"Streetboy Dreams": An Unusual Love Story

Streetboy Dreams is Kevin Esser's first novel, published by the New York-based Sea Horse Press, and is the story of an oftentimes stormy and frustrating love relationship involving Peter Versani, a young schoolteacher and a 14-year-old streetboy named Gito Lopez whom Peter meets one night in a neighborhood bar while the boy is selling candy from a cardboard box. It is the beginning of a relationship that results in Gito, an orphan, moving into Peter's apartment and Peter discovering, and accepting, his attraction to adolescent boys.

The author, a 30-year-old elementary school music teacher, has completed another autobiographical novel Mad to Be Saved, which "deal[s] with my life between the ages of 14 and 22."

Esser has had 30 short stories published. Among them a trilogy set in Morocco: "Renaissance Boy" (his favorite of the three) published in Panthology Three; "Memory of Khalid," NAMBLA BULLETIN; and "Tangerine Daze," which was also" in a NAMBLA publication ."

The Joliet, Illinois native, who calls himself a nomad, has lived in Boston, London, Paris, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, and Mexico. He now lives in a small town in Illinois, " a little factory town of 40,000 people. It's just a typical middle western city but I've been here so often, off and on for so long, it's pretty much home. I use it as a home base."

There is, according to Esser, no gay life to speak of in his small town which doesn't bother him one little bit. "There's people here," he said, " and that's all I'm interested in. Gay bars, gay cinemas, gay this, gay that, I've never been involved in that anyway. I try to stay in the shadows [he laughed] as much as possible."

The youngest of two children (he has a brother), Esser, half Italian and half German, grew up as an Italian. (His immediate family had no involvement with the German side of the family.) Esser's Italian background probably explains why he made Peter, a principal character in Streetboy, a member of that ethnic group.

Esser is six feet tall, weighs 180 pounds, has brown hair and eyes, wears a beard and glasses. The glasses, he claimed, causes people to think he looks professorial.

Esser spoke with me via phone from his home in Illinois.

Charles Michael Smith: How much of Streetboy is autobiographical?
Kevin Esser: It's almost completely autobiographical. I jumbled around a few events in order to make it more dramatically pleasing. The relationships, the settings, the characters were all real.

CMS: What inspired you to write the book?
KE: Well, mainly because I had never read a book on the subject that had pleased me before. So I decided to write one of my own. I was tired of books that either dwelled on nothing but the negative aspects of affairs like that via the self-pity and the despair involved or mostly things that Pan, a magazine from Amsterdam, had come out with. Stories that were just fantasy and unrealistic. They publish an anthology once a year called Panthology. They're stories that have to have a happy ending. Always it's just man meets boy, the boy falls in love with the man, and they live happily ever after. I wanted to write something a little more realistic, dealing with the situation as it would have really happened. Something a little more well-written. There seemed to be a dearth of talented writers in the field. I wanted to see if I could turn out a little better product.

CMS: How long did it take you to write Streetboy?
KE: About three months. it was the first novel I had written so I was more or less teaching myself how to write the thing as I went along. It took a lot of rewritings. The second novel went much, much faster. Of course, I wasn't using [in Streetboy] the style that I was most comfortable with either. I deliberately used a very, sort of, orthodox, traditional writing style.
Since it was my first novel, I didn't want to try anything experimental which is usually the way I write. I wanted to write an unusual love story that wouldn't turn off any readers because of stylistic excesses or whatever. The second novel is written in a much more, sort of, lyrical, experimental style. I thought I could get away with it at that point. I already knew my editor and had some connections. The way it turned out I was right about that. [With] Streetboy, I wanted to play very safe. In the second novel, the style is part of the story because the main character is slightly crazy at the time so the style is slightly lunatic also. It's told in the first person so there's a much stronger feeling of the character's voice involved in the story. 

CMS: Were you afraid you might get a great deal of criticism from people who are not sympathetic to this type of love affair?
KE: That doesn't bother me. However people react to it is their problem, not mine.

CMS: How long have you been involved in man/boy relationships?
KE: Since I was about 14 I've been sexually active. As soon as I became an adult then I became the adult in the situation instead of the boy.

CMS: At 14 were you involved with older men?
KE: Well, no, actually not. Just with other boys at that point.

CMS: When did you decide that you were attracted to boys?
KE: It was never a conscious decision, just a matter of allowing myself to become involved with whoever I chose to at the time and allowing relationships to develop. In a lot of cases, it's just a matter of not cutting a relationship off because situations develop like that all the time which you can really fall into very easily. I don't go out looking for them very often really. I put myself into situations, just leave myself open to things, see what happens. I don't want to get too specific either.

CMS: When your boy lover grows up, does the relationship continue in some way?
KE: Actually every situation I've been involved in either the boy or I have moved away while the relationship is still going on or immediately after. I've always led a very nomadic lifestyle. There's never been a situation where the boy has grown up and I've still been around. I never met any kids that I knew after they have grown up.

CMS: Is it possible for you and the boy to continue having sex well into his adulthood?
KE: Hmmm, no. Probably the sexual aspect of the relationship would end. We could just remain friends. I certainly wouldn't, as I've seen it described in a lot of literature, just use the boy sexually and then cast him aside. That wouldn't happen. We'd certainly remain good friends. All the relationships have been based on a lot of friendship and genuine affection, not just some sort of hustler affair.
Adult males don't excite me sexually so there'd really be no more chance of that than if I had a sexual affair with a woman.

CMS: Wouldn't you say that your attraction to boys may be due to a desire to stay youthful? Or did it come about because of your lack of confidence in dealing with adults sexually and socially?
KE: I never bothered to explore it really very deeply. It's just what I find beautiful. It's my aesthetic perception of the world. I find the ideal of physical beauty in adolescent boys. That's what I find most attractive.

CMS: It seems to me that the availability of boys is much easier in Mexico, for example, than it would be in the United States.
KE: It is much easier in other countries. The cultures are much different in the United States, England, and a couple of other places. There're really exceptions to the rule as far as attitudes towards sex are concerned. Even in countries like Morocco where the religion very strictly forbids homosexuality, there's sort of a double-edged sword. There's a very long and deep-rooted tradition of man/boy love in the culture itself underlying the religious attitudes which isn't true in this country at all.
In Morocco, a man/boy relationship would be preferable to a man and a girl. The girls are kept very closely guarded. The boys are allowed to run totally free. So it would be the reverse in countries like that. A man having an affair with a young girl would be much more objectionable than fooling around with one of the boys.

CMS: In ancient Greece, man/boy love was quite prevalent and accepted.
KE: That's all through the Mediterranean, even now.

CMS: Would you prefer to live overseas?
KE: I would prefer to be able to visit there as often as I'd like. I don't think I'd want to live there as much as I like one aspect of the culture. I am a product of this society. I still like hot showers and Big Macs and color TV.


This article was originally published in the New York Native in a slightly different form in 1984.

An Interview With Author Kevin Esser

The following interview is with Kevin Esser, the gay author of Streetboy Dreams and Mad to Be Saved. The interview was conducted via telephone in 1985 for the New York Native. Esser spoke with me from his home in Plainfield, Illinois.

Charles Michael Smith: What is the origin of the title Mad to Be Saved?
Kevin Esser: It comes from a line from On the Road by [Jack] Kerouac. It had to do with sex. I can't remember the exact quote, but he's always chasing after people that are searching for salvation through religion, through drugs, through sex. That's a very strong theme in my novel. The predominant theme is the search for identity, the creation of images, and the attempt to live up to these self-images that people create for themselves, the self-destruction involved in the deception. The two main books I sort of  had in my head, that I patterned this novel after were On the Road and [Ernest Hemingway's] The Sun Also Rises, the quintessential novel of the Lost Generation 60 years ago. Sort of an '80s version Sun Also Rises.
CMS: Your novel takes place during the early '70s, right after the hippie movement of the '60s.
KE: Yeah, it was right at the tail-end of the whole psychedelic, anti-war, heavy drug use period.
He [Jake] had moved away after graduating from his college and traveled down to Texas to work in the post office which parallels my own experiences and after about a year returns to Illinois to live in Chicago and on his way back to Chicago stopped in his old college town to see old friends.
The name Jacob Smith, I got it from Jake Barnes from The Sun Also Rises and Greg Smith from On the Road. I combined those two names.
A lot of the book was written about 10 or 12 years ago, some of the longer passages. About two years ago, I sat down and typed those together and added about a hundred twenty or a hundred and fifty pages of new material to it. Some of it was written back at a time when I was much more heavier into Kerouac's stuff.
CMS: This book is also autobiographical.
KE: Almost entirely. Even more so than Streetboy Dreams. Mad to Be Saved is really practically a memoir fictionalized enough to make it into a novel. But there's really nothing made up in it. The third novel that I'm working on now is much more highly fictionalized.
Fury of Angels is more or less the sequel to Mad. The same characters with different names. It picks them up about 10 years later but it's set in Sandburg, Illinois again. I'm intending to write a third novel a couple of years down the line, put them all together as a Sandburg Trilogy eventually, hopefully through Sea Horse/Gay Presses of New York, they'll package it, promote it that way.
CMS: Any sequel to Streetboy?
KE: No, I, I don't have any intentions to [do] that.
CMS: The style of Mad is unconventional, it's full of imagery.
KE: That's intentional. In Streetboy, I used deliberately a very conventional, orthodox style because I wanted to tell a very, very simple story, there were really only three characters in the entire novel and in Mad, style was practically another character. The style was very important to the story, how it was told as much as what was being said. There was really no plot to it. It was basically a plotless, episodic narrative and the style reflected the lost and confused lunatic nature of the characters. They were all confused and directionless, not sure what they were going to do, searching for some meaning, some identity. The style reflected that.
CMS: They seemed to be apolitical, unlike many of the '60s generation. their whole lives revolved around drugs  and booze and sex.
KE: It was a very insular type of existence. It was apolitical at one point. There were flashbacks, but the period that it's dealing with in its present tense was right after the Vietnam War. That issue had been resolved. There really was no political focus pulling everybody together at that popint. Around '73, '74.
CMS: I had dificulty with the novel because the characters were totally without any redeeming value.
KE: It's a novel that so far anybody whose read it either is incredibly enthusiastic about it or just leaves them completely cold. They weren't interested in it at all. People either love or hate it.
CMS: There's very little sex in it.
KE: The major theme of it as it evolved over the years was just these images that people create for themselves. The old bohemian image, the beatnik image and the hippie image as you go up through the years. It's the false nonchalance, the hip, cool attitude towards everything, while you're destroying yourself. It's an attitude and a type of behavior there that I grew up with when i was in my teens and early 20s. A deliberately cynical attitude.
The thride novel goes in a mch more highly plotted--there are definite story lines tying together. It 's concerned more overtly with sexuality. The types of jealousy and betrayal, those types of themes. It will probably be more appealiong. It is more restrained, there aren't any long, long poetic passages as in Mad.
One friend of mine said in a complimentary way that the entire novel is like one big long hangover [he laughs]. It's supposed to be very confusing and hallucinatory, impressionistic. It's almost a 200-page poem as much as a novel. It was experimental.  I was concerned, before it was accepted for publication, whether or not it would be,
CMS: It's not a typical gay novel.
KE: Which is fine, which is good as far as I'm concerned. Mad is much bigger, more diffused than Streetboy [about a man/boy love relationship], much harder to pin down.
CMS: I wasn't sure whether the character Jesse was bisexual or flirting with gay men.
KE: I don't know how you would describe him. He's very real, very much alive. He's sort of an ambisexual. He's been involved with men and women and everybody else in between, all ages, whoever happens to appeal to him at the time.
CMS: Jake felt guilty about his treatment of Cody, who he dumped for Robin.
KE: Yeah, there was guilt about how badly he had behaved. There was the desire to experience as much sexually as posssible, too. Cody was just holding him back. He didn't want commitment to one other person. Robin was more into the same sorts of things at that point that Jake was, more compatible.
CMS: Jake is contemptuous of people in the theatre, calling them theatre fags.
KE: That's an example of a passage that was written 10, 12 years ago. If I had just sat down and written that novel a couple of years ago, I wouldn't have remembered that attitude that I had at the time towards the theatre department and all the people in it. But at the time, it was just something that was prevalent from the people who went to college there. Everybody was contemptuous of the theatre department.