The chicken clucks defiant: Revisiting male prostitution

David Henry Sterry’s memoir, Chicken, recounts a year in the early 1970s when the author worked as a teenage prostitute in southern California. In recreating Sterry’s encounters with his manager/pimp, other young sex workers, and a primarily female clientele, the book offers a perspective that is unique among the larger genre created by the “sex worker literati.” By broadening our understanding of male prostitution in particular, and sex workers and commercial sex consumers more generally, Sterry’s memoir is important to social scientists and sex researchers as well as to devotees of pop culture.