December Books: Dirty White Boys

Soho, located in London’s West End, is one of that city’s most interesting neighborhoods. At the turn of the 20^th century, “So-ho, my wild one” was, as John Galsworthy wrote in The Forsyte Saga, “untidy, full of Greeks, Ishmaelites, cats, Italians, tomatoes, restaurants, organs, colored stuffs, queer names [and] people looking out of upper windows.”

For over 200 years, Soho was the center of London’s thriving sex industry and is also now London’s major gay village, centered on Old Compton Street, where dozens of gay or gay-friendly business owners set up shop in order to profit from the “pink pound.”

Clayton Littlewood is one of many gay entrepreneurs who settled in Soho. However, he’s no ordinary business owner, and his unique talents have made him an unofficial spokesman for gay Soho.

As Littlewood wrote in his MySpace profile, “For three years my partner Jorge and I had a clothes shop on Old Compton Street, Soho called Dirty White Boy (just below a rather popular brothel). And between serving sugar daddies and rent boys, I wrote a rather rambling Blog about Soho which, much to my surprise, those lively people at Cleis Press have decided to publish, thereby ruining their reputation forever.”

Littlewood’s blog diaries have been collected in Dirty White Boy: Tales of Soho (The Cleis Press; 350 pages; $14.95), which does for Soho in the digital age what Samuel Pepys and Daniel Defoe did for London as a whole in the 17^th Century.

Clayton Littlewood (right)

Author's photo credit: Jaime Mcleod

Fortunately, Littlewood does not dwell much on his own life, or on the “life” of Dirty White Boy, which, like many small businesses in these uncertain times, often hovered on the edge of insolvency. Instead, Littlewood rightly filled his tales with the interesting and unusual people who visited his shop. Some of his customers are celebrities in their own right: Janice Dickinson, Kathy Griffin, Graham Norton, and Holly Woodlawn. But there are others who, though not so well known, are equally interesting.

As Littlewood wrote in one entry, “QX [a British bar rag] recently ran a feature on the ‘faces of Soho.’ Drag queens, DJ’s, club owners, cabaret acts, promoters, party hosts. Anyone who’s anyone in ‘gay glitterati’ land. . . . [However] the real faces of Soho are never featured. You won’t see them in the documentaries on Soho that seem to pop up on our televisions with increasing frequency. Yet they are the lifeblood of the village. They are the underclass, the true eccentrics, the waifs and strays the party crowd passes by as they make their way to the Shadow Lounge.”

Dirty White Boy features “the real faces of Soho” including Chico, “a very colorful, Afro-Caribbean American, based in London. Decked out in Gucci, D&G, Prada. You name it, he flaunts it. And he’s become one of our regular customers.”

Chico, Littlewood continues, “was once a Diana Ross impersonator who married rich, but his boyfriend died. Thus he was left with a large amount of money, two properties, and a broken heart. The perfect aphrodisiac for a QX hooker.”

Dirty White Boy follows Chico through his ups and (mostly) downs, including getting mixed up with a gang of parasites that eventually turn against him and falsely accuse him of rape. “The judge,” wrote Littlewood, sadly, “obviously not well versed in the whole gay client/hooker scene, saw “’Black Man Rapes White Man‘ and put him away” for six years.

Another interesting personality featured in Dirty White Boy is the feisty transsexual Angela Pasquale. A Janice Dickinson look-a-like, the tall – “at least six foot three” – and stunning Ms. Pasquale has “a beautiful face and big pair of creamy white breasts that look like they’re about to wrap themselves around my neck. ’You’re not stealing my lines again, are you?’ said Angela when she caught Clayton taking notes for his Blog. ‘Well, actually...I am,’ he replied. ‘But only because you’re part of Soho. . . .’ ‘Girl – I AM SOHO!’ she retorts, removing her glasses and shaking out her hair, up and down, backwards and forwards, letting her luscious locks drape over the glass counter.”  (I don’t have the book so I can’t confirm how this quote exactly works and thus how it should be punctuated, but this is my guess.”

Not every character is so outrageous. One of the most touching individuals to cross Littlewood’s pages is Leslie, “a small, old gentleman dressed in a beige three-piece suit with a white handkerchief flowing extravagantly from the top pocket.”

Leslie, who knew Soho “in the old days,” entertained Clayton and his readers with his reminiscences and touched us with his star-crossed love affair with Charlie, a writer Leslie loved and lost. “We were lovers . . . And then one day he broke my heart.” Their story is one of many that makes Dirty White Boy such a wonderful book.

Next page! A memoir by PETA's gay rabble-rouser.