by John Rechy
1963 (Grove Press)
In celebration of Pride last month, the New York Times published an article featuring stories from an inter-generational sample of the LGBTQ community´s artists and public figures. Each one was asked to share about a pivotal moment in their lives from when they were 30 years old, and the answers were terrific (I recommend reading the entire piece through the link above). Author John Rechy, now 93, shared briefly about living and working as a male hustler in Los Angeles circa 1961. Back then, Pershing Square was the "headquarters of gay activity," he said, but in his interview with the Times he made a point of reminding us that homosexuality was illegal back then. Just appearing in drag in public could get you arrested. Feeling sexually attracted to someone of the same sex was considered a mental illness.
Rechy´s recollection of his time in Southern California during the early ´60s was also the same time he was writing, rewriting, and gathering the experiences that would form the basis for his debut novel City of Night, a sprawling book not only about a multifaceted (male) queer community in the decade after the Second World War, but also one about America, loneliness, and the various ways we all try to deceive or manipulate. Rechy published a dozen books following this one, but it remains his most famous work; and today, more than six decades since its publication, reading it still packs a considerable punch. City of Night is dynamic in form as well as powerfully candid in content.
Structurally, the novel is a kind of surreal travelogue. The unnamed narrator criss-crosses North America, making prolonged visits in major cities like New York and Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The geography is collapsed within Rechy´s sprawling odyssey, as if each location is part of a singular "city of night", populated by loneliness and need by (mostly) men desperate for some kind of connection. The desires here contain risk--sometimes personal, sometimes legal, often both--and many of the characters within the novel appear furtive transitory. All the while, the perspective of our narrator remains detached, his presence almost passive. Rather than impose any singular point of view on the episodes he is describing, reading City of Night is like watching a long home movie without context, a camera-like approach which may remind some readers of Isherwood´s Berlin Stories.
Superficially, our guide through this nocturnal urban world resembles Rechy in a number of respects--both are half-Mexican, originally hail from Texas--but it would be a missed opportunity to engage with this book merely as autobiography. Yes, Rechy continued hustling after he published this book, but like Jean Genet, it is important to acknowledge the boldness and excitement contained within his prose. There is an electricity here, a kind of swaggering attitude that practically struts off of the page. Rechy´s literary bebop has been compared to the best work of Jack Kerouac, the so-called "father of the Beat Generation", and it´s easy to see why. There are passages in City of Night that are best read aloud.
After briefly describing a troubled childhood with an abusive father in Texas, Rechy takes our narrator to New York, where he quickly discovers that his physical appearance can provide him with a good source of income as a youngman (ie masculine-looking male hustler). The bulk of City of Night chronicles his experiences within this nuanced and complicated world of men seeking sexual connections with other men. In this novel, sexual identity is not synonymous with sexual activity; some of the johns the male sex workers pick up have wives, and some of the hustlers themselves dally with both men and women when they´re not working. Some customers just an understanding man to listen to them, while others fetishize leather that is explicitly evocative of Nazi officers. Some prey on these young hustlers, promising them wealth and fame, while other others drown themselves in alcoholism or drug addiction as they discover that their primary currency--their youth--has faded. Unblinkingly, Rechy shows the reader all of these tensions and contradictions. Some contemporary readers, reading about the views of masculinity from this time more than 70 years ago, may found these passages about queer men talking about other queer men problematic.
The men (most of the characters in Rechy´s novel are men, but there are a few prominent women, as well) within this sprawling narrative are a blur of identities and masks, and each character is desperately trying to reconcile the facade of a carefully constructed public persona with a private self experiencing unrest and turmoil. Perhaps it is no coincidence, therefore, that the climax of City of Night occurs in New Orleans during Mardi Gras?
City of Night is a melancholy novel, an elegy about the longing of so many populating so many of our American cities. If nothing else, the story bears witness to the complexity of men exploring their same-sex desires in America during the decade before Stonewall. Strongly recommend.
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