Fourteen-year-old Danny, small of stature, blond, handsome, sexy, and with a preference for men, gets tired of giving to his mother's boyfriend what he could make money getting on the D.C. Streets in 1968. So, he ventures out on his own, learns new skills, and falls into the clutches of two guys in cop uniforms. He has a problem in choosing to walk the streets, though, in that any man who can reach into his soft core owns him. He encounters men who can do that.
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.
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.