The book is pederastic and centers on 28-year-old Leo Tsalis falling in love with Leroy, a 16-year-old boy he calls Boychick, after a brief sexual encounter.
[A] Skir, a gay Jewish-American writer and journalist, previously published at least one novel under a pseudonym and contributed to Jewish and lesbian journals about his identity.
[2] According to gay rights activist and journalist Dick Leitsch, it was Skir's first credited novel, though he wrote others pseudonymously,[3] including Hours (1969) under the pen name Lon Albert.
In the showers of Hotel St. George's pool in New York City, he meets a naked 16-year-old boy named Leroy—though he looks "about fourteen or fifteen"[11]—and the two leave together.
[14] Skir was involved in the Beat Generation, and many of the novel's characters were based on others in the movement, including Elise Cowen, Allen Ginsberg and his partner Peter Orlovsky, and Janine Pommy Vega.
[14] The book was called one of the "pederastic erotic classics", alongside Jean Cocteau's The White Paper and Ronald Tavel's Street of Stairs, by LGBT studies scholar James T.
[3] Canadian writer Ian Young similarly said the prose was realistic and that it offered a "more humorous view" than traditional forms of gay literature.
[17] Upon its release, the Oscar Wilde Bookshop declined to stock Boychick, saying that part of its title—"chick"—was a sexist word used to unfavorably describe women.