This paper proposes a historically and movement-wise contextualised reading of Crystal Boys by examining the imagined communities represented within and configured through the novel respectively. It asks what it means for the tongzhi movement when political identification is made with such a particular cultural text, which represents, I shall argue, a specific mode of oppression pertaining to male prostitution. Reading against the narrative grain, it demonstrates that the novel represents a particular sense of male homosexual shame, one that is not only linked to prostitution but also configured through the discursive positionality of base femininity. It further historicises that particular sense of shame by situating the novel within the normative context of national culture in postwar Taiwan, whereby the imagined male homosexual community -locally known as the 'glass clique'-was equated with through prostitution and policed by the state as such. The sleazy world of male prostitution as depicted in Crystal Boys, however, ceases to exist in the imaginings of the tongzhi nation in present-day Taiwan. Such a regulatory exclusion cannot be understood without taking into account of the new normative context ordained by anti-prostitution feminism, which has come to encompass the hegemonic positionality of respectable femininity. The articulation of the two imaginaries thus constitutes a trajectory of identity formation process wherein the politics of sexual shame inseparably linked to prostitution is at stake.