City of Night

John Rechy's book, City of Night, was published in 1962 just before the Supreme Court opened up the floodgate to the publishers of cheap porn in 1965. He will most likely be remembered as a gay male writer who was a brutal and lyrical recorder of the sexual underworld in pre-Stonewall times. It must be difficult for anyone who didn't live through those times to grasp how heavily the threat of censorship hung over America's authors and publishers. He describes this world with brusque frankness. There is an easy understanding of who and what his characters are; they are presented without sentimentality or self-pity. At the beginning he writes about being a shy child who read a lot and sat by the hall window and looked out to see the world. We hear about the death of his dog and about the suffocating attention of his overly affectionate mother Rechy uses the window theme and carries it throughout the book. He's letting us look into and onto the dark underworld of the City of Night . . . wherever that may occur. He's also into looking into mirrors as he looks at himself and at what his narrator has become. I liked the very believable flip dialogue of the drag queens and the hustlers . . . the text was almost like it was recorded. His narrator takes us on a journey through a world of forbidden love. Here, sex is a job, not an identity. This masculine hustler moves from city to city, searching for business and a sense of self-worth and love. While he actively avoids the lives and world of the self-admitted and well-adjusted gay men he encounters, he pursues the outcasts, the maladjusted and self-loathing instead. Rechy's representations of gay life are often bleak and the lives of this extraordinary collection of characters are filled with drugs and liquor. There are two types of chapters in this novel: there are accounts of the narrator's wanderings and character sketches of the people he meets as a hustler. Each sketch builds an understandable person for the reader. I've been on the fringes of this culture a few times and didn't like it at all, but believe me they seem very real. Each narrative chapter pulls the reader away and moves them onward. Rechy was brought up as a devout Catholic. His book is full of symbolism . . .especially of angels in the form of beautiful young men. Well, surprise, a lot of this world still exists. The people of the night haven't changed all that much since John Rechy wrote his eye-opening novel 40-some years ago. Anonymous sex, hustlers, dirty bookstore sex, cruising, rough trade, druggies, dealers, hustlers, bartenders, cops and robbers still abound. There are still sexy boys from the country who will soon be dead from HIV/AIDS . . . or something else like in the old days . . . an overdose, a knife fight, or a car crash. Not much has changed. This is a compelling early account of "the life" that I believe gays and non-gay people will enjoy; the book still has a fun, underground feel to it. It's still a ve

Though it's been forty years since its publication, John Rechy's "City of Night" still packs an emotional wallop. The novel's storyline is well-known: Rechy writes of one young male hustler who wanders from El Paso to New York to Los Angeles to New Orleans meeting and experiencing male customers, drag queens, tough men and "nellies." While partaking of this life, he is also observing the pain and joy of a world filled with "youngmen" and those who are no longer young. Will he find meaning in any of it? Will he come to terms with his sexual orientation? The answers are not clear. But in the end it doesn't really matter. The prose is powerful, the dialogue poignant and, at times, hilarious. This is a remarkable and unforgettable book that should be read by everyone.

"City of Night" is a novel that I haven't read in about eight years, but its storyline and poetic prose still lingers in my mind to this day. It is a sad yet beautiful story of a young, nameless, faceless, street hustler that roams the large cities of the U.S. looking for love in a homosexual relationship. But the main character is sexually confused. He continually claims to be straight, however he has sex with men for money. Paying for sex with another man is not an act of a "fairy", according to the character. This is a myth of the streets. He is gay, but he hates himself for it, leaving the main character to learn to accept himself while going through the tarnish streets of New York, LA, and finally New Orleans. The majority of characters within the novel live on the fringes of society, and they all have poignant stories of their pasts, but no real direction for their future. Our hero sweeps acorss the country traveling through the pre-Stonewall gay community and finds a motley crew of flawed but colorful characters. We can sympathize with charcters like Pete, Skipper, Miss Destiny, Sylvia, bacuse they all want what we want: love, acceptance, desirability, a second chance. This book is not a "gay" novel, rather it is a novel that uncovers the loneliness and desparation that we all have felt sometime in our lives. It is a piece of fiction that is indispensable in the canon of 20th century literature. A brilliant work!!!!!

City by Night by John Rechy is a classic. I had to read it when I did a paper on the history of homosexuality for my history class. That was twenty years ago, before I had ever gone to the US. Now that I am a priest and my parents live there, and I have gone there to the US myself many times over, the book seems like a fossil frozen in time before the advent of AIDS and Mayor Rudy Giuliani's cleansing of Times Square and the closure of bath houses in Los Angeles (I remember I had just arrived in LA and the closure of bath houses was bannered in the papers. John Holmes had just died of AIDs and his death was not given prominence. A feature story appeared in the front page, prominently boxed. It was about a sparrow that died in Santa Monica Beach. A lady wanted to save it so she called for the Red Cross. The Red Cross team arrived, but the sparrow died nonetheless.) Now the novel, as I say, may be a fossil already if not yet a relic. But the bathos of the novel still haunts the crevices of one's mind, and the memory of having read the book sort of makes me giddy because with the book the jukebox, the flower people, the subculture of the third sex, the Vietnam War and the unfished America Dream spring back to life. Side by side with the computer and the Generation X, however, the novel recedes into the past, like Casablanca, like the old, original Heaven Can Wait, like the westerns of Randolph Scott (when his playing good buddy with housemate Cary Grant never generated suspicious snickers), when the world was young and everything seemed so greeen, before the El Nino phenomenon, before the devirginization of the moon by the Apollo, before the advent of the incoming millennium and the forthcoming century, before the transformation of splendid fiction into reportage plain and simple. City of Night is fiction at its best and will remain so forever.