Fifty Years after City of Night
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JOHN RECHY’S City of Night was published fifty years ago. The novel is a frank account of the adventures of a male hustler who wanders restlessly around the country in the late 1950s, turning tricks as much for self-affirmation as for money, and scrupulously avoiding any romantic attachment. The book is partly a travelogue, offering a pano-rama of the gay underworld in (chiefly) New York, L.A., and New Orleans, and partly a portrait gallery, with little cameos of clients (“johns”), other hustlers, and drag queens.

City of Night was understood immediately to be path-breaking, opening the way for works like Faggots and Dancer from the Dance in the following decade. But it also had one foot in the past: nearly all the gay men it depicts are bitchy, dejected, lonesome, or hysterical, confirming the stereotype that homosexuals can never be happy. And the narrator doesn’t just describe, but implicitly endorses, the rigid hierarchy of the world he moves in, with queens and pathetic old johns at the bottom, “masculine homosexuals” in the middle, and young, quasi-straight hustlers at the top. So, if the novel is a landmark in gay writing, what it marks is the beginning, not the end, of the transition from the gay “problem novel” of the ’40s and ’50s to the “liberated” fiction of the ’70s and ’80s.

I can say without hesitation that anyone interested in the history of gay writing in America must read City of Night. But I have a harder time deciding whether the book is any damn good.

The year it appeared, 1963, was also the year of the New York newspaper strike that shuttered The New York Times Book Review and led a group of editors and writers to establish The New York Review of Books. The second issue of the new journal featured a blistering review of Rechy’s book, unhappily titled “Fruit Salad,” by the brilliant but deranged Alfred Chester. Chester might be thought of as the Dale Peck of his day, a passionate, slashing critic whose accounts of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Nabokov’s Pale Fire are venomous and dead-on. No one who reads Chester can ever feel quite the same about those works again. 

Rechy and his acolytes have never stopped talking about The Very Bad Review. They say Chester was jealous of Rechy’s beauty, or that he was bitter that Rechy had beaten him to writing the big book about gay life. Paradoxically, by whining about Chester for five decades, they have ensured that the review will endure as long as the novel does. Chester and Rechy are yoked together forever, and in trying to arrive at a verdict on City of Night one might start with Chester’s piece as stating the case for the prosecution. Here then is the indictment, point by point.

The book is not a novel, but two barely connected books of short stories. Book One is the picture of the gay underworld, observed fairly dispassionately by the narrator. Book Two is a set of abortive love stories, in which the self-absorbed narrator seeks to be loved by one of those “masculine homosexuals” and, time and again, pulls back at the edge of intimacy.

The verdict: guilty as charged. The book started out as a set of sketches published in journals like The Evergreen Review. The lively and penetrating, but disconnected, pieces of the first book are tied together (or padded) by the lugubrious and repetitive second book. This reader, at least, muttered “Oh, no” every time it became clear that we were being dragged back into the second book.

Arguably there are two-and-a-half books, the extra half being Beat-derived streetscapes of the night-cities the narrator visits. These start off pretty well, but, as the cities pile up, they all start to seem the same, rather like the way the Times’ “36 hours in…” travel pieces turn every town in the world into three boutiques and a restaurant serving small plates.

The first book is derivative and clichéd, just an echo of Gore Vidal, Jean Genet, et al. And the narrator never really responds to all the people and situations he encounters; he substitutes literature-soaked overwriting for emotion.

Not guilty. (The charge is especially ironic given that Chester himself was a profoundly derivative fiction writer. As his friend Cynthia Ozick said: “he saw landscapes and cities through a veil of bookish imaginings.”) Of course it is true that other writers “covered” various aspects of gay life before Rechy, but what he did with his world was quite different.

Yes, Genet already wrote about drag queens and the dangerous hustlers they “marry.” But Rechy’s queens remind one less of Genet’s Divine than of the tough babes in some 1930s comedies—Ruth Hussey, say, or Joan Blondell. They are the smartest, most alive people in the book, the truest outlaws, defiantly living a counterlife. You could picture them, a few years later, fighting back when the cops raid a bar.

True, Vidal’s City and the Pillar already shuffled its young gay hero through a handful of set-piece affairs in a country-spanning demimonde. But its characters—the Hollywood star, the famous writer, even the hero—never come alive the way some of Rechy’s characters do. And Rechy’s grittier underworld is drawn with pinpoint accuracy. I can attest to the truth of it, because the world I came out into in the early ’70s was practically unchanged from the world of City of Night. Stonewall didn’t magically transform gay life the way black-and-white gives way to Technicolor in The Wizard of Oz. (Of course, there is some possibility of confirmation bias here: perhaps I saw a desolate, shrill gay life in those years partly because Rechy had conditioned me to.)

As for the claim that the narrator doesn’t respond feelingly to other people? Half-true, maybe; there is brusqueness, wariness, disengagement. But there is also a minute attentiveness that is in its way a sort of embrace—as if the one thing that had never happened to his characters before was to have someone actually listen to them.

The second book is a dreary account of a man who wants to be loved but won’t love in return. The narrator piles up pop-Freudian baloney about various childhood losses to avoid facing the fact that he is afraid of his own homosexuality.

Guilty, kind of. This material is certainly tiresome—especially, as Chester points out, a long, long final discussion with yet another “masculine homosexual” that reads like a transcript of an especially fruitless session with a cut-rate analyst. Chester thinks the problem is sentimentality: that the narrator longs for a white-picket-fence brand of homosexuality that is clearly out of the question in the gay metropolis he has just spent hundreds of pages depicting.

I think Frank O’Hara is closer to the mark when he calls the narrator a Puritan: he hates pleasure, to the point that even coming seems to feel like a self-betrayal, and he certainly doesn’t believe in real love. One might say that the narrator hates gay men in the desperately needy way that Norman Mailer hated women. Like Mailer, he might have named his dick “the Retaliator.”

One last point Chester doesn’t dwell on is how very mannered the writing is. Rechy Capitalizes Random Words and sprinkles! exclamation! points! like jimmies on an ice cream cone. He cant or wont use apostrophes and coins flashy compounds like “nightlives” and “sexhunger” and “youngman.” He loses track of his tenses multiple times in a single paragraph. (Rechy has claimed this was intentional. Uh-huh.) All of this was not uncommon at the time, a way of making the prose seem jazzy and improvisational. Today these stylistic tics are the most dated and distancing thing about the novel.

So, what is the verdict? A mixed one. The book is narcissistic and plump with pseudo-poetry. Some of the characters are easy stereotypes: the leather queen, the old professor who keeps scrapbooks of hustlers he calls his Angels. But some others are unforgettable—not just the queens, abject but dignified, battered but with an ember of expectation still burning, but even more the guys on the edge. The other hustlers, Pete, Chuck, Skipper, Sonny, whom the narrator sees less as competitors than as survivors huddled in the same ice-bound lifeboat. The married man, called only Someone, who cannot at last make the leap into the only life open to him.

It is the people who keep City of Night readable after fifty years, and who may bring it readers fifty years from now. They make up an indispensable group portrait of the way gay people really were in the 1950s, and in the ’70s. Maybe the way people, gay or not, are today.

Mark Merlis is the author of American Studies (1994) and Man About Town (2003), among other novels. His  new novel, JD, will be published by the University of Wisconsin Press in fall 2014.