(Revised Edition)
By Richard Balthazar
In the early 1960’s, before Stonewall, before hippies, even before the Beatles, the French Quarter in New Orleans was a Bohemian enclave of artists, eccentrics, and/or perverts not unlike the Left Bank in Paris. (Sadly, next to nothing of that unique ambiance survives today.)
Told in many voices, including his own and those of friends and lovers, this is the picaresque, semi-fictional, semi-epistolary tale of Tommy Youngblood, a college boy who frequents the disreputable Latin and Greek sailor dives on the Wild Side waterfront of the Quarter. A dervish in the Holy Carouse, Tommy dances his gay way through love affairs and amorous adventures, celebrating his brief sweet youth in a Dionysian debauch.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
(Click on titles to access chapters)
1.0—VIRGIN – In which our Hero discards his virginity and seeks to enjoy that of others
2.0—DEVIATE – In which our Hero looks for love in the right places and finds it occasionally
3.0—FAERIE – In which our Hero carouses and dances compulsively with frequent fornication
4.0—FAGGOT – In which our Hero enjoys a decadent and dissolute summer of sensuality
5.0—SLUT – In which our Hero bestows his favors widely and does something really stupid
6.0—QUEER – In which our Hero strives for virtue but fails again with degenerate flair
7.0—SAINT – In which our Hero attains bliss in the sublime heights of depravity
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Richard Balthazar 