Guido Sarto-Reutter is a fourteen-year old son of a Venetian-Austrian aristocratic family, that, in 1920, is both in poverty and riddled by scandal because both Guido's father and grandfather have, for years, been bedded by a Vienna baron in his castle. Guido is in a Venetian charity school for sons of families in straits like his run by a count who is pimping the boys. Guido has no trouble falling in with this demand, and the count has found a possible buyer for the boy.
At 14, Danny should have aged out to a work program in the 1870s from Eli Phillips's Iowa farm orphanage, but Eli takes too much sexual pleasure from the boy. While Eli is absent, his wife, Sarah, sells Danny to male brothel suppliers Meachem and Grant to take Danny west. Danny's goal is California, so he willingly goes with them and serves the men they sell his body to. Landing in Colorado, he's short of his goal, wanting to go to the coast and a man who will love and protect him.
Fourteen-year-old mulatto slave boy Sweet barely settles into the rice plantation, Riverside, up the Cooper River from Charleston, before his new master is dealing him to Charleston gambling house and male brothel owner Chance Drake to pay off a gambling debt.
Life was tough in the scratch-earth mountain valleys of the Colorado Rockies in the years following the Civil War. They were unbearable when the father of a small family had died—and even more so when the wife is Lakota and the son a half-breed. But the fourteen-year-old son, Cigala—Little One—is beautiful and sexually desirable to men. Where there is such an opportunity, there is always a way.
Fourteen-year-old Ernst has the looks and voice of an angel in early nineteenth-century Austria. These attributes mark him inevitably to be the catamite of a rich sponsor. He is resolved to this, and is initiated by Baron Otto von Lauffen. When the boy’s voice changes, the baron transfers Ernst to an older boys’ choir and new voracious choir master. Ernst wants to be a painter, though, and meets one younger and more desirable than the baron or the choir master.