My stint as a card counter & casino capitalism

For the Inaugural Issue of the Ramble, I write about pandemic-era cruising in the Central Park Ramble: Leaning against a showy Black Tupelo, I summoned a mental image of its vast root system beneath the ground I stood upon. This need is at the root of queer resilience. We don’t have unbroken bloodlines, but we have other legacies to transmit, by other means. We bent GPS to meet our needs and reconnect with our analog selves. Our desires fused the scroll to the stroll. Our digital enablers may sniff at our habits and seek to turn us into their audience, but we’re not just another exploitable data set to monetize, our movements and proximities collected to know more about us to sell us more stuff.

Bookstack posted my meditation on Felice Picano's Fire Island memoir, A HOUSE ON THE OCEAN, A HOUSE ON THE BAY (Ocean/Bay). This important work has been reissued by The Library of Homosexual Congress, an Imprint of Rebel Satori Press, for Pride Month. Picano also captures the texture of queer communication. He has a genius for dipping into the language of a “dish session,” or gossip, as it was known in the day. The tribe has other names for it today: spilling the tea, having a kiki. It’s a linguistic mode endemic to queer people who for most of their lives read vociferously, looking for clues about themselves.

The Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS) at the City University of New York is the oldest program of its kind in the US. CLAGS convened a conference on the topic of Queer-Class, and a panel discussion I proposed was on the schedule. Burlesque Performer, Educator, and Headmistress Jo Wheldon and I had a free-wheeling discussion of how sex work either upholds or subverts class and capitalism. I got to know Jo in preparation for this panel and during the panel itself and she's now a role model for me as a worker who thinks deeply and writes beautifully.

Well my press was a no-show but I was adopted by the good folks at Queer Love Project. I had a book signing at their table (sold out my stock!) The joint QLP/Open Secrets Magazine booth at AWP 2026 Baltimore. and took the stage at the QLP Offsite at The Club Car, a queer bar with a fab crowd. QLP Offsite: Jardana Peacock, Jerry Portwood, me, Megan Okonsky, Mike Narkunski, and Stephanie Sellars. I gave them my sex worker origin story from AFTERLIFE OF A KEPT BOY:

The blizzard postponed this event, but we eventually convened for some lively discussions. Sadly, recent events 🍉 have resulted in heavy security measure to access the Columbia campus, once a more inviting and porous part of the city fabric. My memoir AFTERLIFE OF A KEPT BOY touches on two diasporas: the southern Italian of the early 20th century, when my grandparents made the crossing, and the Bolivarian diaspora of the 2010s, when Venezuelans fled dire crises, considered the largest South American diaspora in the world (through the experiences of Machito, my ex)

(It's 2026, but I'm catching up on 2025 stuff after experiencing the hallucinatory magic of the Réveillon in Rio de Janiero 🇧🇷) Back in September, I had a great talk with Jerry Portwood of the Queer Love Project Substack Live. We discussed the launch of AFTERLIFE OF A KEPT BOY, staying creative and engaged under the reactionary thrall we are living through, and other themes. A bite from the convo about drift in the online environment discussed in the book: I don't remember asking for this digital world. And whether you're from my generation–like Gen X–or from another generation, we're all figuring it out as we go along.

Amelia Possanza and Michael Narkunski joined me to talk about the reading we enjoyed this past year and what we're excited about in 2026.

I joined Vivian Manning-Schaffel (whose riotous essay on Nonnacore excoriates current values around aging), Elena Sheppard, and host Elyssa Maxx Goodman at September's Miss Manhattan, Elyssa's long-running monthly series featuring nonfiction. Read from chapter 8 of AFTERLIFE OF A KEPT BOY, "Are U Available?" which covers my friendship with Dean Johnson. About Dean's core grievance with the music industry: I later attended a screening of the film Mondo New York in which he appeared with his first band, the Weenies. I found the film’s wide-eyed, sensationalist framing of New York’s underground scene tiresome freak-gawking, but Dean’s incendiary performance of the song “Fuck You” woke me right up.

Fun times in the rain! From the alley to the store interior of Book Row. Heard some great pieces from Emily Mitchell, Goeff Dembricki, Kevin Gonzalez, and Mani Mekala, who all appear in the inaugural issue of the New York Review of Smut. From the reading: I developed a baseline identity, a bisexual Italian guy from either Brooklyn or Long Island. The customers, locals and tourists alike, ate it up. I modeled my speech on blue-collar types, mechanics who drive in early from Long Island in their vans and go from one job to the next, men who fixed things, men who had the right tools for the job.

I had a really enjoyable convo with Lou Barrett of Purple Palm Press, who hosts the Queer Discourse podcast. QD also has stellar episodes with authors Torrey Peters and Jason Yamas, check them out too. Lou & I discussed some major themes of AFTERLIFE OF A KEPT BOY: agency, solitude, the Italian-American condition–and got into the Yoko Ono of it all.

Discussing agency, Italian-American identity, and the Yoko Ono of it all w/ Lou Barrett.

from ch. 9 of AFTERLIFE OF A KEPT BOY (C&R Press, 2025)

A twink-death-forward review of my memoir AFTERLIFE OF A KEPT BOY appears in Issue 005 of The Whitney Review of New Writing. I also appear in the issue as a contributor, reviewing a memoir by the late Felice Picano, whose death in March came while we were actively corresponding. Despite health challenges, Felice was gracious enough to provide me with a blurb for my memoir: Afterlife of a Kept Boy is a sensational read, immediate, engrossing, frank and at times way out there. Corvino's detailing in at least the first part is so intricate and accurate one could reproduce the upper-upper's lunch and dining…

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?

Presale Available Now, Afterlife of a Kept Boy will ship on or around March 1, 2025! C&R Press Nonfiction 2023 Award Winner ABOUT Fifth Avenue, New York City, 1986: a sexually confused college kid is ...