City of Night by John Rechy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I picked this book to write about this morning, I noticed that a lot of my friends have written about it, which is natural, since this is an iconic gay male novel, born out of an era in which writing of this blunt honesty was nearly impossible. This is the kind of book that Grove Press was known for, edgy and hard. It is also the kind of book that people speak of as hard, edgy, frank, which means that the writer treats sex in a particular way; at least I find that to be true most of the time. There are not a lot of parallels to this book; it is reminiscent of other writers who deal directly with erotic matter, but it is born out of one man’s hard-won experience. The ideas about gay sex that Rechy wrote about fell out of fashion in the aftermath of HIV; he was an advocate for hustler sex, anonymous sex, public sex; the world he writes about is that night-driven world that gay people occupied in that same era. It is a hard era for people to comprehend and is easy to dismiss as a time when men were closeted and full of self hatred. The fact that the closets and the self hatred were the natural outgrowth of trying to find intimacy in the shadows and corners of the world is harder to see. Rechy does not write about those ideas. He simply presents the world of the hustler, the world of the drag queen, the scenes of gay bars in New Orleans, with the sensibility of a natural inhabit of all these milieus. He does so with force and brilliance and a good strong dose of messiness. The writing is extravagant, self-involved, and true. It’s almost pointless to call this book a classic; it is a singular novel that only got itself born because of the force of the writer and his unswerving vision. He wrote many other novels, most of them not successful; but a few of them are essential – Numbers and The Sexual Outlaw come immediately to mind. Much as I love this book, I have never been able to face rereading it. I suppose I don’t want to spoil my first impression of it, when everything Rechy had to say was vital to my understanding of myself.