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Bottom line, the Sale $269.88/pair By Ernie McLeod n the Introduction to a reissue of his 1963 work, City of Night, John Rechy explains that the novel began as a letter to a friend and was “a cul- mination of the years I had spent traveling back and forth across the country moving in and out of lives, sometimes glimpsed briefly but always felt intensely.” The letter led to a short story, which led —'after encouragement from editors — to an autobiographical first novel. When the novel came out, however, there was a question as to whether its author existed. Alfred Chester (him- self gay) wrote in The New York Review of Books that although the jacket showed an “adorable picture” of the author, he could “hardly believe there is areal John Rechy.” He went on to say, bitchily, that City of Night read like “the unTrue Confessions of a Male Whore as told to Jean Genet, Djuna Barnes, A Truman Capote, Gore Vidal ...” and so on. The review was given the dismissive, ‘ever-so-slightly homopho- bic-title “Fruit Salad,” and other critics speculated which already-established author had, under a pseudo- nym, actually penned the scandalous work. Meanwhile, the real -Rechy was — by choice — back on the streets, anony- mously hustling. City of Night stayed on the best- seller lists for months. Even after his exis- tence was no longer chal- lenged, Rechy’s male whore reputation overshadowed his artistic one: “I was being viewed and written about as a hustler who had somehow managed to write, rather than as a writer who was writing intimately about hustling — and many other subjects.” Certainly, all the gay hustler works since City of Night —- and there've been a number — owe a debt to‘ Rechy. It’s no accident that Gus Van Sant gave River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves copies of the novel to prep them for their rentboy roles in My Own Private Idaho. I was prepared to find City of Night quaintly raunchy, seedily diverting — I hoped! — but minor. What surprised me is how well it has stood the test of time. Sure, some of the language and situations are dated, and most urban gay lives today aren’t as desperate as the ones portrayed in the novel. But — then as now — Rechy was exploring the fringes, articulating lives that aren’t ever likely to blend into the mainstream. As Frank Browning put it in his review of a much more recent (but thematically related) Rechy novel, The Coming ofthe Night: “His work is fundamentally at war with the current buffed and blow-dried gay rights movement.” Amen to that. The novel has no plot beyond following the nameless narrator on his city-to-city sexual journey, recording the “narcissistic pattern” of his youth- obsessed existence. He wants only to be desired, not to desire others. As one character observes of him late in the novel: “‘You want, very much, to be loved — but you dont [sic] want to love back, even if you have to force yourself not to ”’ Eventually, the nar- rator’s vulnerabilities sur- ' face; he allows himself the possibility of love, if not its actuality. The novel’s prose is _ stylized throughout, some chapters influenced — Rechy says — by Greek tragedy, others by algebraic equa- tions or childhood games. Its studded with irregular grammar and capitaliza- tions, gay street slang rub- bing up against philosophi- cal poetics. Generally descriptive City of Night chapters alternate with por- trait chapters titled after characters encountered along the way. Appropri- ately, perhaps, things some- times get a little overripe. It was the portrait chapters that unexpectedly moved me. On the surface, they seemed mere stereo- types: Pete, the jaded hus- tler with the innocent core; Miss Destiny, the drag queen who dreams of a “fabulous” wedding; Lance, » A the desired—by-everyone Hollywood Legend primed for a fall; Someone, the ter- rified closeted married man; Neil, the kinky uniform addict; Sylvia, the world- weary bar matron; Dave and Jeremy, the decent guys who challenge the narra- tor’s disbelief in love. In a radio interview, Rechy said he is a champi- on of stereotypes because they exist. True — the trick is to make the stereotype flesh and blood. He does - this by viewing his charac- te‘rs through a clear, unjudg- mental and compassionate lens. That he managed this in 1963, without cleaning things up or taking a moral- ly superior stance, is aston- ishing — and is probably what got so many critics’ pantiesin a wad. Rechy was born in 1934 and raised in El Paso, the child -of a Mexican mother and a Scottish father. Temperamentally, he favored his Mexican moth- er. He wrote throughout his J childhood, but when it came time for college, he l joined the army. After the military stint, he went to New York to enroll at Columbia but instead wound up on Times Square. Occasionally, he would flee l the streets only to return, imagining them “like a repentant lover eager to make up, with added inten- sity, for lost moments.” Most of City of Night was written on a rent- ed typewriter at his moth-