Steal Hearts, Steel Bonds/ This is Pittsburgh

Money Boy by Paul Yee

I jam my buds into my ears but don’t connect them.  I need to save the battery.  Walking around without wires looks pitiful, and even sadder if you’re alone. 

You look like you don’t know music.  You look poor.

Ray Liu immigrated to Toronto at age 14.  Now 18, he’s still two-and-a-half years from graduation, having been held back in ESL classes, but English still doesn’t come easy to him, unlike his stepbrother, unlike his Chinese friends who all had English tutors back in China.  Consequently, his grades suck and his ex-military father is perpetually pissed off.  Ba wants Ray to be a doctor.  Ray just wants to be somewhere else.

He’s embraced Western Society so far as he enjoys conspicuous consumption: an iPod, a laptop, the widest widescreen TV of all his friends,  menagerie of brightly colored high-tops.  He can’t be blamed for this apparent vapidity, though.  These are the fetishes of Western Culture his father lives for.  Is Ray to blame for his failure to assimilate, or his father?  To answer that, must we first decide whether assimilation is something admirable?

It suffices to say that Ray is not Canadian, does not want to be Canadian.  He longs for his flawed mother, a gambling addict, possibly a prostitute, who stayed behind.   He immerses himself in the geography of his homeland while playing a Chinese MMO.  There, he is Steel, a man who fights for Honor points, not for Blood. 

He worries when the Rebel Command he fights for decides to give up on a direct offensive and engage in guerilla tactics.  This will mean a long war, a costly one, and many peasants will die.  The people want a quick war, one with an end, he tells his clan on their Chinese-language forum, the only place he can express himself elegantly, honestly.  He scolds them, but they don’t buy his logic:



Coward, I retort.  You’re afraid to fight and die.

No, Steel, you’re the coward.  You fear failure.  You would rather die quickly than work slowly to reduce the enemy’s power.  Besides, what do you know about ordinary people?  You were born into wealth.



This an avatar confronting an avatar, But the words burn through the screen:

Too many things to be Chinese.  Not enough language to be Canadian.

All of that is enough to explain Ray’s feelings of isolation, but he’s in the closet, too.  When his father finds gay websites listed in Ray’s internet history, they’re not porn sites, they’re support sites: When to come out to your parents, What to say.  Ba freaks, throws Ray’s closes on the lawn.  Ray runs. 

To downtown, to the gayborhood, to Boy Street, where the rentboys pose.  Maybe that will be me, he wonders, but almost in jest.  He’s still got money in his pocket.  He spends a night on a loading dock and gets robbed.  Then a night in a shelter.  Penniless, he reaches out to his stepbrother who gives him a loan.  Then two nights in a hostel, and his laptop is stolen.  No more gaming.  Things are getting dire.  Back to the shelter, where, tonight, his stepbrother and his fundamentalist girlfriend are serving dinner.  Too proud, he runs.  Back to Boy Street.  A Chinese man in a nice car rolls up, addresses him in Mandarin.  This will make things easier, he thinks, selling himself to someone he can speak to.  Never-mind the fact that he’s never touched another dick.  This man drives a Lexus.

I want gay sex.

It will prove things.

The man is tender, respectful, knows it’s his first time.  Buys him a meal.  Holds him.  The sex is oblique.  Ray spends the night.  (Every first time is a dream or a nightmare.  I can’t imagine what it would have been like if the first time I was fucked was the first time I was paid.)

Things are not what they seem, though.  This man is a pimp.  After Ray’s first date with a Western client, he vomits.  Now comes a tidy ending.  Ba offers a netbook as a peace offering, and with a little compromise and little fanfare, Ray comes home and comes out.

I loved this book.  I wish I had it when I was a teenager.  I came out around the same time Rainbow Boys was published and given a Lambda Literary Award.  I was terrified to buy it, but I did and devoured it.  It’s an awful trite sermonizing piece of shit that reeks of whiteness and privilege.  While any kind of representation is better than none, finding a boyfriend is far from the primary concern of most queer youth.  Few gay teens know a single other gay teen, and if they know one, odds are they’re not compatible.  (Back in high school, was I supposed to fucking Alex?  Of course not.  We were both off fucking college boys, separately. 

While reading reviews of Money Boy online, I came across an offensively negative and inadequate review on the Lambda Literary site.  Their reviewer seems to disagree with the any representation is good representation idea.  He finds Ray naive, vapid, essentially unlikable.  Ray is naive and somewhat vapid.  But unlikable?  Most teens are naive and vapid.  At least real ones; rainbow boys aren’t.  Rainbow boys are self-loathing and adorable until the climax at which point they become giddily proud and adorable. 

And again: Whiteness and privilege at work.   The reviewer seems completely ignorant to the culture-based shame which pervades Ray’s sense of self, despite the fact that the words “shame” and “pride” are used a number of times in the text:  Ba tells Ray he shames his family, Ray worries he’s shamed his family when a neighbor witnesses him picking his clothes of the lawn, Ray’s too proud to go to a shelter, he finds feminine homosexuals shameful, and the list goes on and on.  Pride is discussed at length, but never in the reductive  sense of “Gay Pride”.  When you’re not a rich, white, popular, suburban teenager, other sorts of pride are more exigent to well being than the sort that leads one to wave a flag in a parade. 

There’s rainbow boys, and there’s the rest of us.  This is a book for the rest of us.

As an addendum, this is not a novel about a teenage sex worker.  This is a a novel about a boy who engages in two singular acts of survival sex.  The Lambda reviewer seemed to be unable to make this distinction, too.

I’m happy to announce I’ve found myself a new toilet. 

I can’t stop whistling “We’re in the money.”

My god, he fucked me so many times.  It was a bad idea to look back on my LiveJournal tonight.  But I really liked him, and the money was good.  So why does it feel bad? 

You can love a client—that’s the thing they never tell you—the ones for or against this thing.

I loved being with him.  I loved the money, his cock, his company.  It always seemed like America’s Next Great Dancer, or whatever it’s called, the one with the British lady, was on while he fucked me.  And the Gun Oil.  He fucked me with lube called Gun Oil, and it was wonderful. 

But it’s been years now, hasn’t it?  And I want to still love him, as I loved the gun oil and cumming on my chest.