The Twink Death of it all

Only days after its publication, the first review of AFTERLIFE OF A KEPT BOY is out. More than feeling seen I’m feeling clocked! Writing in the Whitney Review of New Writing Issue 005, Journey Streams gets into the twink death narrative of it all. Full transcript of the review:

When a twink dies, what else fades?

Maybe it’s that certain combination of gumption, magnetism, and fear—the fear that one’s worth can’t be extricated from the body, or the belief in someone else’s power to will one into being. But what remains?

Dale Corvino was never a twink, but something else to be coveted. A fellow prisoner in consciousness. His memoir regales a life under the stifling gaze of his late sugar daddy, a wealthy decorator with a destructive taste for the finer things. He furnishes the interiors of his gilded cage with memories of the objects surrounding him, often twisting the object-fetish tether to draw out a kinship with fragile ornaments, his own agency within a world where everything–and everyone–is for sale.

A large portion of Afterlife is a tumultuous dining tour of the Upper East Side. Between decadent plates and alcohol-soaked tablecloth, Corvino confesses an equal appetite for homecoming and heartbreak. His writing is as sumptuous as his story is steeped in turmoil, examining the acrid underbelly of his keeper’s psyche, the ornate contours of that romantic fixation. We witness the false promises of captivity slowly denature into mutual, violent desperation. He remembers the past with a complicated reverence, as if his resentment has been placated by its own coherence: the aftertastes of a sordid youth that would otherwise fester in silence, leftovers.

Even in these flights of fancy, Corvino’s account reads like an elegy both for his indulgent keeper and for a youth abridged and prolonged simultaneously. He speaks with the candidness afforded by time’s passage, anointed with the omniscience only possible when we make fictions of our own lives. Perhaps twink death is its own fiction. Between the birth of the twink animus and the inheritances of his reincarnation, the real changes occur in the environments that enclose the body and the mind. The twink never dies. Still, we grieve. The grief for oneself often takes the form of grief for another.

For Corvino, the memoir seems to function as a testimony and receipt. It’s an audit of the tools (and the scars) his bond left in its wake—a testament to the price of beauty. Corvino’s voice emerges from a body shaped by the artifacts still lingering in the periphery of his own desire. His words tabulate the real cost of living and the karmic debts that remain.”