Enchanted Boy

infobox Book |
name = Enchanted Boy
title_orig =
translator =


image_caption =
author = Richie McMullen
cover_artist =
country = United States
language = English
series =
genre = Novel
publisher = GMP Publishers
release_date = 1989
media_type = Print (Hardback & Paperback)
pages = 123 pp (paperback edition)
isbn = ISBN 0-85449-098-1 (paperback edition)
preceded_by =
followed_by =

"Enchanted Boy" is the 1989 autobiographical novel by Richie McMullen. It is dedicated to ‘every boy who has been or is currently involved in any form of prostitution’.

Richie McMullen tells of his childhood, growing up in post-war working class Catholic Liverpool and aims to ‘contribute to the growing knowledge of child (sexual) abuse’. It is a subjective account of the author’s life from age five to fifteen.

Plot summary

Richie is routinely physically abused by his father, a drunk who works in the construction industry. He adores his elder brother James and leads a life a petty crime and childhood dares with his friends.

At the age of eight, he is molested in a cinema by a man who persuades him to come home with him. It is the first time he realises the power a knowing boy can have over a desperate paedophile. Richie regularly runs away from home and finds that this has the effect of stopping the abuse from his father, though on one occasion, his father stops his beating, asks the boy to fetch the butter and abuses him while he is bent over his lap. He is also sexually abused by his older cousin who is in the Merchant Navy.

By the age of twelve, his thoughts were continually turning to sex and he experiments with Pip a friend at school at the same time as offering himself up in toilets and parks to men who will pay for his body. This excites and disgusts him in equal measure and the realities and dangers of rent boy prostitution are brought home when he is raped by two men in a boy’s toilet.

At fourteen, he had fallen for Mike, but Mike unfortunately prefers girls and so their relationship is long-lasting, but doomed. He gets his sexual kicks by meeting with a friendly child molester who pays him for a weekly session.

At fifteen, Richie is thinking of leaving home and thinking of making his living in London as a rent boy in Piccadilly Circus.

ee also

*List of books portraying paedophilia or sexual abuse of minors