Eleven-Inch (The Pride List)

What does it take to succeed as a queer teenage Eastern European sex worker in the 1990s? Eleven inches and a ruthless attitude.

Western Europe, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall: Two queer teens from Eastern Europe journey to Vienna, then Zurich, in search of a better life as sex workers. They couldn’t be more different from each other. Milan, aka Dianka, a dreamy, passive naïf from Slovakia, drifts haplessly from one abusive sugar daddy to the next, whereas Michał, a sanguine pleasure-seeker from Poland, quickly masters the selfishness and ruthlessness that allow him to succeed in the wild, capitalist West—all the while taking advantage of the physical endowment for which he is dubbed “Eleven-Inch.” By turns impoverished and flush with their earnings, the two traverse a precarious new world of hustler bars, public toilets, and nights spent sleeping in train stations and parks or in the opulent homes of their wealthy clients. With campy wit and sensuous humor, Michał Witkowski explores in Eleven-Inch the transition from Soviet-style communism to neoliberal capitalism in Europe through the experiences of the most marginalized: destitute queers. 

Michał Witkowski is a Polish author. His groundbreaking novel Lovetown was the first explicitly queer novel to be published in Polish and was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2011. He lives in Warsaw.

W. Martin is a US-born editor, educator, translator, and writer who lives in Berlin and Ramallah. His published translations from Polish include Michal Witkowski’s Lovetown.