City of Night (1963)

I really liked John Rechy's novel of the "hustler" life circa the late '50s and early '60s. It counts as a novel officially, but obviously has connections to autobiography and memoir, telling Rechy's stories and experiences as an anonymous "youngman" traveling from New York to Los Angeles to San Francisco, Chicago, New Orleans, and points elsewhere. I learned a lot I had never known about hustling, from a time when LGBTQ+-related activity was necessarily underground if not outright against the law. Rechy does a nice job of going directly to the soul of many of the characters he meets—the queens, fairies, nellies, hustlers, and other figures populating the scene, including lots of weird johns. Maybe the big lesson again is that this community is an enduring part of the human experience and won't be denied. The only choice for anyone once they have figured it out is to be themselves, and if that means sexuality out of the mainstream that makes their courage then at least as great as it is now, when society still does not want to accept their reality and must be confronted. The novel is episodic and anecdotal and the best part may be Rechy's writing, terse and colorful. He occasionally veers off into beat styles that don't always work, but they often do and they always set an effective tone of urgency. I love all the stories and memorable characters—trans folks insisting on their realities, hustlers insisting (faintly ridiculously) on their hetero normativity, men who sought to escape themselves by marrying and having children and now wander in and out of the scene with desperation and sadness. All the rules people have in this self-enclosed world, the pettiness that erupts among them and the solidarity too, are fascinating in many different ways. City of Night served as one source for director Gus Van Sant's movie My Own Private Idaho. Like the movie, the novel is much more than a litany of lurid stories—in fact, they're not really lurid at all, given the subject, but more a series of portraits of souls in agony, attempting to find and accept themselves. That might sound pretentious, but City of Night is anything but that. It's actually one of the more profound things I've read in a while.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.