My Colonizer: A Kept Boy and his Afterlife by Dale Corvino
I spent my twenties as the “kept boy” of a wealthy British decorator of a certain renown. He dressed me in custom suits, took me to the finest restaurants, and flew me on the Concorde. Upon his death from alcoholism, his secrets were laid bare and I had to figure out how to free myself of the relationship’s enduring harms.
My Colonizer, a voice-driven memoir of 75,000 words, offers an unsparing picture— from the high living to the soft oppression—and examines an afterlife of reckonings. The first section’s misadventures begin in 80’s New York City, ricocheting between aspirational uptown and anarchic downtown, while the second section departs from my excavations of work, desire, and sex in the digital era.
The process of shedding that handed-down “kept boy” label includes recovery—years of drinking with the decorator had fueled my own addiction—a late-in-life stint in sex work, and a culminating reunion with the prime instigator of this story during one of the world’s largest populist uprisings.
The memoir threads these themes in a form early readers have said is “emotionally resonant” and “scans like a movie.” If offered a nuanced examination of queer legacies—beauty and passion along with trauma and harm—while subverting expectations of sex work narratives.
For a generation that grasps wistfully at the promise of finding a sugar daddy, My Colonizer is a how-to wrapped in a New York adventure.
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