Rent Boy—Gary Indiana

for some reason reality never quite coincides with what you imagine

I finally read a book by Gary Indiana, and I’m glad I did. The particular edition of Rent Boy that I read is being put out by McNally Editions on January 10th 2023.

I couldn’t but think about my forays in and around “Dimes Square” over the past year while reading the book. The Emerson club, where our protagonist and the first-person writer of this quasi-epistolary text “Danny” works as a waiter, felt like if Clandestino somehow merged with Soho House. Failing and ailing playwrights, love-torn and unadorned businessmen, and self-mythologizing and hypnotizing novelists make up the clientele. And on the side, Danny works as a prostitute, paying his way through an architecture program at Rutgers. The novel focuses more on the prostitution than the institution. 8-inch erect penises are much more common than erecting buildings.

Anxiously waiting in apartment building lobbies when you’re about to sell your body, the need for money weighed against the harvesting organs of somebody’s honey. Indiana writes of doomed romances, a Nietzschean Beyond Good and Evil-ass villain, fake tits that might look too real, the real history of the Hagia Sophia, and Guadalajara. Conscience becomes a much stronger force than we’re led to expect. After all, if $10,000 in your bank account means, to you, “swimming in it,” why get greedy?

I don’t know what New York was like in the eighties. It seems like there was a lot of blow and debauchery. It also seemed like a worthy pursuit, and a real triumph, to stay smart and create good shit while existing in that whirlpool of vice. It seems like that was the game? It seems like Danny had a lot to offer and it’s an indictment of something that because he was queer, or wanted to be an architect, there simply weren’t any real options available to him to get by besides rent-boying. But one of the major triumphs of the book is that this tragic fate is a moot point, and not tragic. Here there is a life, representative of what was lived and perhaps still lived by some. There was an element of necessity, of “I don’t have a choice,” but you know what? It’s not a bad life man. It makes me laugh at the Dimes Square of today, it’s cosplay. The dance with tragic necessity is what makes this story so cool. Indiana tells us how it is, what’s up. Unfortunately, a major part of being cool is not getting what you want, whether by choice or not. The Kantian transcendental point outside of the material conditions of the text is J., who Danny loves, who he is writing to. We may not get what we love, but it’s better to live knowing that something like that exists, you know? And what a joy to know that this new edition exists and others like me will be able to dive into this world.