Sordid Truths: Selling My Innocence For a Taste of Stardom, by Aiden Shaw. Alyson Books, 258 pages, $15.95 paper.

Can a book about compulsive sex for pay and unceasing drugged-out nights and days be charming? Yes it can. Shaw is a 21-year-old college dropout with “massive boy meat” – in the panted words of his first-ever trick, a porcine mincer with overbearing airs – as this memoir of his pre-porn film fame opens. It closes with Shaw stripping while acclaimed porn director Chi Chi Larue snaps Polaroid pics of his hard body and that massive member – which is where an earlier memoir, My Undoing, picks up. Between these scenes, the one-time hustler relates with good humor, engaging self-reflection and disarming niceness – no matter how unattractive his clients are, he’s always an amiable object of desire – about a near-decade of turning tricks in London’s finer hotels and sleazier sex clubs, with a few boyfriends along the way. There’s no doubt that in the minds of some, what Shaw was doing in his 20s can certainly be classified as sordid. But the author’s truth-telling about desire, lust and even love, with such clarity, is a gift for readers to celebrate.

by Richard Labonte