From the Inside Flap
The story develops during a single evening and is set in a "leather and Western" bar located near the decaying and deserted waterfront of a large American city. This is the sexual battlefield, the world of the trucks, the piers, the warehouses. And Rechy explores it with a compelling, dramatic story told in a style that is elegant, convincing, and unsparing.
Into the bar arrives a range of characters: the regular patrons in their ceaseless search for compatible love, the occasional customer hoping for a quick sexual fix, the female and transvestite hookers who work the dark streets outside, the couple seeking a voyeuristic experience, the young man venturing out for the first time.
During the course of the evening we come to know these people, their loneliness and their fears, their pride and their courage. We share with them their search and their discoveries. Rechy has distilled from these lives a human experience that is moving, painful, and revealing.
The evening culminates with one of the most shattering scenes in recent fiction. The central character, around whom most of the evenings activities have revolved, leaves the bar at closing time and goes to a sadomasochistic orgy room. This descent into the depths of a sexual underworld fulfills the ceremonial structure of this artfully conceived work. The almost religious rites of the evening end in ritual sacrifice.
"Rushes is a tour de force. It is like peering into the gates of hell."--Los Angeles Times
"What he has given us for more than thirty years is a wonderful and terrifying gift.... He has given us life and literature."--Michael Bronski, presenting The Publishing Triangle's William Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award
"Fresh, beautiful, totally courageous-and totally cool, passionate.... His uncompromising honesty as a gay writer has provoked as much fear as admiration.... John Rechy doesn't fit into categories. He transcends them. His individual vision is unique, perfect, loving and strong."--from Carolyn See's Introductory Remarks presenting PEN-USA West's Lifetime Achievement Award
"The country's most important author on homosexual life in America."--Gerald Fraser, The New York Times
"A major American novelist writing at the peak of his powers."--Richard Hall, The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
"[He] is one of the heroic figures of contemporary American life...a touchstone of moral integrity and artistic innovation. He is the great champion of desire.... In his endlessly inventive style, he is entirely modern."--Edmund White, introducing Rechy at the Gay and Lesbian Arts Festival in New York
"His tone rings absolutely true, is absolutely his own, and he has the kind of discipline which allows him a rare and beautiful recklessness. He tells the truth, and tells it with such passion that we are forced to share in the life he conveys. This is a most humbling and liberating achievement."--James Baldwin
"John Rechy shows great comic and tragic talent. He is a truly gifted novelist."--Christopher Isherwood
"Eloquent, convincing, basically unsparing."--Herbert Gold
"Rechy's writings are carefully conceived and executed, with as much emphasis on symbolism and structure as on developing characters and delineating settings specific to gay culture."--Jameson Currier, New York Blade News
John Rechy is the recipient of two coveted literary honors: PEN-USA West's Lifetime Achievement Award (which he was the first novelist to receive) and the Publishing Triangle's William Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award. He is the author of eleven other novels, among them City of Night, Numbers, Rushes, The Sexual Outlaw (all from Grove Press), as well as The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez and Our Lady of Babylon. An NEA recipient, he is also the author of several plays, essays, and short stories. John Rechy lives in Los Angeles. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
