Customer Reviews

City of Night

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

It's easy to see why this book caused such a sensation when it was published in 1963. It's not because of the sexual descriptions, which are neither remotely erotic nor all that graphic--even for the early 1960s. Nor is it because of the Beat-genre prose and the in-your-face nihilism. Instead, "City of Night" brought to the light of day the darkest corners of the "gay underworld" (and, yes, Rechy uses the term "gay" here), and the book does it in a way that highlights the insecurities and the pretenses, the profligacy and the humanity of even the most jaded hustlers, "scores," and "queens" who fervently frequent the bars and speakeasies in metropolitan America.

The unnamed narrator has fled his hometown of New Orleans, initially for New York, and he finds himself both bored of the "respectable" jobs he manages to find and intrigued by the easy money (not to mention the ready drugs, the nervous thrill, and the artificial freedom) that comes from being a male prostitute. Like many of his associates, the narrator tries to convince himself that he is only "gay for pay"--that his activities are no more than a job and that in the real world he would sleep with women. But gradually he realizes that this conviction, for him and for most of the others, is little more than a pose. Among the book's many themes is the tension between the futility of the closet and its ultimate necessity (let's not forget that, in much of the country, it was illegal for two men to dance together or to wear women's clothing).

Each chapter scrutinizes the bar scene and focuses on a different type (sometimes bordering on stereotype), from the flamboyant drag queen to the aging hustler to the married man to the older women whose guilt over a long-kept secret motivates her to tend to street boys. There are passages and scenes that will, of course, seem dated (or--to use a less loaded term--of historical interest), but many of the characters are, forty years later, hilariously and scarily recognizable.

Finally--for reasons Rechy could not have fathomed--the most disconcerting section of the book is the last one, which is set in New Orleans. The eeriness of finishing this book at a time like this (early September 2005) is that certain passages take on a prophetic tone. The environs around the French quarter are "merely the remnants of what may have been; a city scarred by memories of an elegance and gentility which may have never existed. A ghost city." And later: "An almost Biblical feeling of Doom--of the city about to be destroyed, razed, toppled--assaults you." The narrator's love-hate relationship with the Big Easy--with its celebratory abandon and its remorseful gloom--instills the novel's finale with an intensity both haunting and unforgettable.

John Rechy's book, City of Night, was published in 1962 just before the Supreme Court opened up the floodgate to the publishers of cheap porn in 1965. He will most likely be remembered as a gay male writer who was a brutal and lyrical recorder of the sexual underworld in pre-Stonewall times. It must be difficult for anyone who didn't live through those times to grasp how heavily the threat of censorship hung over America's authors and publishers.

He describes this world with brusque frankness. There is an easy understanding of who and what his characters are; they are presented without sentimentality or self-pity. At the beginning he writes about being a shy child who read a lot and sat by the hall window and looked out to see the world. We hear about the death of his dog and about the suffocating attention of his overly affectionate mother

Rechy uses the window theme and carries it throughout the book. He's letting us look into and onto the dark underworld of the City of Night . . . wherever that may occur. He's also into looking into mirrors as he looks at himself and at what his narrator has become.

I liked the very believable flip dialogue of the drag queens and the hustlers . . . the text was almost like it was recorded.

His narrator takes us on a journey through a world of forbidden love. Here, sex is a job, not an identity. This masculine hustler moves from city to city, searching for business and a sense of self-worth and love. While he actively avoids the lives and world of the self-admitted and well-adjusted gay men he encounters, he pursues the outcasts, the maladjusted and self-loathing instead.

Rechy's representations of gay life are often bleak and the lives of this extraordinary collection of characters are filled with drugs and liquor. There are two types of chapters in this novel: there are accounts of the narrator's wanderings and character sketches of the people he meets as a hustler. Each sketch builds an understandable person for the reader. I've been on the fringes of this culture a few times and didn't like it at all, but believe me they seem very real. Each narrative chapter pulls the reader away and moves them onward.

Rechy was brought up as a devout Catholic. His book is full of symbolism . . .especially of angels in the form of beautiful young men.

Well, surprise, a lot of this world still exists. The people of the night haven't changed all that much since John Rechy wrote his eye-opening novel 40-some years ago. Anonymous sex, hustlers, dirty bookstore sex, cruising, rough trade, druggies, dealers, hustlers, bartenders, cops and robbers still abound. There are still sexy boys from the country who will soon be dead from HIV/AIDS . . . or something else like in the old days . . . an overdose, a knife fight, or a car crash. Not much has changed. This is a compelling early account of "the life" that I believe gays and non-gay people will enjoy; the book still has a fun, underground feel to it. It's still a very cool book, kind of like "On the Road." But decide for yourself. Pick up a copy! (...)

Although that is one of its facets. This book, both for all of its cynicism, has a generosity towards the human race, encompassing and striving to understand those who are its most marginalized members: sexual minorities, hustlers, bums, floozies, drunks, junkies. . .all of those who are traditionally swept under the mat. I haven't read it since I was twenty, but in those long-ago, mid-80's days, I read it to tatters, and I've never forgotten it (and I'm a straight-but-not-narrow female). Read it. You'll remember it always.

Though it's been forty years since its publication, John Rechy's "City of Night" still packs an emotional wallop. The novel's storyline is well-known: Rechy writes of one young male hustler who wanders from El Paso to New York to Los Angeles to New Orleans meeting and experiencing male customers, drag queens, tough men and "nellies." While partaking of this life, he is also observing the pain and joy of a world filled with "youngmen" and those who are no longer young. Will he find meaning in any of it? Will he come to terms with his sexual orientation? The answers are not clear. But in the end it doesn't really matter. The prose is powerful, the dialogue poignant and, at times, hilarious. This is a remarkable and unforgettable book that should be read by everyone.

"City of Night" is a novel that I haven't read in about eight years, but its storyline and poetic prose still lingers in my mind to this day. It is a sad yet beautiful story of a young, nameless, faceless, street hustler that roams the large cities of the U.S. looking for love in a homosexual relationship. But the main character is sexually confused. He continually claims to be straight, however he has sex with men for money. Paying for sex with another man is not an act of a "fairy", according to the character. This is a myth of the streets. He is gay, but he hates himself for it, leaving the main character to learn to accept himself while going through the tarnish streets of New York, LA, and finally New Orleans. The majority of characters within the novel live on the fringes of society, and they all have poignant stories of their pasts, but no real direction for their future. Our hero sweeps acorss the country traveling through the pre-Stonewall gay community and finds a motley crew of flawed but colorful characters. We can sympathize with charcters like Pete, Skipper, Miss Destiny, Sylvia, bacuse they all want what we want: love, acceptance, desirability, a second chance. This book is not a "gay" novel, rather it is a novel that uncovers the loneliness and desparation that we all have felt sometime in our lives. It is a piece of fiction that is indispensable in the canon of 20th century literature. A brilliant work!!!!!

When City of Night was published in 1963, I was a 19 year old freshman in Cincinnati. I recall having to keep this scandalous book hidden, except for those precious moments alone with it...and his story told me of a world I had only hoped might really exist. The effect was visceral, sexy, fightening, and it made my spirit soar. In 1965 this book helped lure me to California. Although decades have trooped by, I took a chance last year and decided to re-read City of Night, although hesitatntly, fearful that it might disappoint now, so many years later. But, like the first time, I couldn't put it down. In many ways, it was a different book for me, this time around; some portions were like old friends, other parts seemed strange and new, as if I had never read them at all. Other parts that had gripped and taunted me in 1963, were now fellow travelers. Times change and so do we. City of Night was a groundbreaking novel in 1963 that, I am certain, changed many lives. Whether or not it still has that power is no longer as important. City of Night remains a powerful novel and a graceful composition, from an author who loves the language enough that he wastes no words in the telling of his story. This book is a classic, and should be required reading (at least for every gay man). The very fact of its publication was extraordinary at the time, and a look at the literary controversy surrounding its publication is eye-opening...and chilling!

City by Night by John Rechy is a classic. I had to read it when I did a paper on the history of homosexuality for my history class. That was twenty years ago, before I had ever gone to the US. Now that I am a priest and my parents live there, and I have gone there to the US myself many times over, the book seems like a fossil frozen in time before the advent of AIDS and Mayor Rudy Giuliani's cleansing of Times Square and the closure of bath houses in Los Angeles (I remember I had just arrived in LA and the closure of bath houses was bannered in the papers. John Holmes had just died of AIDs and his death was not given prominence. A feature story appeared in the front page, prominently boxed. It was about a sparrow that died in Santa Monica Beach. A lady wanted to save it so she called for the Red Cross. The Red Cross team arrived, but the sparrow died nonetheless.) Now the novel, as I say, may be a fossil already if not yet a relic. But the bathos of the novel still haunts the crevices of one's mind, and the memory of having read the book sort of makes me giddy because with the book the jukebox, the flower people, the subculture of the third sex, the Vietnam War and the unfished America Dream spring back to life. Side by side with the computer and the Generation X, however, the novel recedes into the past, like Casablanca, like the old, original Heaven Can Wait, like the westerns of Randolph Scott (when his playing good buddy with housemate Cary Grant never generated suspicious snickers), when the world was young and everything seemed so greeen, before the El Nino phenomenon, before the devirginization of the moon by the Apollo, before the advent of the incoming millennium and the forthcoming century, before the transformation of splendid fiction into reportage plain and simple. City of Night is fiction at its best and will remain so forever.

It must have been 1974 when I read city of night on request of a girl pupil of mine.(In a Dutch translation!)She (yes) had found in this book her feeling of life. Her struggle with emptyness, with relations, with God. I read it. It was my first confrontation with the Gay scene. It was pictured in a vivid way, almost like watching a movie. I was with the guy who was discovering his world. And it helped me to discover mine. It was and is hard to discover your world - this being the way it was depicted in the novel - once being married. Yet it was so vivid, that I identified immediately with the married guy in the book. Yet the book was more than a gay novel. Together with the discussions I had with the girl it helped me as a teacher to understand the youth of that period of this century. I had to return the book to her. I have been looking for it ever since. Could not find it. I am glad to have it at hand again.

I was 19 the first time I picked up this novel. I started and was unable to put it down until I finished it. It is amazing. It opened my eyes up to just how much things haven't changed. I was disillusioned by thinking just because we are almost at the end of the century that things must be so much better than they once were. This book crushed that thinking. Nothing has changed! We, gay men, are just as confused and in mental turmoil today as we were when John Rechy wrote this novel. The impact this story makes is a must. We all need our eyes opened to the fact nothing has changed and nothing will change until we become more aware of ourselves and confident of the fact that we are human, we are important, and we all have the desire to be loved.

Someone once remarked that great artists remake the same works over and over, likening them to musicians who play variations on the same riff.

John Rechy would fall into this category of literary artist.

Take his first novel, for instance: CITY OF NIGHT. After one has read this novel and gone on to Rechy's other works, one sees the same themes and concerns sounded again and again in almost the same register - the note of erotic desperation played in high lyricism and despair. Still, he's such a virtuoso with this instrument, and tells such a compelling story, one doesn't mind.

CITY OF NIGHT, as noted, is the book that got the ball rolling for Rechy. It's a stark, unsentimental portrait of a male hustler's sojourn through the underbellies of numerous big towns - NY, LA, Chicago, and New Orleans. The section in New Orleans, with its depictions of "floods" of people during Mardi Gras racing ahead of impending doom, is eerily prophetic of the recent fate of that great city.

Although the point of view is first person, Rechy also incorporates the voices of the men and women the protagonist encounters in his carnal odyssey - the fellow hustlers, the scores, the drag queens, the closet cases, etc. - and the song they sing is usually one of vast loneliness and unfulfilled desire.

This is a seminal work but not without flaws. At times Rechy's prose bows to the worst inclinations of creative writing class cliches - comparing buildings and trees to giants, for instance, and waxing more than a little purple at times. One wants to shout, "Please, sir, you ARE a good writer. No need to show off." Also, one cannot help but tire at times of the repetitiveness of the unnamed narrator's adventures, but that may be Rechy's point about this kind of life.