Indeed, indeed! here comes Miss Destiny! fluttering out of the shadows into the dimlights along the ledges like a giant firefly-flirting, calling out to everyone: “Hello, darling, I love you-I love you too, dear-so very much-ummm!” Kisses flung recklessly into the wind…. But sometimes there are jewels in the streets.Īnd here is Rechy listening through Jean Genet: Sometimes he brings me demiangels: they last only one interview. And I never know how I shall meet those angels-it was not always as it is now-when Larry chooses them for me. Angels are all I see when I glance heavenward, and that is Enough. Here is Rechy listening through Capote listening through Djuna Barnes:įor me something does indeed shine: the wings of the angels-briefly but clearly. He is not, however, deaf to the fact that other writers haven’t been, and through their ears he listens to his own characters. He is deaf to the music in language, and thus deaf to the rhythms of homosexual speech. The trouble is, he has no ear whatsoever. The episodes are so gracelessly, clumsily written, so stickily, thickly literary in his determination to boil every last drop of poetry out of pederasty, Rechy ends up with nothing but a pot of blackberry prose. The first is that disgusting rhetoric that Rechy pours all over everything like jam. But Rechy’s stories are awful, and they’re awful for two very specific reasons which may ultimately sound like one. And there’s no general reason why it shouldn’t be pleasant to read about them once again. They’re mostly about the same old queens doing the same old things: swishing and bitching and cruising and falling in love and leaving each other and getting desperate and growing old and worrying over it.
#City of night book full#
(I regret telling you that the full extent or the exact nature of his being had is something he and Rechy are quite silent about.) These stories do not bring anything new to literature, homosexual, sociological or American. It is a blow by blow account, so to speak, of where to go for what you want (assuming of course that you want it)-a kind of “Sodom on Five Dollars a Day.” Throughout most of these episodes, the nameless hero of the novel plays no part except as observer or listener his passport into this world that never, finally, makes him is the fact that he’s a hustler and lets himself be had for money.
#City of night book movie#
We are taken on a guided tour of gay bars and beaches, turkish baths, parks, S & M scenes (Sado-Masochism) for those of you who aren’t aficionados), queer parties and movie houses, faggot social life and street life, and so on.
The episodes that comprise Book One are concerned with those lives lived out darkly in what is nowadays called The Homosexual Underground, though never before has it been so much on the surface. One night sex and cigarette smoke and rooms squashed in by loneliness…Īnd I would remember lives lived out darkly in that vast City of Night, from all-night movies to Beverly Hills mansions.Īctually, City of Night is two books of short stories, sneaking their way through each other to give the volume the appearance of a novel, partly, I would guess, because novels are more negotiable than short stories and partly, I am sure, because the amorality of the characters in what I will call Book One helps disguise the eminently respectable morality of the hero-narrator in Book Two.
Later I would think of America as one vast City of Night stretching gaudily from Times Square to Hollywood Boulevard-jukebox-winking, rock-n-roll moaning: America at night fusing its dark cities into the unmistakable shape of loneliness. Here are three quotes that come to you through the courtesy of Page One alone: So fabricated is it that, despite the adorable photograph on the rear of the dust jacket, I can hardly believe there is a real John Rechy-and if there is, he would probably be the first to agree that there isn’t-for City of Night reads like the unTrue Confessions of a Male Whore as told to Jean Genet, Djuna Barnes, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Thomas Wolfe, Fanny Hurst and Dr. This is the worst confection yet devised by the masterminds behind the Grove epater-la-post-office Machine.
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