City of Night

By John Rechy

Bold and inventive in style, City of Night is the groundbreaking 1960s novel about male prostitution. Rechy is unflinching in his portrayal of one hustling 'youngman' and his search for self-knowledge among the other denizens of his neon-lit world. As the narrator moves from Texas to Times Square and then on to the French Quarter of New Orleans, Rechy delivers a portrait of the edges of America that has lost none of its power.
On his travels, the nameless narrator meets a collection of unforgettable characters, from vice cops to guilt-ridden married men eaten up by desire, to Lance O'Hara, once Hollywood's biggest star. Rechy describes this world with candour and understanding in a prose that is highly personal and vividly descriptive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Souvenir Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780285639898

John Rechy

John Rechy is the author of seventeen books, including City of Night, Numbers, Rushes and The Coming of the Night. He has received many awards, including PEN Center USA's Lifetime Achievement Award and the Lifetime-Recognition Award from the University of California at Riverside. He lives in Los Angeles.

Reviews for City of Night

[thorold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is American writing from the great era of the typewriter that never sleeps, when to use apostrophes in "don't" and "can't" would have been irredeemably square, and when writing "youngman" as a compound noun and arbitrarily capitalising random adjectives (adjectives are profuse, even superabundant, in this book) was a sure sign that you were someone who could swap authentic jive talk with the best of them. It would be unfair to blame Rechy for any of those things, any more than you can blame him for the bombastic images that angrily open each chapter with the impact of a panting animal. I did blame him for all of those things when I started reading the book, of course, but I got over it surprisingly quickly, because they turn out to be completely irrelevant to what makes this quaint survivor from the early days of LGBT writing such a wonderful treat.Rechy's unnamed narrator travels from city to city in fifties America, selling his body on the streets and in the gay bars, and telling us in fascinating and vivid detail about the characters he meets in what was still "the strange twilight world of the homosexual": the hustlers and drag queens, their clients, the fag-hags who hang around them, the vice cops, barkeepers, and all the rest. In the process, the narrator - who obviously sometimes is Rechy, with his typewriter stashed away in his room at the Y, and sometimes isn't - explores his attitude to his own sexuality, and unpicks what it is that drives him to live a life in which men have to demonstrate their desire for him by giving him money, but he doesn't allow himself to desire anything except sexual release.Described like that, it sounds cold and anthropological, but Rechy obviously does have far more empathy for the people he describes than he allows his narrator to show, and he brings them to life very vividly on the page. And as a reader, you can't help getting involved with the fate of the Professor, Miss Destiny, Chuck, Chi-Chi and the rest of them. We even find ourselves engaging with the pathetic would-be-Nazi leather queen Neil for a few pages...No surprise that this book was a big commercial success despite uniformly negative reviews in 1963, but a pleasant surprise to see that it's managed to retain at least some of its charm half a century later.

[alexthehunn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a classic in gay literature. Rechy reveals a seemy underside of life in the 1960s among hustlers and drag queens. This tale is not for the faint of heart. Although a mirror of some aspects of gay life of its time, it seems a bit quaint and dated these days.

[dbsovereign · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I sometimes wonder how I ever managed to make it through the days when I lived in the City explored by Rechy's _Night_. How did any of us? It was captivating, but so elusive. Rechy captures the elusiveness perfectly. However, I have to say that the patrons in this book are mostly captured as pathetic and predatory grotesques...Is Rechy a self-hating invert?