The Corrupter and Other Stories (1968)

[Simon]

   

Through these masterful, morbidly illuminating 10 stories, James Colton takes his reader on a serpentine journey through the shadowy, terror-filled love lives of that singular breed of men who are so ironically called gay.

The Roughest Trade

Creighton had gone among them fascinated, beside himself with lust, not himself at all, in fact: insane, rushing upon his own destruction. One by one he had taken them up to that room and had lived out there, upon that butt-sprung bed, fantasies suppressed so deeply all those years that he could not recognize them when they came to life. Night by night, hustler by hustler, stud by stud, trick by trick—adrift in an alien world, he expected an alien tongue—he had them all, until he got to Covent Blessed. Or rather, until Blessed got to him.