The Golden Boy

The author, a casualty of AIDS, recounts his life as a model and banker, and describes how he came to terms with his homosexuality and his fatal illness

The place is New York City. The time is the decade before the plague of AIDS. Thousands of gay men were living a free-wheeling lifestyle of club hopping, ?score? hunting, sex without fear, and upward mobility. To none did The Big Apple offer greater rewards than to those young men who had the envied ?male model? look.

Author James Melson belonged to this exclusive clique: he was tall, blond, muscular, and very ?straight-looking.? He was a model at 19, and by 25, was a successful Wall Street banker. His good looks offered him immediate entry into exclusive clubs and onto the sexual fast track with actors, male models, and other members of the ?Clique.?

In The Golden Boy, the author brings you behind the scenes into the lifestyle of the handsome ?Clique??providing vivid details of the vigorous and entertaining excitement of the times. He exposes?for one of the few times in print?the lesser-known attitudes of the ?Clique? and their disdain for ?ugly faggots,? their obsession with strictly the chic and glamorous, and the fast lane life of partying and sex.

For 200 pages, the reader is brought back to the era that for many older readers is just a memory, and for younger readers a time they never knew?when to be a ?Golden Boy? was to be a prince, and sex was only fun and games.