Queer Hustler

Joe Caruso, Playtime Books, 1965

Small-town stud Kenny comes to Hollywood to break into movies in this gloomy and attenuated novel early in the Golden Age of Gay Pulp Fiction. Kenny doesn’t have much in the way of marketable skills — at 20, his job history consists mostly of manual labor — and he isn’t all that bright. But he’s handsome and has one hell of a body — just like plenty of other wannabe stars who can’t get past the literal gates that separate the starry-eyed dreamers from the lucky few who manage to get a foot in the door.

Kenny quickly learns the inevitable lessons: Los Angeles is teeming with pretty young things of both sexes, the gatekeepers are many, and putting out is the fastest way of getting in. Along the way he finds a friend in 19-year-old Lily, who’s driven by the same dreams and less than thoroughly thought-through ambitions. And somehow Kenny does manage to land a movie role, albeit in a quickly made stag film shot in a nondescript house, for the sum of $25. Yes, that went further back then than it does today, when the equivalent is a little under $250, but it’s still less than generous, especially given the stigma attached to adult filmmaking — not to mention the creepiness of shooting on a little single-room set with wall-to-wall shag carpeting and dominated by a double bed, all of which lies behind a secret door in a basement storage room. Were that scene in a horror movie, you know the next one would involve plastic garbage bags full of body parts being hauled out under cover of darkness and tossed from a moving car.