Bonds & Boundaries

Two cousins entangled by memories, a romance that begins in a sleazy bar, or a real Marilyn Monroe.Dale Corvino gives us visceral access to his characters’ brains. Each of these pieces delivers something whole. You can tell he’s been around, and you’re bowled over by the humanity that has grown from it.- Bruce Benderson, Author of The Romanian

Bonds & Boundaries is a collection of short stories written over ten years. Among the bonds explored: two women, a starlet and a homemaker, admiring each other across the constraints of their roles (“Miss Bensonhurst”); a mother and her gay child reasserting their love after estrangement (“Great White”); queer friends protecting each other (“Drowned River”); a stripper sitting next to a gay man on a long bus ride (“More Sequins than Cloth”); lovers reuniting through displacement (“The Marielito”). Though the boundaries explored include national (“The Forty-Ninth Parallel”), social, and familial (“Donor Baby”), such externalities are revealed in how they push emotional and personal boundaries.

The recurrent theme of sex work interactions (stripper/customer, kept boy/sugar daddy, escort/client), ripe for explorations of bonds and boundaries alike, reflects the author’s past experience and genesis as a writer. Racial and cultural dynamics drive several stories, notably “Three-way Calls” and “Benny Aboard.” Several take on the particular despair of Gen X, a cohort largely formed in an analog context and thrust into a digitally-mediated reality, though none more pointedly than “Satellite Rules, Stranded Longings,” in which an aging salesman at a trade show grapples with intimacy while using a gay cruising app. As a collection, Bonds & Boundaries maps a queer journey from the moraine of our origins through the vectors of longing that form us towards the afterlives we must often build over displacement and loss.

A 2021 Lambda Literary Emerging Fellow in nonfiction, Dale Corvino found his confessional voice at the East Village queer underground literary salon “Dean Johnson’s Reading for Filth,” recounting his youth as an object of longing and later interactions with sex work. In 2018, he won the Gertrude Press Fiction contest, judged by Whiting Award recipient Brontez Purnell. Recent nonfiction includes a profile of Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel for the Gay & Lesbian Review, “You’ve Got Male,” on queer longing in the digital era for Matt Keegan’s 1996, and a chapter on sex worker representation for the 2021 Routledge Handbook of Male Sex Work, Culture, and Society. Upcoming projects include a memoir based on his kept-boy experience in Eighties New York City. Dale lives in Hell’s Kitchen with the Sour Patch Kid of his dreams.