MH-463 Boy Meat
Boy Meat
Manhard
MH-463
Samuel West
$1.95
Sexually repressed Americans have always found travel to be a broadening experience. Foreign shores have been the traditional dumping grounds for down East inhibitions. American sexual innocence is doomed in its confrontation with European perversion.
Our literature abounds in works of fiction based on these themes. The “Europe vs. America in the bedroom” field of fiction is usually associated with Henry James, although such greats as Mark Twain and Sinclair Lewis have added their lustre to this literary genre.
In Boy Meat, Samuel West adroitly updates the controversial Jamesian theories by applying them to the current scene. West aims his shafts at a very special segment of the current scene—which he proceeds to dissect in a manner most meaningful to the modern reader.
Growing up in small town America, young David Drummond lacks all but the most rudimentary experience. In his travels, he becomes an astonishingly fast learner. In Paris he discovers a broad spectrum of specialized sex knowledge available to boys with his abilities. With his newly acquired experience, he is able to take advantage of the even more blatant educational opportunities offered in New York. David returns to his Missouri backwater, world-weary and blase at sixteen.
Here the allegory is explicit. The characters David meets on his journey are stages in his sexual development. Jean-Claude, the ravishing Parisian, represents European decadence withering into vice. Patrick, the mercenary Manhattan stud, represents a more direct temptation.
By the time David completes his Grand Tour, however, he finds that life is not an allegory. Nothing he encounters turns out to be what it seems. Vice, lust, and depravity are not glittering exports but home-grown American products. On his home ground, with a dazzling succession of willing and unwilling partners, David learns his final, unforgettable lesson.
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