Theatre: Chicken

David Henry Sterry grew up in nice neighbourhoods where kids played ball in front yards, the Tooth Fairy left a quarter under their pillows and there were merry-go-rounds and PTA meetings.

He had a "very sweet" girlfriend and studied poetry, theatre and philosophy at a college run by nuns.

Not much meat, you might think, to fill one of the defining works in that most American of genres - the contemporary confessional. But Chicken is the auto-biography of Sterry's secret self.

It is the true story of a 17-year-old freshman who allowed himself to be seduced, for nine soul-destroying months, into the seedy world of the Hollywood sex business.

Within hours of his arrival in tinseltown, Sterry had been raped by a man who lured him home with the offer of a steak.

After making his escape, he was spotted by the manager of a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant and, within days, he was working as a Chicken - the slang term for a young male prostitute, although Sterry claims to prefer "Industrial Sex Technician".

Unlike those less fortunate (a recent University of Pennsylvania study estimated that in the United States there are 325,000 victims, aged 17 or under, of commercial sexual exploitation) Sterry got out.

He performed as a stand-up with everyone from Robin Williams to Milton Berle, acted alongside Will Smith and Michael Caine and wrote screenplays for Disney, Fox and Nickelodeon.

But he still hadn't told a soul about his teenage alter-ego, the "Loverstudguy".

Then, in 2002, Sterry came out in a big way. With a light-hearted double-entendre which some might find rather healthy, verifiable stints as a "soda jerk", a "cherry picker" and a "marriage counsellor" were added to his public CV, while his professional sexploits, sometimes comic, more often tense and always highly graphic, were put down in print for all to see.

"This secret life was destroying me," he explains. "I went to hypnotherapy, which helped enormously to isolate this self-destructive voice in my head. And at a certain point, the hypnotherapist said, 'You should really write your parents a letter telling them what happened.'

"I did and it was so cathartic, such a relief. And then I knew: I've got to write this story down."

The book is a breathtakingly honest and heartbreakingly poignant affair, turning lurid detail into a literary page-turner via Sterry's jazzy, poetic diction.

While fellow victims have found Chicken therapeutic and inspiring, others revered it as the best coming-of-age book for blokes since JD Salinger's Catcher In The Rye.

"Everybody who reads this book seems to latch on to different things," Sterry observes. "My story transcends gender, transcends race, transcends economic class. It's universal."

So successful was Chicken that Sterry has turned it into a stage play, which, in turn, was named the Number One Show when it premiered at last year's Edinburgh Festival and is now being made into a TV series by HBO.

As a Seventies soundtrack pounds, Sterry portrays everyone from his nun teacher to his employment counsellor/ pimp, his naive 17 year old self to the rich, lonely women who hired him.

Smart, self-pitiless and searingly funny, an evening with Sterry is also a damn sight cheaper than therapy.

Komedia, Gardner Street, Brighton, 9.30pm, £8/£6, 01273 647100