A gracefully aging chorus boy who packs a pistol and carries a P.I. license, a down-on-his luck football stud who might not be as shocked as one might expect upon learning that some boys do more than bathe in a bathhouse, and a vivacious vixen with a taste for rough trade and a roomful of kinky secrets. Along the way we meet handsome thugs, catty drag queens, sleazy businessmen, corrupt cops, and tainted politicians.

The author depicts a world whose very order depends upon outlaw spaces over which cops and criminals-two rival gangs-vie for the ability to profit from the people and activities relegated to the sexual margins. Even more impressively, however, the back story offers a motivating force for his foregrounded tale of blackmail and murder. He shows how broad social developments that had nothing directly to do with homosexuality nevertheless worked to disrupt and reconfigure the underworld of vice and crime in ways that led to the emergence of new-and newly politicized-gay identities and communities.