This debut novel trumpets a sometimes raw, but always poetic, voice that resonates like a tragic Mexican ranchera. Set in a male-burlesque theater, the novel follows the mercenary life of a young Latino dancer who falls in love for the first.Will he quit his nights with the johns? Will his lover, who is also a dancer, leave the same hard-commerced life behind? Will they come to see the other men and the money as substitutes for the love that they had dared to exist? This coming-of-age novel is shot through with the pain of heartache and the realities of paid-for sex.With the same exhaustive richness as Rechy's City of Night and Genet's The Thief's Journal, this debut novel traces the arabesques of the acrid smoke and loneliness found in the world of hustler's and johns, of porn theaters and crumbling hotel rooms, of cheap neon-lit thrills and violent bravado. We run the abandoned streets with this new writer, searching for the love that might lift and save us from where we find ourselvesnow from whatever we have become.