I was greatly affected by many of the classical writers, certainly Dostoevsky, the form of the ancient Greek tragedies, the redemption of the gods. Mine was a mixed background I belonged to neither culture too clearly. “My background is mixed, Mexican and Scotch, but I learned Spanish before I learned English, and we continued speaking Spanish so I was really much more firmly in the Mexican culture than in any other. If a voice may be said to smile, then Rechy’s does. Rushes (Grove, $10), his sixth and most recent novel, explores the world of a leather bar in New York. One reviewer called it “the most moving protest against the garrison state ever written.” Rechy’s other works include Vampires and The Sexual Outlaw: A Documentary (Dell, $2.25). This Day’s Death novelizes police entrapment in America. When initially released, many public libraries stacked it in special, limited access collections so that the general public would not be offended by the alleged “pornography” of the book. Numbers, (published 1967 by Grove, then $2.95) follows a hustler named Johnny Rio through Los Angeles’ Griffith Park. Rechy’s later works expanded his evocation of the urban world. If a literary generation can be said to have taken its cues from any one book, then City of Night is a strong contender for such an honor. City of Night tracks the wanderings of a male hustler across the American continent, and does it better, more movingly and literally, than any other writer can or has to date.
With his Decameron-like City of Night, in 1963 (first published by Grove at $1.95!), a gigantic new vista opened to American homosexual writers. To John Rechy these books - and many, many others - constitute ripoffs of areas that he originally helped to put on the map. Other writers followed with works like Cruising, an examination of the underworld of violence and sex Butterflies Are Free, a character study of male hustlers on the road to self-destruction and much, much later, a slew of titles ranging from the abysmal if not well-intentioned Superstar Murder (midnight Manhattan mayhem among the twilight people) to the sero-religiose Faggots with its almost theological evocation of Bad Boys Gone Wrong. About a dozen years ago the novelist James Leo Herlihy wrote a book called Midnight Cowboy.
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