GLR January-February 2026

mously proclaimed: “To get rich is glorious!” To get rich is also arduous, and what’s so remarkable about the young men Tsang interviewed and in some cases befriended is how little self-pity there is in their stories. They don’t want sex work made legal because then the government would tax them. Nor do they want to tell their parents what they do. So they lie to everyone. Sometimes they do drugs. “Social death” is what Tsang calls it. “Necropolitics” (deciding which groups should live and which should die) is the word for what the government is doing through its policy of neglect. Transgender people are even more disdained; there’s not even a Chinese character for this word. Scorned by police, ignored by the government, and abused by their partners, they are forced to rely on one another. As for the gay male sex workers, most do not want to marry a village girl and wreck her life in order to please their parents; so they some times make an arrangement with a lesbian and give their parents the wedding, if not the grandchild, that they wanted. Unfortu nately, some of them do still marry the village girl. Unlocking the Red Closet is, like other books on this subject, a mix of sociological analysis and transcripts of the subjects’ interviews. There is mercifully little jargon, and the monologs are highly theatrical. And they are what make the book. There is a remarkable matter-of-factness to Chinese expressions that can be brutal to the point of being camp. For instance, a woman

in her thirties who hasn’t married is referred to simply as a “left over lady.” Two such women provide the best monologs in the book. One client tells Tsang, speaking of the rent boys: “I know that when they are through having sex with me, they go right into the bathroom and spit.” No matter, she goes on hiring them. “I am called the old ox who chews young grass.” As for her view of them: “These young boys are such terrible actors. I tell them to kiss me and I can tell that they are reluctant. I know those boys want to vomit in the washroom after I leave, and they only do it for the money.” She’s right. Her boy toy even tually has to sever ties with her because “I only wanted to get paid for my time. I would prefer she find another old Chinese woman to dance with and kiss. Finally, I had to delete her from WeChat and cut ties with her.” The odd thing about the conclusion of this generous and em pathetic book is that Tsang seems to be suggesting that, given the disdain in which same-sexers are held, these rural gay men who want to live a better, more honest life might be better off if they just skipped the sex worker phase and became livestream ers. Selling cosmetics to a huge following online may be the so lution to the problem of gay social death in China—given the widespread belief on the part of the government and much of the general population that homosexuals cannot be part of the Chi nese Dream.

B R I E F S tory evacuation leads to relocation at an an archistic commune in Montana where “hope is a discipline” with the promise of “love for everyone.” But utopia doesn’t last long. Sub terfuge leads to an FBI Counterterrorism in filtration. Perhaps the solution is retreating to a Mars colonized with harvested retirees.

acter from jazz’s mythical golden age.” Rocco’s years in Thailand closely aligned with the most active phase of the Vietnam War, when Bangkok was the main R&R des tination for American servicemen. Author Benjamin Tausig, an Associate Professor of Music at SUNY Stony Brook, considers Rocco an important “hinge” in popular music’s shift to rock and roll, and uses his time in Thailand to explore many of the transformations caused by the U.S. presence. As the title suggests, Bangkok afterDark emphasizes nightlife-centered encounters, both romantic and sexual rela tionships, and the new identity formations created by these interactions. Despite exten sive research and crucial assistance in both countries, however, Rocco himself remains elusive. Rocco shielded parts of himself, understandably for a Black gay man in pre Civil Rights, pre-Stonewall America. Both he and the music press stretched or fabri cated parts of his biography. As Tausig notes, “absence is part of his story.” Rocco’s life is a slim thread for an author weaving such a complex tale of the cultural effects of war. Thailand was a place where farang (white foreigners ) frequently went to hide and enjoy the relative freedom that sta tus allowed them. Rocco’s unsolved murder by a pair of male sex workers in 1976 ex poses the vulnerability of queer and non white foreigners there as well. R EGINALD H ARRIS

IT’S NOT THE END OF THE WORLD by Jonathan Parks Ramage Bloomsbury. 384 pages. $29.99 Picture it: Los Angeles, 2044. Sculptor Mason Daunt fiddles while Burbank burns. Throw in an over-the-top 100-person $100,000 baby shower he’s planning with his screenwriter husband, Yunho Kim, to celebrate their forthcoming child by surro gacy. Add a mysterious pink fog smothering the Valley and a few zombie-like creatures, and you have the spellbinding start of It’s Not the End of the World , Jonathan Parks Ramage’s queercentric, prescient, dystopian rom-fantasy. This cheeky geopolitical ecological-crisis novel ranges over almost 100 years in three settings (L.A., Montana, and Mars) some thirty million miles apart. Despite massive debt, Mason and Yunho live large. (They can hire WeatherMod to create artificial rainfall to clear the smoke from their man sion.) In a clear homage to Virginia Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway buying flowers for her party, Mason, wearing a Gucci gas mask, jaunts off to Los Feliz to pick up flowers and a humongous cake. The harried errand is not without distractions: a writhing figure, “one eye gouged out, cheeks shellacked with blood,” blocks Mason’s car; a billion aire client demands emergency advice on placing a $200,000 ten-foot marble penis in his foyer. Disaster befalls the party; Mason seems overcome by a “white void”; manda

Readers seeking a little Clive Barker (lurid sex, including VR BDSM), a little Cormac McCarthy (grim, grisly TheRoad style scenarios), or a bit of Neil Druckmann ( The Last of Us ) will welcome this epic gen erational saga. It may not be the end of the world, but it certainly comes close, and Parks-Ramage ( Yes, Daddy ) delivers an en tertainingly audacious view of it. R OBERT A LLEN P APINCHAK BANGKOK AFTER DARK Maurice Rocco, Transna ti onal Nightlife, and the Making of Cold War In ti macies by Benjamin Tausig Duke University Press. 264 pages, $29.95 A popular nightclub entertainer of the 1940s and ’50s, Maurice Rocco was known for singing and playing “boogie-woogie” piano standing up, performances that possibly in fluenced another Black gay performer, Little Richard. As interest in his unchanging musi cal style diminished, Rocco performed less frequently in America, eventually leaving for Europe and Australia. By 1964, he landed at the Bamboo Bar in Bangkok, Thailand’s Ori ental Hotel, in residence as “an opulent char

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