cover image Enchanted Youth

Enchanted Youth

Richie Mc Mullen. Gay Men's Press, $12.95 (160pp) ISBN 978-0-85449-134-6

In this sensitive, revealing memoir, McMullen recounts his year as a London ``rent boy,'' a prostitute engaging in homosexual acts. In 1958, when he's 15, prostitution offers McMullen an escape from his abusive father (described in his earlier Enchanted Boy ) and the ``cold hearted''p. 8 city of Liverpool. He ends up in ``The Meat Rack'' at Piccadilly Circus, where boys hang around ``like marketable produce in a butcher's shop,'' waiting for customers. Fortunately, the more experienced Joker takes the innocent McMullen under his wing. In the course of the year he discovers a supportive camaraderie among the rent boys and falls in love with a public school boy whose father takes elaborate steps to separate them. But this period also has its horrors: McMullen contracts syphilis, is raped and tortured by a customer and learns of the murder of an acquaintance, another rent boy. Yet McMullen, who is now a counselor and youth worker, emphasizes the good in people rather than the sordid or demeaning, though he realizes that his memoriesstet/pk may have become generous over the years. (Nov.)