Down There: A Review of "Rent Boy" by Gary Indiana
A review of "Rent Boy" by Gary Indiana
Among other things, Gary Indiana’s Rent Boy is a comedy of manners. The book opens with a bait and switch, three pages of canned cosmopolitan wit before the foam of New York café society runs off into the bottomless sewer of desire. There’s still money in the sewer, even a certain access to glamour, but it’s a place that’s fundamentally dark, dank, and where language as a currency is basically worthless. You see very quickly how Sandy Miller, the celebrated author whose primary muse and subject is her cunt, can only thrive in the hothouse context of a few trendy bars and restaurants. In Rent Boy’s netherworld, no one’s buying books and they especially aren’t buying cunt.
The “manners” at hand are the formalities of fucking: who gets fucked and by whom and for how much. Warm bodies with vacant (or dissociated) minds run up against desperate bodies with overactive imaginations. Although the novel is set primarily among men who have sex with men, “gay” is an inaccurate descriptor for this sexual marketplace, which specializes in satisfying fantasies so baroque that gender is often wildly beside the point. It takes all kinds to fuck someone 400lbs or play-act as Shirley Temple or suck vomit out of someone’s asshole, and Indiana plays out these more *singular* geisha dances beautifully.
Danny, the narrator of Rent Boy, has language though it serves the reader more than it ever serves him. He has good looks and a big dick and those are as good as a passport. Because he’s handsome, anonymous, and not apparently fucked up, he has the capacity to enter and exit many discrete New York’s at will; ducking in and out of dinner clubs, john’s apartments, bombed-out construction sites, and high-end fashion shoots without leaving much of an impression anywhere. He has a bedrock of intelligence and potential that sets him apart from the rest of the hustlers and a small degree of distance from the scene that allows him to compartmentalize sex work alongside other jobs (student, waiter) rather than merely becoming a casualty of it. Because he belongs nowhere and to no one - and isn’t an insufferable Lana fag about it - Danny is a perfect vehicle for Indiana, a ruthlessly clear-eyed proxy for navigating the city and its underground economy of desire.
These slippages were enormously relevant to me when I first read the book. At the time I was living in San Francisco and souring on it more and more every day. I was fresh out of college and in a career tailspin, unable to monetize my degree and temping my way into oblivion. I’d more or less gone to school to be gay, and though the pixie dust sheen of being “out” had long since worn off, a rabid, desperate hunger for experience remained. I’d met a series of older men, who I’d wanted to “initiate” me into homosexuality, which is to say that I wanted the non-traditional education of being “taken to the opera.” What I didn’t understand was that the opera house had shuddered when Grindr went online and rather than being taught to go to bat for Maria Callas or Renata Tebaldi, I’d merely learned how to fuck. Because I had a good bedside manner and a certain blond, all-American quality about me, I came to realize I could extract money and favors from these guys, which was exactly what I did.
Dabbling isn’t the same as immersion, and I wouldn’t describe my experience as “sex work” so much as being cute and kind of extractive about it. What I did, and still do, relate to is the novel’s steady gravitational pull downward, its moments of youthful abandon punctuated by the inescapable feeling that you’re steadily losing ground. Danny’s story is a prolonged quarter life crisis, told at the crux where the thrill of fucking around gives way to the years-long hangover of actually finding out. Neither Indiana nor Danny is queeny enough to wring their hands over “twink death,” but what they do train their eyes on are people who have been irreparably damaged by trauma and are now locked into cycles of regression and repetition, probably until death. Behind every cutting judgment or brutal character assessment is the distinct possibility of ending up exactly like them.
Indiana is heroic to me for his powers of description, which veer from ironic, gimlet-eyed understatement to ferocious, face-melting horror. His authority as a writer allows him to slash through ambiguity with devastating certainty, although his knack for drama means teasing out the awfulness of his characters rather than simply lighting into them, which surely must have been tempting. The book works in a similar vein as Samuel Delany’s Hogg or Dennis Cooper’s The Sluts, unrelenting in its brutality but compulsively readable for how funny it is. Often the compound horrors add up to scenarios so fucked-up that you can’t help but laugh. Behold the abject horror of a client’s failed douching rendered as “my prick bursting through some toll booth on the Hershey’s Highway” or the second-hand retelling of a john’s flabby ass ruptured by a good toe-fucking, and all for only $50.
Because intimacy is currency for rent boys, Indiana’s characters most readily come together out of convenience or when their needs for money or drugs are mutually compatible. This is certainly true of Danny’s relationship with Chip, a handsome but demented fellow hustler, who involves him in a disastrous plot involving “economically redistributive” organ theft. Danny knows he isn’t in love, not really, but he still can’t fully grasp the full scope of what being together with him means. Indiana depicts sex with the blurry intensity of a Francis Bacon painting, fixating on particular details (throbbing cocks feature large) while the overall picture remains firmly out of focus; note Danny’s description of a hook-up with a near-sighted Saudi “we’re just two vague mammals humping.”
The reader can eventually piece together that theirs is an attraction born of shared hope and desperation, of imagining a new life and beginning again somewhere new. That Chip and Danny’s actions are utterly buckwild and that their trust in strangers is dangerously misplaced is beside the point; what’s important is that they still have the capacity to dream, which is proof enough that they haven’t yet sunk so far. In its most tender moments - as in the surreal sequence where Danny encounters Chip in a millionaire’s mansion clad in a voluminous wedding dress - the book has the same flicker of innocence and impossible romantic longing that makes characters like Venus Xtravaganza, Miss Destiny, and the street kids in Larry Clark and Mary Ellen Mark photographs so haunting.
The ambient fog that hangs over the world of Rent Boy has more of a charge to it than simple underworld gloom. Camille Paglia once noted of Tom of Finland’s drawings that the backgrounds were as important as the foreground: wide open plains to roam with no home on the horizon to return to. This feature haunts the work of everyone from Jean Genet to Gore Vidal, Wakefield Poole to Gus van Sant; vast empty backdrops through which one can explore and pursue pleasure, albeit without a safe haven from the ruthlessness of the world. In other ways it does represent a kind of safe space, by limiting themselves to a world of action and reaction, both hustlers and johns can hold off from reckoning too deeply with the devastation of their personal lives. “They don’t want things to be emotional,” Danny notes of the men his age who respond to his ads, “they don’t want to cope with messy feelings.”
The book’s air of obscurity and its mercenary social scene is unthinkable today. “Visibility” has brought middle class, career-oriented fags into the light of consumerist striving and far away from the scuzzy corners it was once relegated to. This is especially true of the island of Manhattan, which has more or less gentrified the book’s entire world out of existence. Sure there are plenty of gay men who continue to pursue hedonism with an active horror of Pete Buttigieg-style politics and domesticity, but they do so primarily as a lifestyle choice; you’d be hard-pressed to describe any of these 9-to-5 cum pigs as the shadow side of anything.
Rent Boy is one of the best and last portraits of New York as a bottomless vortex, a place where people can vanish as totally as they can make it. The book is technically an epistolary novel, a collection of undated letters from Danny addressed to “J.” In his final message to J, after relaying the nightmarish aftermath of his and Chip’s adventure in organ trafficking, Danny concludes by saying that he’s moved away from New York and to not bother trying to contact him going forward. After all, he notes, “Danny” had been a pseudonym all along.