I first met Dale Corvino during the summer of 2023 in Cherry Grove on Fire Island through my friend Bobuq Sayed (both Lambda Literary fellows). Bonds & Boundaries, published October 2023, is his first collection of short stories. This is a thoughtful, very funny, sex and sex work-forward book, and, in joint launch events, it’s been paired wonderfully with I Could Not Believe It! The 1979 Teenage Diaries of Sean DeLear, edited by Michael Bullock and Cesar Padilla. Loneliness and camaraderie braid in and out of these tales of New Yorkers, Long Islanders, migrants, and tourists. I met with Corvino at Greenwich Village’s LGBT Center to discuss all that went into the book’s conception.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Kyle Carrero Lopez (KCL): What made you realize you were working towards a cohesive short story collection rather than just writing separate, individual pieces? Did your sense of focus shift over time?
Dale Corvino (DC): I did write these stories—sixteen in total—over time, separately, not thinking about bringing them together as a collection. So, there’s a progression of themes and interests that were on my mind throughout that time, and I was also gradually working on my craft. When I put it together in this format as a collection, I started looking at it with a little bit of removal because it had been some time. I also had enough distance from them where I could say, okay, there’s a group of these stories that are kind of like Queer Origins, like, the tension between biological families and chosen families. There is a group of these stories that are the middle section, which is mostly sex work situations, which, to me, all address, in one way or another, the titular ‘bonds’ and ‘boundaries.’
One of the stories that gets the most feedback, “Raunch Daddy,” is about a kind of earnest young hustler who falls in love with his client, and so there’s a lot of exploration of bounds and balance in that story. And then in the last section, I kind of came to this realization that a lot of my life, and I think a lot of life for a lot of people of a certain generation, especially Gen-Xers, feels like an afterlife—whether it’s post-AIDS, or post-COVID, or post-9/11, or just being born analog children and then thrust into a digital world that we did not ask for and are figuring out along with everyone else. So yeah, the themes came together after looking at the stories with a certain distance.
[T]here’s a group of these stories that are kind of like Queer Origins, like, the tension between biological families and chosen families. There is a group of these stories that are the middle section, which is mostly sex work situations, which, to me, all address, in one way or another, the titular ‘bonds’ and ‘boundaries.’
KCL: Bonds & Boundaries is from Rebel Satori, an indie press that describes itself as “on the frontiers of liminal space.” How’d you know you wanted to work with them, and what’s that relationship been like?
DC: This has definitely been a learning curve for me: publishing a short story collection with a small press. It has a queer imprint and an occult one, so there’s the liminal. And it’s amazing to me—you hope that, once it’s out, a book has a life of its own. The old model was like: it’s everywhere! and you sell a lot of copies, and you get great reviews, and you win some prizes and you make some lists. The market conditions are so disrupted now that it’s not like that. It does happen for a few books for very, very few writers.
In this new model, for an author like me with an independent small press like Rebel Satori, you have to be super active in getting the book out. Whether that means setting up readings in bookstores around the country, getting it on podcasts, getting it in the hands of reviewers, or talking to people about the book—it’s all on the writer. It’s a new labor paradigm for writers where we have to write the book, market the book, and be the publicist, unless you’re in that rarefied group of authors who have people to do that for you. So that’s been an incredible learning curve. Whatever this book brings back to me now that it’s out in the world—I’m not setting any expectations. Because I don’t think it’s going to be the things you would think to anticipate. It’s going to be something that comes down and sideways from another angle. The feedback I’ve gotten has already been surprising and unexpected.
KCL: Yeah, you never know where these things end up, right? Who’s teaching it, where might it get anthologized, and all that? The story “More Sequins Than Cloth” has one of the book’s great first lines: “I’m pretty sure Nikki Saint-Roach is a stripper.” She’s one of several characters in that story who are quickly there and then not there without being lost in the narrative progression. That transient quality reminds me of Ezra Pound’s poem “In a Station of the Metro.” Did capturing that quality feel important to this project?
DC: It’s funny because, speaking of expectations, this character had expectations merely from a name. Also, he thinks he sees her in the reflection of the cafe window—this kind of fleeting there/not there. And I wanted to explore the bond between a gay man and a sex worker because I’ve had those kinds of bonds—not exactly this story of a bus home encounter—but there’s a bond that I have found with women who do sex work across our differences, which I think is amazing and beautiful. I wanted one kind of format to explore that theme, that topic. And the intimacy of passing.
And the whole bit about a stripper’s work garment having more sequins than fabric is almost an extended metaphor for the lives that creative people choose to lead. We’ve privileged the sequins over the cloth.
KCL: In that same story, the POV character says, “… I preferred to think of myself as a vector of pleasure and intimacy.” Then, Part II of the collection is titled “Vectors.” It’s an eye-catching, scientific choice. Where does that motif come from?
DC: There’s one story—the first one—where a gay kid growing up on Long Island sees the World Trade Center from the distance over the Atlantic Ocean, and it becomes a beacon for that character, like, that’s where I want to be. So there’s Part I, “Beacons,” which refers to points in the landscape that draw your center as you orient. And then there’s Part II, “Vectors,” which refers to the way I started to feel while being a by-the-hour hustler in New York—that language helped me take away any moralism around sex work, and just say, I am a vector. This work is me being a vector. Going to all these places for out-calls in the tri-state area—meeting all these people on these terms, whether it’s one-time or repeat—I started to see myself as a vector. Instead of seeing myself as a vector of, you know, depravity or disease, I began to see myself as a vector of longing. So that’s where the term factors in for me.
KCL: Scent, especially the erotics of natural ripeness, plays a memorable role in several of your descriptions of both casual and sex work encounters. Have there been any storytellers influential to you in capturing this sense on the page?
DC: There probably are. But I arrived at it as I was working on my craft. I used to audit my text, like, does this text describe? You know, like, fully described visuals. Does this text fully describe an emotional atmosphere? I am sure some writers have intentionally focused on that, but for me, it comes out of my pursuit of craft. “The Raunch Daddy” is based on a real-life situation, although it’s maybe 50% based in truth while the rest is developed as fiction.
KCL: That connects to another question I had in mind. You work in both fiction and nonfiction and, at times, the collection toes that line; for example, certain readers of “Rita Dolores” will recognize an allusion to the story of the mummified man found in Dorian Corey’s closet after her death. There are even versions of Lady Hennessy Brown and Michael Musto under the same names. Can you speak to how you navigate the in-between of factual and fictitious?
DC: Yeah, the story “Rita Dolores” is loosely based on the legend of Dorian Corey, who I was privileged to see live at a club. There was a club you had to go down the steps for—I can’t remember the name of it.
Stella’s! I believe it was Stella’s… no, it wasn’t. Anyway!
So, there’s the legend of Dorian Corey, and there’s the legendary parties of Suzanne Bartsch, which I attended. There’s the continuing presence of Michael Musto as a journalist and observer of the scene. That was imprinted on me as a certain sort of naive participant to the scene. I had a friend who kind of dragged me into that scene and opened up this whole world of New York club life to me. So, in a way, I was half-observing, half-participating, a little bit inside-outside. And I just loved the idea of having a drag queen character. Another drag queen character in one of the other stories brings a larger truth and wisdom to the situation because of their experience of doing drag.
Sally’s Hideaway! Sally’s Hideaway was the club.
KCL: Nice. Sex work threads through the book, and I wanted to loop back to that a bit. You explore some of its most taboo genres in “Three-Way Calls,” including race play, consensual non-consent, and intense physical violence. Do you ever find it difficult to write about these subjects? Does delving into these things come up against any challenges in this era of literature, wherein many readers seemingly approach fiction seeking arbiters of morality?
DC: Oh, yes. So yeah, that was part of the interest in writing “Three-Way Calls.” I feel like—people may disagree—but I grew up in the 80s in a suburban, white-flight community, fully identifying as an Italian. We identified as Italian-Americans; we never identified as white. If you look back on the history of Italian-Americans, which is alluded to in some of the earlier stories, Italian-Americans were not considered white. The ancestors of mine who came to this country were subject to employment discrimination, bigotry, and occasional violence, and where things are today speaks to the arbitrariness of organizing society based on race. Over decades of assimilation–and a purposeful recruitment of Italian-Americans as enforcers of whiteness against BIPOC, especially workers– they were granted this kind of conditional whiteness. So, as a white, Italian-American writer, when I look at bringing up race in my work, what I tend to do is flip the dynamics a little bit so I can really examine it, and bring out that inside-outside perspective.
For instance, in “Three-Way Calls,” the Black character demands race-based labor from two white sex workers. And at least one of them is not up to the job, and he’s a disappointment. And the labor is uncomfortable labor, right? And the character, Vinnie, says it made me uncomfortable. In that instance, the Black character—the client—has the last word on his level of comfort. Similar to that is “The Raunch Daddy,” where it’s a Mexican character who’s demanding the labor of an American kid. The dynamics are inverted from what we expect or tend to see. These stories track my attempts to lay claim on that inside-outsider perspective on the fictions of race and their harms. They may not succeed, but even in failure I hope they speak to the possibilities of dismantling these fictions from the margins.
