Later I would think of America as one vast City of Night,” John Rechy writes in the opening sentence of his debut novel, City of Night, “stretching gaudily from Times Square to Hollywood Boulevard—jukebox-winking, rock-n-roll-moaning: America at night fusing its darkcities into the unmistakable shape of loneliness.” The rhythms may be reminiscent of the Beat writers who were his contemporaries, but Rechy has long been a pioneer on his own terms. Although there was gay literature before him, Rechy helped bring it out of the shadows. It’s tough to imagine the work of Edmund White, Paul Monette, or Dennis Cooper without City of Night’s influence. What makes the novel so arresting is its bluntness, which may have to do with its development; the first chapter was composed as a letter, describing Rechy’s experience hustling in New Orleans. Only after it was published in Evergreen Review in 1958 did he consider making it a book. Either way, the novel spares no one, least of all the unnamed hustler-narrator himself. It is in his portrayal of Los Angeles that Rechy finds his voice. “Twin fountains which will gush rainbowcolored,” he writes, “verypretty at night.… The world of Lonely-Outcast America squeezed into Pershing Square, of the Cities of Terrible Night, downtown now trapped in the City of Lost Angels.” Here, Rechy offers a vision of a lost world that is not so lost, less a metaphor than a reminder of the dangers of repression, with all its attendant resistance and rage.•
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
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