City of Night

Surprisingly, John Rechy, three years older than I, is still alive. His 1967 book 'Numbers' played an essential albeit indirect role in my gay life in New York City that started one Saturday afternoon in 1968 at the long defunct Bleecker Street movie house.Strange grammar like `Youngman' as a one word - I remember it well.This is, of course, a review, not my personal story. Fortunately, I did not have to depend (in 1968) on street hustlers for `all my needs', that came many years later.Rechy became, I understand, lid of superannuated fake hustler in LA and was quite proud of - pretending being properly stupid, almost illiterate, but no longer for the money.Let just say that my current former hustler (he sells now light bulbs although his body is not a total disaster at the age of 52) never read and will never read any book. He, however, reads a lot of newspapers online - I have to supply his computers, of course. As long, that is, as they report from Ireland and on soccer.The variety of gay lives may be more remarkable than the variety of straight lives and we are different. But what I know about straight sex? Very little.Just one last comment. I used to be a Catholic till I reached the age of 12. To make a statement on a very 'high' level, I just want to say the following.Western culture is a curious mix of Abrahamic traditions (Leviticus 20 can be crudely translate as 'kill the queer') and much nicer Greco-Roman traditions. They had their handsome and bisexual (??) gods and goddesses.Since the Greeks did not have any mechanical means to describe their way of life, I can only fantasize about their kids in their 'gymnasiums', the schools were they ran naked.I can imagine that not only mythical gods but these (exclusively male?) kids did their stuff with intensity matched only by Rechy in this book and the "Numbers'.Rechy probably did for us gay people what was done long time ago for the straights in a a few their pioneering books.Four stars only because I liked the 'Numbers' better - bit simpler and just happened to affect my life here in the US more profoundly.

In this classic of gay literature (first published in 1963), Rechy—who worked as a hustler himself for years prior to its publication as well as after—captures the spectrum of experience (I resist calling it emotion) that constituted queer life in the decades before Stonewall.The book is more of a peripatetic collection of vignettes and verbal tableaux than an actual novel. Rechy’s story lacks a conventional plot structure, and the characters are developed only to the extent that their brief appearance in the narrative will allow. Although no character (other than the narrator) sticks around very long, many are nevertheless quite memorable. Drawing on his own experience, Rechy uses exquisite detail and a perceptive ear for authentic dialogue to sketch distinct, almost allegorical characters. Flamboyant queens, butch hustlers, desperate scores, gruff bartenders, and reckless partiers populate the book’s many locales—New York City, Los Angeles, Hollywood, San Francisco, Chicago, and New Orleans.Despite their differing appearances and motives, every character—and most notably Rechy’s unnamed hustler narrator—experiences a profound sadness borne of loneliness, which is the theme that unites every scene in the book to every other. Every human connection between characters is predicated on physical contact (often sexual)—and every connection evaporates at the first sign of intimacy or emotion. Desire—or, more precisely, the desire to be desired—always conquers love in Rechy’s world.Nearly 500 pages in length (this edition includes Rechy’s Introduction, an Afterword, and an interview with the author), “City of Night” is required—and worthwhile—reading for anyone interested in queer American literature.

I’m sure in the early ‘60s, this book was titillating and subversive. In 2023, it becomes tiresome. The shock sex and prostitution aren’t really that interesting today, so there’s not a lot to hold your attention. Rechy tries his hand at some trite literary tricks (for example, not using punctuation that he feels his uneducated narrator wouldn’t have used), but those just make it more difficult to read, without the intended effect. Moreover, the whole novel is ponderous and self-conscious.

During Covid made a study of Gay Fiction. Read dozens of novels some predictable, a few extraordinary. City of Night stands alone as a sort of memoir/novel revealing the journey of a solitary man driven to the dark corners of American cities in search of men, daily money, erotic pleasure, and emotional escape. Have read nothing like it. It is not a happy read though parts are very funny, but it is a cold look at desire in all the wrong places.

I returned this for a refund. I found the complete lack of apostrophes eg hes, isnt and every time New York was spelt newyork really spoilt it for me. I maybe getting more pedantic as I get older, but I am not really bothered by minor occasional lapses of grammar. I would never return a book just because I did not enjoy it, but the quality of the kindle version just falls too low.

I found out about this book through the Bowie Book Club and brought it based on the description. The kindle version needs editing as theres lots of Js and 1s instead of I's, lots of words seem to be pushed together instead of having spaces between them and for some reason the word 'balance' is written as bMalace. So, my advice would be to buy the physical copy.However, the actual story is beautifully written. It takes place in the 60s when homosexuality was against the law and it a sad and truthfully book about the lost men of male prostitution in LA, New York and New Orleans.

Did expect it to be more graphic in detail , but i guess the authors had to be carful in those days theres no point in writing a book knowing it would be banned , a lot of interesting characters and situations from real life though .

City of Night is a classic of its kind...Rechy is an evocative and at times poetic writer who captures the seedy underside of America. The novel is sad, bleak and depressing showing the lost lives of people living in a more closed and tragic rendering of American society.One issue: this version of the book is littered with spelling mistakes, typos, incorrect capitalisation and general bad formatting. This really ruined my enjoyment of the novel. There are spelling mistakes every 10 or so pages (and repeat errors at that, for ex. the word 'balance' always appears as Bmance) and this lazy rendering of the text lets this version of an otherwise great book down.

The story is very good - the quality of the Kindle book is very poor.I would not recommend the Kindle version of this book - the optical character translation has at least one mistake every other page and some words, e.g. 'balance' are wrong throughout.This makes for an exhausting and tedious read of what is frankly a classic document of a both a lifestyle and place in time.