A REVIEW OF THE TRUCKER AND THE TEENS BY LOUIS A. COLANTUANO
The Trucker and The Teens: Volume 1 1969-1975, by American trucker and autobiographer Louis Anthony Colantuono was published by the Coltsfoot Press in Amsterdam in 1984. The following review of it was published in the “Books” section of issue 19 (July 1984) of Pan, a magazine about boy-love, published by Spartacus in Amsterdam. It was unattributed, but was presumably by Pan’s editor, Frank A. Torey, who was also Coltsfoot’s general editor.
The Volume 2 mentioned in the review was never published, either later that year (as promised) or later, though Colantuono continued to write, the last of his stories to be published coming out in The Second Acolyte Reader, likewise edited by Torey, in 1987.[1]

It was perhaps two years ago that we received in the post a little boy-love tale called Greek Creek which had everything wrong with it - form, grammar, style, punctuation, spelling - but was vivid and touching in a way that many more successful stories simply weren’t. We finally discovered that the author, Louis A. Colantuono, was an inmate in the San Luis Obispo prison in California and was busily teaching himself - literally - how to write. Colantuono is severely dyslexic. Until fairly recently he had been able to do little more than sign his name. But faced with many years of incarceration (it was his second imprisonment for loving boys) he decided that his life story was worth telling and he must find some means of putting it down on paper. So he acquired a typewriter somehow (American prison policies vary widely with respect to allowing such dangerous implements into the cells), covered the keys and learned to type.
Now the words began to flow. First was a 500-manuscript-page account of a year he spent in Alaska at age fifteen with some Aleut Indian boys fishing for salmon on a boat they rescued from a watery grave - and making love with the inexhaustible energy of adolescence. Strangely, for this is a kind of autobiographical slice, Louie’s voice is just one of many who tell the tale. But the characters are sharp, shrewdly. observed, and after a short time it seems natural to have the writer go inside the heads of the people surrounding him.
Next came an episodic telling of his trucking adventures all across the contiguous 48 states, for after leaving Alaska, Colantuono gradually worked into the long-haul transport business - with occasional breaks for car racing and rodeo performing, following the circuits of these two typically American entertainments from small town to small town. His last prison projects have included short stories, one long novel about a fantasy trip with a group of pubertal and adolescent boys aboard a trimaran sail-boat he actually did own at one time - and The Trucker and the Teens, a two-volume account of his life between imprisonments.
Volume One is now published, covering the years 1969-1975 from the burned out end of the hippie culture years, as Colantuono puts it, through the rise of Sunbelt Christianity (now reaching its crowning glory in Ronald Reagan). Colantuono pulls no punches in his remembrance of things past: the gang wars of barrio kids, the inconveniences of sleeping with a 12-year-old hyperactive enuritic, the jealousies of an “understanding” wife and enmity of a prudish step-daughter - all are fully and fairly described along with moments of deep oneness with individual boys. The Trucker and the Teens is about as sexually explicit as you can get, and yet each boy is so individualised, and the sexual activities he participates in so integral to his character or his evolution through adolescence, that the book can hardly be termed pornographic. Art it perhaps isn’t, but truth it has in full measure, communicated with the kind of zeal and candour that bypasses words and design.

It is a big book, and when Volume Two comes out later in the year the complete work will be by far the longest we have so far published. It’s only strtucture [sic]is of day to day life and the growth of the boys that are loved in it, yet it makes compulsively good reading. Mostly this is because everyone is described with such a warmth of human feeling: you quickly come to care about Keha, the orphan Indian boy who had run away from a Catholic mission, as if he were a boy of your own. Keha had been born in the Black Hills, but when he was left fatherless, “they sent him to live with the ladies in black who made him spend hours on his knees per day because he was the son of a savage. They taught him about their wooden god, they taught them how to pray for being dirty little savage children. The children found out they were without sin until they read a book of the wooden god’s that gave them sin, to make them children of sin now that they knew what sin was.” Kehais picked up half-starved on the side of a desert road and becomes Colantuono’s son/lover/live-in boy. A year or two later Colantuono takes on Tommy, the hyperactive enuritic. And then there are his lovers (not chosen by him but who chose him!) in his wood-working shop where some two-dozen barrio boys are usefully employed (and so kept out of gang fights and thievery): Gabe, the chubby gang-leader, Darly the gentle gay boy, Gato, equally gay but physically underdeveloped and perpetually quarrelsome, 9-year-old Gil injured in a hit-and-run driver. And lovers found along the road: the black boy Sammy, white Jimmy Lee from a Tennessee farm and his brothers.
[1] An enquiry posted here by the editor of this website has elicited the information from a helpful reader that, according to the website http://www.nsopw.gov, Colantuono, who was born in 1938, was still alive in February 2023, but civilly committed in Texas. Considerable further information about him emerges from the trial held in 2017 for this commitment: https://caselaw.findlaw.com/tx-court-of-appeals/1879267.html. This may be briefly summarised as follows. He had admitted to sex with 15 boys over 30 years. He "became a 'boy lover' when he was twelve years old and was sodomized by another boy." He was first convicted for sex with a boy of 13 in California in 1963, aged 25. He married twice and had a daughter by his first wife. He was convicted four more times in California for sex with boys between 11 and about 16, some of whom he admitted pedicating, including a boy of 14, Jerry, who lived with him for 2 1/2 years. He was released in the 1980s after 7 1/2 years in prison. Finally, in 1995, he was sentenced to 30 years imprisonment in Texas for sex with a girl of 11, though he said he had woken up to find her fellating him against his wishes. It is odd that he took the risk of publishing under his real name explicit accounts of numerous love affairs with boys at a time when he had the imminent prospect of freedom, though apparently the consequences he suffered were only short-term: according to Pan magazine, issue 20, October 1984, pp. 11-12, a further 30 days imprisonment was imposed on him for breaking prison rules by posting the manuscript to it and for thereby "promoting child abuse". Despite this, he wrote a letter from prison dated 27 April 1985 to the last issue (no. 21) of Pan, and contributed an article to it entitled "Being", in which he described the happiness he had derived from knowing he had helped the boys he loved.
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