by Dale Corvino
A warm-hearted romp and an ode to New York City in the early aughts.
The author gave me this book at the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival in 2017, but I put off reading it. I didn’t think I was queer enough for the book. Sex for me, at least for the last fifteen or so years, hasn’t been the main event. Thankfully, despite the hustlers, the johns, the buckets of cum, the outré events, sex isn’t the main event here, either. As with any good story, that is reserved for human entanglements. In this case, the relationships of compadres and clients of a thirty-nine-year-old escort, one who “found something to love about every single one of those men” he had sex with. One who convinced himself, quite rightly I think, that he “was doing God’s work.”
So in these pages we get to know, Mr. Greet, the jaded effete. Dean Jonson, a hustler with a heart as big as his huge cock. Adam, a young john in upstate New York, a small-town undertaker. Cherry, a Manhattan marketer who Dominick services on his lunch breaks. Darryl, a regular and Upper East Side butler, and his jealous lover, Brad. Many others.
Though some of the pieces rise to the level of literature—not that they need to really—most exist as recollections, as storytelling. (They were originally read live at the Rapture, a bar on Avenue A in Manhattan.) I’m not prepared to debate the difference between literature and performance-based storytelling, but where the two merge here is, as I say, in their description of human entanglement.
Corvino has a fine narrative style which he uses to render these closely-observed recollections. For example: “Darryl was a tall, solidly built Nordic man in his forties. He was naturally smooth, always clean-shaven, with a broad easy grin—but a clownish, tragic turn at the corners of the mouth.”
“Dominick Reading for Filth” is a warm-hearted romp and an ode to New York City in the early aughts. { Cross-posted at goodreads. }