The Sexual Outlaw At 83

September 10, 2014 9:43 AM

83 year old Chicano author John Rechy (City Of Night, The Sexual Outlaw, Rushes) talks to Lambda Literary about gay assimilation, being mistaken for white, melding truth and fiction, the post-Stonewall peroid, and hating the word 'queer.'
posted by The Whelk (20 comments total)

I can't read this until tonight, but am looking forward to it. Rechy is amazing, full stop.
posted by Dip Flash at 9:57 AM on September 10, 2014 [2 favorites]

That's a FANTASTIC interview -- I recommend reading it even if you don't know anything about the author. I've only read City of Night, but I intend to seek out more Rechy books after this. Thanks!
posted by vickyverky at 10:07 AM on September 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

That's a fantastic interview. Thank you for another great post!
posted by Frowner at 10:07 AM on September 10, 2014

Ditto, I've never read City of Night, I shall have to pick it up now. Seems to be a man who takes his symbols very seriously.
posted by Diablevert at 10:40 AM on September 10, 2014

Rechy's work was actively denounced in the women's study's classes I took in the early 1980s. I immediately borrowed from my gay male friends everything he had written until then; mostly I was impressed with the quality of his writing, more than the recherche topics. My recollection is an entire class session by Janice Raymond at UMass Amherst wasted with this sex-negative feminist/gay lib movement in-fighting.

Sex won anyway.
posted by Dreidl at 10:47 AM on September 10, 2014

Rechy's work was actively denounced in the women's study's classes I took in the early 1980s.

Can I ask why?
posted by PeterMcDermott at 10:49 AM on September 10, 2014

Coincidentally, it was also the absolute last straw in my relationship with Gore Vidal when he invited me to lunch at 11:30.
posted by en forme de poire at 11:04 AM on September 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

Seriously though it's a really interesting interview. Thanks for posting it.
posted by en forme de poire at 11:05 AM on September 10, 2014

I am gobsmacked that I've never heard of him; he sounds like exactly the sort of person I'd love to read. (I'd also love to see him go toe to toe with Richard Rodriguez, given how assuredly he deflates Vidal's pomposity.)
posted by psoas at 11:10 AM on September 10, 2014

John Rechy is amazing and a true pioneer. You can't talk about queer literature or the history of modern Los Angeles without mentioning City of Night, Numbers, Rushes, and a bunch of other works. It's also true that (as he's said many times, with good reason) that he's always been marginalized because no one knows how not to pigeonhole him: “Today, I find myself a ‘Texas writer’ left out of discussions of Texas writers, a ‘Chicano writer’ omitted from anthologies of Chicano writers, a ‘California writer’ ignored in books about California. And even though I am excluded from several anthologies of homosexual writers, I am often designated as ‘a gay writer.’”

Great sidenote, in 1996, Rechy wrote a scathing letter to the New York Review of Books about its original review of City of Night that began:

"In May 1963, there appeared in your journal a piece of malice posing as a review of my first novel, City of Night. The 'review' was written by Alfred Chester. You titled it "Fruit Salad." I was young, baffled by the personal assault, and I did not protest. I’m no longer young, I understand the attack, and I protest the abuse and its recent extension."
posted by blucevalo at 11:24 AM on September 10, 2014 [4 favorites]

the whole response letter is worth a read
posted by The Whelk at 12:01 PM on September 10, 2014

Interesting contretemps. I double-checked, and the author of the blistering NYBooks review was the same guy described with such fond mournfulness in an essay of Cynthia Ozick's I read back in the day. Strange currents; I wonder why the NY Books people picked him to review it, or if he pitched it himself. The review is scathing, contemptuous, repulsed; you 'd never know from reading it that the author was an openly gay man himself. For a straight author to review the work with such disdain might be expected, in 1963; for an openly gay author to attack it so strongly seems a bit more of a puzzler, though Rechy certainly alludes to one potential explanation.
posted by Diablevert at 12:42 PM on September 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

for an openly gay author to attack it so strongly seems a bit more of a puzzler

It was only the second issue of the NYRB and while the years have forgotten Alfred Chester he was a connected guy in the NY literary circles of his day. I imagine Chester chose the book, suggested a review, and the new tabloid clutched at it. Why the hostility? Reading the review I'm going to guess that it was partly because Rechy was Not Our Kind Dear, partly for the lulz—Chester's obviously amusing himself with the review, and partly because Alfred Chester was a nut. I mean really a nut.

But to be fair, there are moments in Chester's review which are chuckleworthy in a bitchy sort of way:

"Rechy’s stories are awful, and they’re awful for two very specific reasons which may ultimately sound like one. The first is that disgusting rhetoric that Rechy pours all over everything like jam. 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."

and

"All his abortive love affairs are written out of the traditional anguished, romantic sentimentality, and of course you wish, you just wish like mad that sodomy wasn’t against the laws of heaven and earth so this sweet little whore could make it for life with some nice guy—settle down to a pretty house in the suburbs, regular job, TV, kids with corn-colored hair."

La Grande Dame. Anyway, 50 years later Chester is a footnote and Rechy is a revered elder. The key to fame is work like hell and outlive your enemies.
posted by octobersurprise at 1:28 PM on September 10, 2014 [2 favorites]

Yeah it's so bitchy and superior and dismissive and nasty, complete with Vidal saying it was "untrue but very amusing." It was a way of putting a young author in his place.
posted by The Whelk at 2:19 PM on September 10, 2014 [2 favorites]

for an openly gay author to attack it so strongly seems a bit more of a puzzler

I can understand this. When I read this in my early 20's - I had just come out and was super idealistic - I was at first attracted to the novel and then horrified. I couldn't finish. It seemed so spiritually empty. I thought: this is not the life I want. Ever.

I would have probably understood it much better if I had read the book a decade later, when I had a lot more life experience. And now City of Night seems a chronicle of a lost world. I'll probably feel sad and nostalgic.
posted by kanewai at 3:38 PM on September 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

"But the worst development is accepting the word “queer.” That’s crazy. The word is ugly, the meaning is ugly."

I never liked the word either, but I'm probably not allowed to say so. Glad he did.
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:08 PM on September 10, 2014 [1 favorite]

I never liked the word either, but I'm probably not allowed to say so.

You apparently believe you are allowed to say so, since you just did. But this raises an interesting question: who, if anyone, gets to police the language used by everyone else? Note: there's often no way to know what someone else's sexual orientation is.
posted by John Cohen at 7:46 PM on September 10, 2014

I should add: sexual orientation is fluid, and people are often confused about their own sexual orientation. So you can't really draw brights lines about what people are and aren't allowed to say based on their sexual orientation.
posted by John Cohen at 7:51 PM on September 10, 2014

Wonderful interview with Rechy. Alfred Chester did indeed go completely clinically insane, but he was a sort of brilliantly eccentric experimental writer. Diana Athill was his editor for a time, and has interesting things to say about him in Stet.
posted by VikingSword at 10:45 AM on September 11, 2014

There's also a good deal about Chester in Edward Field's memoir, The man who would marry Susan Sontag and other intimate literary portraits of the bohemian era. Allen Hibbard touches on Chester's acquaintance with Paul Bowles in Paul Bowles : Magic & Morocco.
posted by octobersurprise at 11:45 AM on September 11, 2014 [1 favorite]