Understanding John Rechy
by María DeGuzmán
University of South Carolina Press
152 pages, $39.99
FOLLOWING THE PUBLICATION of his inaugural novel, City of Night, in 1963, John Rechy became widely celebrated as the bad boy of American gay literature. Tracing the restless odyssey of an unnamed “youngman” (Rechy’s preferred term for a sexually desirable male) from El Paso to various cities around the country and home again, the novel provided the American mainstream with its first exposure to gay hustlers, johns, drag queens, and other inhabitants of the sexual underworld. And Rechy, who regularly posed for photographs in muscle tees or denim shirts open to the navel, successfully fashioned himself as a gay Prometheus Unbound who defiantly challenged the social status quo and promulgated a radical gospel of sexual liberation six years in advance of Stonewall.
Rechy continued to explore the operations of the gay demimonde in Numbers (1967), in which a “youngman” named Johnny Rio cruises the parks, beaches and movie theaters of Los Angeles, having sex with thirty men in under ten days. Johnny’s anonymous sexual encounters function as an exercise in existential affirmation: he feels that he exists only insofar as he’s desired. Paradoxically, in his increasingly frantic need to score, Johnny’s orgasms become more mechanical than exciting. And because his partners are never allowed to become real to the protagonist, much less to Rechy’s reader, the narrative grows flat. We never know, for example, how someone smells or how his skin feels. Orgasm is la petite mort in more ways than one.
Rechy’s most important book remains The Sexual Outlaw (1977). Subtitled “A Documentary,” the pastiche juxtaposes news reports about incidents of anti-gay discrimination and violence with episodes from a three-day long “sexhunt” (Rechy’s term) of a Los Angeles hustler named Jim. The book proves to be an apologia pro vita sua in which the protagonist’s defense of his life—his defiance of sodomy laws, his circumvention of corrupt vice cops, and his refusal to adhere to the Mattachine Society’s attempts to make gay men and women appear normal and thus less threatening to the heterosexual majority—coalesces in a celebration of sexual outlawry, which Rechy presents as a heroic rejection of America’s Ozzie and Harriet complacency. The book can profitably be read alongside Charles Shiveley’s provocative Fag Rag essays of the 1970s, which valorize various sexual acts as anarchic challenges to an odious system of stultifying social values. (See, for example, his “Cocksucking as an Act of Revolution.”) Or, as Maria DeGuzmán puts it in jargon-laden prose in her new book, Understanding John Rechy, his “critique of U.S. society and its expectations and delusions [is]achieved through the protagonists’ dissent from compulsory heteronormativity.”
Consequently, it is not unfair to think of Rechy, who cast such a long shadow over the 1960s and ’70s literary scene, as a raunchy, gay Hugh Hefner, provocatively justifying his right to take physical pleasure from whatever acolyte is willing to worship at the altar of his narcissism, and refusing to feel shame that he cares so little for his partners.
By the mid-1980s, however, as the gay community struggled to care for the thousands of friends and lovers who had developed full-blown AIDS, Rechy’s valorization of “sexhunting” began to sound like the Siren Song that had led so many lives to their doom. Gay readers did not abandon Rechy, but his Peter Berlin-style narcissism grew wearying. To men of his generation who’d learned to accept the aging process as gracefully as they could, while being forced by the AIDS epidemic to rechannel their sexual energies, Rechy—once the standard-bearer as we stormed the citadel of oppression—suddenly seemed passé. Not even a sympathetic biography of him by Charles Casillo in 2002 could renew interest in Rechy as a groundbreaking gay writer. He seemed to have suffered a fate similar to that of Marlon Brando, another sexy bad boy who dazzled in his twenties and thirties, only to lose his edge as his middle-aged body lost definition.
Although Rechy continued to work out and to hustle well into his forties, as if he needed to prove to himself that he remained physically desirable, his writing gradually lost its urgency. His most recent work, After the Blue Hour (2018), for example, exasperates by its self-indulgence. As fellow narcissist Kim Kardashian has learned, while the individual may find his or her own image endlessly fascinating, others eventually grow tired of watching you gaze adoringly at your own reflection.
ALL OF THIS makes the career of the 88-year old Rechy ripe for reassessment by Maria DeGuzmán in Understanding John Rechy. There is much to value here. For example, DeGuzmán shrewdly recognizes the extent to which the hustler protagonists of the early fiction, who are reaffirmed by being desired while never allowing themselves to experience desire for another man, reflect Rechy’s own Latin-bred inner conflict between homosexuality and machismo. And she offers a shrewd analogy between “sexhunting” in Rechy’s early novels and the bullfighting, deep-sea fishing, and battlefield combat that function as the testing grounds of masculinity in the novels of Ernest Hemingway, a writer with whom I would never have thought to associate Rechy. Finally, I was particularly engaged by her discussion of Rechy’s “creative synesthesia”—that is, his “combining aspects of drawing, acting, photography, cinematography, and music” in his novels. The cinematographic style of certain of Rechy’s novels explains in part why his characters seem to exist largely on the surface and possess so few interior resources.
In the late 1980s, Rechy began to concentrate on Latina protagonists in works like The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez, Our Lady of Babylon, and About My Life and the Kept Woman. DeGuzmán is clearly more interested in Rechy as a writer about Latino/a identity than as a gay writer. Unfortunately, this seems to have prevented her from familiarizing herself with gay writers who were contemporaries of Rechy. Had she done so, she might have been better able to substantiate some of her generalizations about Rechy’s narrative style by contrasting his protagonists with, for example, Samuel R. Steward’s Phil Andros, who inspired so many of Tom of Finland’s drawings yet is able to maintain a sense of humor about his sexual appetites. There is a humanity to Andros that makes Steward’s narratives a pleasure to reread, whereas the role-playing of Rechy’s protagonists only grows more tedious with each rereading. Likewise, whereas British playwright Joe Orton similarly challenges bourgeois conformity and sexual hypocrisy, he does so by slyly revealing the disconcerting sexual desires that his characters are repressing, whereas Rechy’s characters’ lack of psychological nuance leaves little for the reader to discover, much less rediscover. Preparing to write this review essay, I revisited Rechy’s major novels and was disappointed to find how thin many of them seem today.
Consequently, I suspect that DeGuzmán’s sympathetic but plodding study is not likely to restore Rechy’s reputation or win him many new readers. In fact, her readings of Rechy’s novels reduce them to clichés. Consider, for example, the weakness of her discussion of This Day’s Death (1969), Rechy’s third book, which she dutifully notes has been dismissed by the writer as “the least favorite of his novels.” The novel maps the interior drama of 26-year-old Jim Giraud as he makes six trips in eight months from El Paso, where he cares for his beloved yet emotionally possessive mother, to Los Angeles, where he’d been arrested earlier for public lewdness in Griffith Park. While his mother uses a psychosomatic illness to keep Jim close at hand in El Paso, a sexually repressed vice cop supplies patently false testimony against him, resulting in a conviction for a crime Jim never committed, one that destroys his chance of enrolling in the law school program into which he’s been accepted. His mother’s repeated relapses and the maddeningly slow movement of the justice system that delays Jim’s case finally being heard in court ensure that, as the novel’s title suggests, some part of Jim dies each day. Like Daniel Curzon’s Something You Do in the Dark (1971), This Day’s Death is an eloquent plea against a justice system that assumes that, far from being innocent until proven guilty, gay men are guilty of whatever fantasy arises from the perfervid minds of their accusers.
Ironically, despite DeGuzmán’s assertion that Rechy’s works “are highly allusive of other works of literature, film, painting, and music, both overtly and covertly,” she fails to recognize that Rechy is alerting his reader through the novel’s title and epigraph that he is inverting the moral poles of Milton’s Paradise Lost in order to suggest that paradise is gained, not lost, by rebelling against sexual authority. The passage comes from Adam’s speech to Eve as they anticipate what their lives will be like after being condemned to death for having eaten the fruit of the forbidden tree: “Since this day’s Death denounc’t, if aught I see,/ Will prove no sudden, but a slow-pac’t evil,/ A long day’s dying to augment our pain.” Rechy, however, has transformed the Garden of Eden into a secluded cruising spot in Griffith Park—a spot to which Jim returns after his trial to deliberately commit the “lewd act” which he hadn’t committed earlier and of which he was found guilty. Adam’s humility in the face of God’s judgment is transformed into a gay man’s brazen defiance of a corrupt justice system. “This day’s death” is not a symbol of a sinner’s exclusion from the joys of eternity, as it is in Milton, but a frank description of what every gay man suffers when persecuted by an irrational authority that judges him to be guilty simply for being gay. In This Day’s Death, Rechy enlists on the side of the rebellious angels who refuse to serve a tyrannical god.
For Rechy, a rebellious angel is not a fallen angel: one’s victory lies in daring to rebel against unjust and soul-sucking authority. Whatever his limitations, Rechy is in many ways a better novelist than even DeGuzmán allows. The book is still to be written that documents just how important a gay pioneer he has been.
Raymond-Jean Frontain is author of The Theater of Terrence McNally: Something about Grace(2019) and editor of the forthcoming Conversations with Terrence McNally.
