Afterlife of a Kept Boy

• Afterlife of a Kept Boy
• Price: $22.00
• 978-1-949540-52-9
• March 1, 2025
• Nonfiction - PB
• 200 (apprx.)
• Dale Corvino

Presale Available Now, Afterlife of a Kept Boy will ship on or around March 1, 2025!

C&R Press Nonfiction 2023 Award Winner

ABOUT

Fifth Avenue, New York City, 1986: a sexually confused college kid is introduced to a British society decorator and before long is entrapped in romantic obsession. In and out of custom suits, he grapples with being an object of longing and other perils. Through the Nineties, the boundaries between uptown’s social climbers and the East Village underground erode along with his own. Vivid flashes of kept life—Concorde flights, jewelry shopping in Paris, a gastronomic tour of the city—spark in the darkness as the decorator declines and the century winds down. The decorator’s secret history is revealed and our kept boy’s own desires are unleashed.

In a post-9/11 city, his unkept life unfolds with the promise of the Internet, found deep in the isolating routines of AOL chatrooms. As he leans into a “Guido stud for hire” persona he’s haunted by the decorator’s fetishization of his heritage, prompting a deeper look into the Italian-American condition. A reunion with the instigator of that Fifth Avenue encounter amidst the tear gas smoke of a massive populist uprising isn’t the reckoning our boy was expecting, but the one he gets. Plunging into themes of personal agency and longing, reckoning with legacies both aesthetic and traumatic, Corvino also casts a queer lens on the Gen X condition as analog children thrust into a digital context. AFTERLIFE OF A KEPT BOY is an immersive memoir of sex work crafted with a thorough and tender honesty.

PRAISE FOR AFTERLIFE OF A KEPT BOY

“Dale Corvino’s vivid memoir of hustling is an unflinching look at the thrill and pain of transactional relationships. His singular, amoral voice describes an unexamined life of privilege that descends into a dark complicity and back out the other end.”
-Daniel Minahan, Director of HALSTON and ON SWIFT HORSES

“What does it mean to be a kept boy and what does it mean to break free? In acute prose, Corvino takes the reader on a journey of survival and liberation, of the roles we choose and the roles that choose us, and, ultimately, of what it means to transcend. Many books trace the activities of sex workers, but so few do as this does—to trace the fragile outline of the sex worker heart. Treasure this.”
-Lily Burana, author of Grace for Amateurs and Strip City

“In Afterlife of a Kept Boy, Dale Corvino has written nothing short of a masterpiece. I swear this book activated something ancient and homosexual in me. You do not simply read Afterlife of a Kept Boy, you nod your head, snap your fingers, call your best friend and say, “Girl…” And Corvino is not just funny—though I kept scream-laughing throughout—his stories about navigating the sex work industry are also smart, tender-hearted, and absolutely fearless. Rich in atmosphere, full of lyrical prose and hard-earned wisdom, I was swept away from the first page and sighing with deep satisfaction by the last. I really love this book.”
-Edgar Gomez, author of Alligator Tears: A Memoir-in-Essays

“You’re unlikely to find anything resembling this story in the archives of gay literature, or maybe any kind of literature at all. Those who spend a significant portion of their lives  as “kept” usually don’t get the chance to acquire either the literary skills or the understanding to recount what happened. Afterlife of a Kept Boy is one fantastic exception, an invigorating tale of survival that led to the flourishing of a glorious new identity.”
-Bruce Benderson, Prix de Flore winner forThe Romanian

“Sex work, passion, disillusionment, wisdom and coke all overflow in this delicious diary of an unstoppable dreamer. Condoms not included.”
-Michael Musto

“An unapologetically raunchy queer odyssey that challenges the art of memoir writ large, demanding the truths we expose of ourselves be deeper and more colorful. Dale Corvino’s self-awareness is immediately inviting, putting the reader at ease while feeding them a buffet of debauchery that seamlessly transmutes into profound wisdom. This is the kind of story where you cry and cackle in the same gesture. If this prose is what Corvino does with his personal history, I can only imagine the force he’ll become in the queer lit sphere. And yet as much as I loved the ending, I wanted more and more!”
-Jason Yamas, Lambda Literary Award winner for Tweakerworld