Items

• Streetboy dreams : a novel
  ‘Streetboy Dreams’ by Kevin Esser (1953-) was published by two out of the three Gay Presses of New York, who note the “controversial and divisive” nature of its subject matter. The novel details the relationship between Peter, a teacher in his mid-thirties, and teenage Gito. Unlike Bruce, the adult protagonist of Wallace Hamilton’s ‘Kevin’, Peter is not presented as a gay character, per se – the novel opens with the end of “another fling at heterosexuality”. Marketed at the time as “a different approach” to what was euphemistically known as “man/boy love”, it is hard to read the novel today as anything other than the story of a grooming – a glorification of unequal power dynamics and dubiously consensual sexual experience.