SODOMY GODS

A young gay man finds love and business success in this feisty remembrance.

Lauterstein recaps his salad days in Manhattan in the 1990s when, in his early 20s, he came out and eventually co-founded the fashion company Nasty Pig, for which he’s still CEO. Much of the book chronicles his romance with Fred Kearney, a clothing patternmaker and company co-founder. As the author recalls in these pages, theirs was a loving, committed, but not exclusive relationship that left room for Lauterstein’s explorations of New York’s sexual demimonde, including an orgy at a bathhouse, a paddling session with a dom, and immersion in the exuberant scene at gay clubs like the Roxy, Sound Factory, and leather bar The Lure. Entwined with the story of the author’s sexual awakening is the tale of Nasty Pig’s creation: Lauterstein and Kearney started by making diffraction goggles that split light into rainbow hues, selling them to ketamine-addled kids at dance clubs; from there they branched out into clothing with a “unique blend of streetwear and fetish,” with items like “a highlighter-yellow rubber tank top with electric green insets, and…matching booty shorts with a reverse applique NASTYPIG sewn straight across the ass.” It’s a classic start-up saga of wild dreams, moxie, and hard work, as the partners scrounged for financing, spent endless hours cutting and sewing, and forged ahead with seat-of-the-pants improvisations: “That’s not a fashion show…That’s just us getting people high and you walking around in three tank tops.” Lauterstein’s fizzy, atmospheric portrait of gay New York balances accounts of graphic sex with expressions of anxiety about the AIDS epidemic and plangent sorrow at the loss of friends. His punchy prose veers between out-loud-and-proud militance (“Being gay meant I loved dick—a lot—and I was going to wear my status as a faggot on my sleeve”) and hymns to the mystical significance of homosexuality (“My gayness was a ticket to freedom from the oppression of the binary that had been hoisted upon humanity”). The result is a giddy, openhearted love letter to gay life in the city.

A brash and entertaining queer memoir, full of erotic and commercial energy.