Massage

by Henry Flesh

Fiction. Although it has been hailed as a masterpiece by writers as disparate as David Sedaris and Kaylie Jones, MASSAGE will no doubt be assailed as politically incorrect because of its chilling view of a New York ravaged by AIDS, anger, homophobia, and addiction. The action takes place in grungy East Village clubs such as The Scrotum, where safe sex is an oxymoron. Randy inhabits a gay underworld of lower Manhattan, peopled with such characters as his amoral pimp, Jake; feuding drag queens Fay Ray and Stella Dallas; prowling literary figures Dakota Montaya and Denise Lamour (My friends may be avaricious, backbiting cunts, says Graham, but they do know how to work a room); and wasted hustlers like Haircut, the coke-addled prostitute with a plastic septum who finds the answer in AA. Massage succeeds precisely because it lies close to unexplored terrain. As John Wynne, author of The Other World, writes: We step through a savage looking glass to confront a world so real and honestly depicted th

Genres: Fiction, Gay, LGBT

384 pages, Paperback

First published May 17, 1999

Reviews

[Anissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed & am finally donating as I need to cull bookshelves before moving.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Feverish and apocalyptic

[A · Rating 3 out of 5]

A depressing, insistent, an thoroughly engrossing reading experience, like a particularly humiliating episode from your childhood. I picked this up thinking it was going to be another gripping, santorum-splattered East Village boisploitation novel in the vein of Dennis Cooper or Kevin Killian. What I got instead was something much less extreme, but infinitely more disturbing (no surprise coming from the man who had a recurring column in the New York Press chronicling his slow death from AIDS). Yes, there is the standard 80s/90s-era gay LES novel set-up where the hustlers, junkies, winos, and layabouts all have more inner moral fortitude than the straights or power gays with actual authority. Yet, rather than being completely depraved, the characters in Massage -- including a brilliantly, brilliantly cruel mockery of Edmund White -- are just barely over-the-top, regular Joe Blowjobs forced to live in extremis. This makes the mental leap horrifyingly easier to make when considering to just what ridiculously unpleasant lengths the depravity of the AIDS crisis could push even the most reasonable of people. I was repulsed by every character and what he or she did from start to finish, but I also didn't want to stop being in this world, even to the resignedly depressing final scene.

(PS. One star docked for the vaguuely cliched, sub-par writing, especially the surreal [in a bad way] dialog.)