The lives of two fugitive brothers of successive Phoenician kings become entwined in the villa of the Greek philosopher exile Phaedo, where one fugitive is Phaedo's fourteen-year-old catamite, Hiero, and the other, Prince Xander, brother of the current Phoenician king, is a hidden guest. Hiero and Xander's lives as sometimes lovers continue to intersect over the years of trying to gain the throne.
A young English gentleman takes his valet and bedmate to sea with him as personal cabin boy during the Seven Year's War between England and France. Their ship, the "Essex," sinks in the battle of Quiberon Bay in 1759. The gentleman is lost and the boy takes shrapnel to the head, causing amnesia, but is saved and sent back for surgery and recuperation at Longford Castle. Here, various men discover the boy's talents in bed and use him as the boy slowly regains his memory.
Brad is a respectable forty-year-old banker in the circus wintering town of Peru, Indiana, but he has a hankering for young men. He's working, in postwar 1949, on a scheme to "adopt," with fake papers, one of three boys he covers from a German male brothel, when, in Peru, he happens to come onto a knife-thrower's assistant, Alfonso, who has tried to drown himself in the Wabash River.
Male perspective bisexual: When you are a man/woman U.S. spy team in Southeast East and told to give a Laos-China-Myanmar border drug warlord whatever he wants to recruit him to support the national interest of the United States, you give him whatever he wants, even when he wants it from both of you.