and identity, of a man who refused to allow himself to be defined by the standards of anyone else—gay or straight. Along the way, Rich Merritt writes with humor, compassion, insight and naked truth about:

• What it’s really like growing up behind the “Fortress of Fundamentalism” and how he ultimately came to despise their views
• The harsh realities of military life under the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” Clinton policy
• A real insider’s experience of working in the male porn industry—the good, the bad, and the extremely hot
• Why he chose not to reveal his porn past to the New York Times journalist
• What it felt like to be the most notorious marine in the world and what it took to come through the fire

By turns harrowing and heartbreaking, angry and affirming, Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star is that rarest of memoirs—a fascinating slice of life that reads like the most absorbing fiction, but is all true.

My Review: Gay guys who become porn stars are very interesting to me. Their stories, I suppose, are all very much alike, and very much like the stories that drive women to pornography...low self-esteem, a sense of failure in one's life, a desire to capitalize on physical beauty while it lasts, greed, the usual. But those driving forces aren't unique to these people, they're common to all of us in some degree or another. Why do these folks do this (to me) very scary and risky job?

Start with a damn-near fatal upbringing in the grasp of an Evangelical family; proceed to the Bob Jones-ing of his entire education, all the way from kindergarten (there is no link to the non-University of Bob Jones due to, um, controversies shall we say) to time in seminary; waking up and realizing he can not pray the gay away, subsequent substance abuse, two deliberate decisions to end his life.

This author pilots us through his decisions made...he didn't have sex with anyone until he was twenty-three! and he was sexually repressed to the point that his first sexual encounter predates the first time he ever masturbated!...and accepted; this with a degree of skill and a commendable lack of embarrassment that surprised me. I was expecting a defensive tone to creep in to the reports. He instead simply informs the reader of his choices and seems, while not endorsing them with hindsight, not to disavow the life he lived, either. The sense I get is of a guy I'd enjoy kickin' back with a beer, some nachos, and a bunch of good jazz CDs on shuffle with.

Plus he's really so very pretty to look at.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

YOUNG MAN FROM THE PROVINCES: A Gay Life Before Stonewall
ALAN HELMS
University of Minnesota Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Young, intelligent, and handsome, Alan Helms left a brutal midwestern childhood for New York City in 1955. Denied a Rhodes scholarship because of his sexual orientation, he soon became an object of desire in a gay underground scene frequented by, among many others, Noel Coward, Leonard Bernstein, and Marlene Dietrich. In this unusually vivid and sensitive account, Helms describes the business of being a sex object and its psychological and physical toll.

My Review: Beloved Boston cultural institution Alan Helms had a wildly exciting past! See the film! Admire his art collection, appreciate his cultured and elegant way of speaking, his breadth of cultural knowledge, and his charming sweetness.

What does a young, abused man from flyover country do the moment he realizes he's queer? RUN! Get to New York City as soon as possible. He got to Columbia University in 1955, leaving behind a life in Indianapolis, Indiana, that could charitably be described as "uncongenial." A father who thought his son was a bitter disappointment...how many of us queer boys can relate to that...a mother whose situation wasn't a lot better than his, a younger brother whose close brush with death was the single moment in his childhood when peace reigned. None of this is a recipe for a healthy adulthood...and add in the author's understandable, if off-putting, self-absorption and you get a difficult-to-empathize-with narrator.

But he was So. Beautiful. Look at that face on the cover! Hoo-ee!

And the awfulness of that...wow...to be so pretty and so readily available and so snobby, who can claim to be surprised that he wasn't a pleasant person? His sexual awakening came at the price of being raped. His family life prepared him for a life of abuse. He dived into it in the glamorous world of high-class hetaira-dom in closeted gay life pre-Stonewall. Pretty, sexually available, intelligent boys found innumerable lovers, and the author wasn't about to say no. (I totally relate to this and would've done precisely the same in his shoes. Damn the bad luck of not being pretty!) So a decade and a half passed in what I imagine was a golden haze...this book's largest part. It's a bit less charming to me than it might be to a younger reader. I look at the wreckage he glosses over and think, "there's the real story."

Yes, sleeping with famous Hollywood stars and titled Eurotrash is all very well. But the people you stood up, the ones whose parties weren't quite glam enough that you said you'd attend, and so on and so forth? How did you sleep, look in the mirror, launch yourself at the next big fish in your hifalutin' pond without thinking about them?

The Fall took place when he was thirtyish, and some semblance of human feeling broke the ice he'd cultivated to keep his agony at bay and under the surface of a freezing cold lake he called his heart. Escape to Boston and the tender mercies of a shrink who began the process of waking the author up from his frozen state. Then it happened: His body aged. He wasn't the hot young muffin anymore; he wasn't even visible to the hot young muffins. That had to be a bad, bad day.

Now, let me not try to hide my glee here. This event has occurred in my life, too. I can not imagine how much worse it was for a formerly gorgeous creature, feted and celebrated and wined and dined, to be cut off from that gushing geyser of distractions. Luckily for his sanity, Helms had a brain and a deep love of the life of the mind that he'd never left behind or neglected. While learning what he'd never known, that feelings are best felt in the moment and not in retrospect, I'm sure he left more carnage behind in his wake. But the fact that no one ever killed him means that he learned enough to at leas fake his way through professional, if not personal, relationships. So hope still shines for him to pull his head out of his ass and recognize that, in his swan-paddle through youth, he got into some ugly emotional habits that would be wise for him to shed before he's patted in the face with a shovel and 120 cubic feet of dirt dropped on him.

I guess it shows that I don't like the man I got to know from reading this book too terribly much. Yes, part of it is envy: I would've LOVED to live among those glittering parties and glamorous people, and I'm jealous that he won nature's looks lottery. But more of it is the sense that grew and grew as I read his (ampersand-laden) memoir that he wasn't sharing his journey with me.

He was bragging that it happened.

I suppose I would too, and that is a disappointing self-revelation that elicits deep sadness in my shallows. Read the book, o ye queer boys over 50 to relive a lovely, dead time when we were few but fabulous; QUILTBAG youth, especially young and pretty ones, definitely think about your history; y'all straight folks, umm, on balance I'd say not unless your Gay BFF approves it for your personal tastes.

THE GLASS CASTLE, a neglected daughter's journey to forgiveness

THE GLASS CASTLE: A Memoir
JEANNETTE WALLS
Scribner
$12.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. When sober, Jeannette's brilliant and charismatic father captured his children's imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and how to embrace life fearlessly. But when he drank, he was dishonest and destructive. Her mother was a free spirit who abhorred the idea of domesticity and didn't want the responsibility of raising a family.

The Walls children learned to take care of themselves. They fed, clothed, and protected one another, and eventually found their way to New York. Their parents followed them, choosing to be homeless even as their children prospered.

The Glass Castle is truly astonishing--a memoir permeated by the intense love of a peculiar but loyal family.

There will be a 2017 film whose release date isn't set just yet, so it seemed like a good time to revisit this influential, searingly honest, and personally relevant memoir.

My Review: Oh. My. God.

Walls has a non-fiction novel coming out this month, so I decided to re-read the book that started all the ruckus before I got to Half-Broke Horses. (NB I read that book, was disappointed, didn't review it.)

This memoir appealed to me as the youngest child (by a large margin) of two complete nutters. They were not like Walls' parents in that they never let us go hungry and we never lacked a roof over our heads. They were emotionally disturbed, though, and this passage sums up the sensation of being raised by a completely bizarre mother:

I wondered if the fire had been out to get me. I wondered if all fire was related, like Dad said all humans were related, if the fire that had burned me that day while I cooked hot dogs was somehow connected to the fire I had flushed down the toilet and the fire burning at the hotel. I didn't have the answers to those questions, but what I did know was that I lived in a world that at any moment could erupt into fire. It was the sort of knowledge that kept you on your toes.

The fires were, in my house, verbal. As a result of the noisy unsafe minefield I grew up in, I hate to raise my voice. If I have to shout it means (to me) that I've lost, there's no chance of being heard. I'm a sucker, as a consequence, for a man whose emotions are tightly reined in, especially if he's losing his battle against letting them loose. I empathize strongly.

A little backstory: I was romantically involved with a man for some time while I lived in Austin, whom I met on a bus. I got on the bus, sat a few seats behind the cute, sandy-haired, rumpled guy with the prominent ears devouring a book that I spotted from the pay-stile, and sighed the happy sigh of one whose world contains all the things he needs: A job, a home, and all the men he can mentally undress and ravish.

I was mid-mental ravishment when Mr. Man (as I came to call him) upset the applecart by bursting into tears. As quietly as he could, of course, but tears. A stop later, still crying. Stop after that, still crying. I got up, moved into the seat next to him but across the aisle, and said, "What the hell're you reading? I wanna be sure I never set an eyeball on it." That got a laugh, and he held up The Glass Castle and said it was sort of the story of his life.

We talked for four hours that day. I gave him my email and number, and things progressed pretty smoothly until one day they didn't, but that's another story.

He'd just read Walls's tale of her father taking her pubescent self to a pool-hall and getting her within an inch of getting raped, just so he'd have beer money:

Mom asked me if I was okay. I shrugged and nodded. “Well, there you go,” she said. She said that sexual assault was a crime of perception. “If you don’t think you’re hurt, then you aren’t,” she said. “So many women make such a big deal out of these things. But you’re stronger then that,” she went back to her crossword puzzle.

It struck a chord, and the story of his own stepfather's abuses of Mr. Man, and his mother's indifference to them, came spewing out of him. I've read the book before just now, specifically so I could discuss it with Mr. Man, but I did so with an already numbed horror bone and a severed humor tendon.

Only now that I am several years beyond that initial encounter with the book can I see how very funny the tragic events in it are, and were to the author. I can see that it's gallows humor of a sort...but also that it's all perfect proof that life's a Zen joke:

Mom always said people worried too much about their children. Suffering when you're young is good for you, she said. It immunized your body and your soul, and that was why she ignored us kids when we cried. Fussing over children who cry only encouraged them, she told us. That's positive reinforcement for negative behavior.

If you can chuckle at Dolly Parton's aperçu, "You have no idea how much it costs to look this cheap," then Walls is the next step up the Sisyphean slope of learning how to laugh like the Dalai Lama. It's a hard life that etches grooves in the looking-glass, but it's a path worth taking if you can get to the place where "textured" is valued more than smooth. Read the book, you'll know what I mean.

UNASHAMED, rapper Lecrae's memoir of Being Saved, and my vote for 2016 Goodreads Choice Awards in Memoir

UNASHAMED
LECRAE (MOORE)
B & H Books
$24.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: Two-time Grammy winning rap artist, Lecrae, learned this lesson through more than his share of adversity—childhood abuse, drugs and alcoholism, a stint in rehab, an abortion, and an unsuccessful suicide attempt.

Along the way, Lecrae attained an unwavering faith in Jesus and began looking to God for affirmation. Now as a chart-topping industry anomaly, he has learned to ignore the haters and make peace with his craft. The rap artist holds nothing back as he divulges the most sensitive details of his life, answers his critics, shares intimate handwritten journal entries, and powerfully models how to be a Christian in a secular age.

This is the story of one man's journey to faith and freedom.

My Review:I voted for this book in the 2016 Goodreads Choice Awards. There's no obvious reason I'd vote for some christian crapola over the memoir of Gloria Vanderbilt and her gay son Anderson Cooper, except I really can't relate to rich people's problems any more. On the dull side, frankly. Being so desperately wretched that suicide makes sense I can relate to (although in my case it was a thyroid imbalance that tipped the scales).

Lecrae's problems aren't dull. They include a laundry list of every social ill I've been able to dream up. He ticks every box and then, one fine day, gawd reaches down and saves him. My eyes rolled so hard I was dizzy for a week.

But I voted for the book because I felt the sincerity and passion and belief oozing from every bit of this story. That makes up, in my never-humble opinion, for the fact that I oppose every single thing that Religion represents.