Fourteen-year-old Kenny's father is off on military duty and his mother has had to cut back her work hours to take on more family duties. Kenny goes on a work-study program as school starts in the fall to help out and gets a job on Jake's horse farm. Jake wants to break in Kenny but all he knows is horses, so he calls in a horse handler to help him with Kenny's initiation.
Comely and perfectly formed Cotta Antullius, third son of an armaments fabricator for the Roman gladiator school in the hedonist reign of Emperor Caligula, is in training in various possible careers of serving men when a visit to the gladiator waiting cells under the colosseum stands accelerates his experience and family misfortune forces him to be sold into slavery to an old general using him for his own ambitions.
14-year-old English cabin boy Nathan is shipwrecked off the coast of Aden in 1881 and makes his way to the city. His choices are to starve and be taken in the streets of the city and done to death as handsome European boys are roughly used in Aden or to at least use his body to make money for passage home. He consigns himself to a male brothel, hoping that Arab clients will not use him up before he can return home. It's an Englishman who uses him the most cruelly, though.