Billy's Club

Larry Townsend, Phenix Publishers Ltd., 1970

Nice pun — Billy’s Club — though the title would have been cleverer were Billy a cop rather than a hustler, someone more likely to find himself on the receiving end of a police officer’s baton. In any event, it’s part of a long tradition of penis-puns in gay adult book titles, from Phil Andros’ Shuttlecock (1972) to Jeff Kincaid’s Officer Dick (1973) … while the unsubtle Hung (1975) tucks a bonus humdinger into the author’s name: Just say Don Kedong out loud.

In any event, Billy is a hustler plying his trade — temporarily, he tells himself — in Los Angeles. He left his Chicago home a year ago with vague and as yet unrealized dreams of making it in the movies, and still wears the little gold cross his mom gave him as a parting gift. But his shiny dreams are more than a little tarnished. He’s living in an SRO and doing things he swore at the outset he wouldn’t. And like many ostensibly straight hustlers in fiction and real life, Billy tells himself sex with another man isn’t gay if he’s giving rather than taking. Cue a chorus of the jaded snickering: “Oh, honey, that’s just his drag.”