Afterlife of a Kept Boy

About this book

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.