Monday, May 08, 2017

CITY OF NIGHT





Shop Indie Bookstores



City of Night, John Rechy, Grove Press, 1963, 400 pp


Oh the places I go in My Big Fat Reading Project! At #7 on the 1963 bestseller list, this novel was a ground breaker in gay fiction. I had never heard of it but my cohort in the Literary Snobs reading group knew all about it. In some ways it was unlike anything I have ever read while in other ways it felt familiar compared to some of the Beat fiction I have read.

Largely autobiographical, the story follows a young man through his peripatetic nightlife as a hustler in the dark streets of El Paso, Times Square, Pershing Square (in Los Angeles), the French Quarter of New Orleans, and the Mission District of San Francisco. His lonely, frenetic existence is portrayed as a search for identity and connection but the milieu in which he searches is a desperate world of disconnection and confused identities, made up of hustlers, queens, secret slumming homosexual men, and sad women, a few of whom are lesbians. In fact, there are few women in the book and those few seemed like stereotypes. 

What was brought home to me is how horrid life could be for gay people in mid-twentieth century America. So much secrecy, confusion, guilt and personal disintegration was necessarily their plight. Though the endless rehashing of similar scenes got to be too much for me as a reader, I wondered if life is much better for gay persons in our present time.

I can't really know because I am heterosexual and though I have gay friends there is a reticence between us when it comes to talking about sexual orientation. Is that my doing? I want to ask about or discuss what that aspect of their lives is like but I feel shy about doing so. I was raised to be homophobic and confess that it took some doing to get over that prejudice. Mostly, it took reading books.

So I thank the writers who have opened their hearts and minds in their novels and memoirs, their essays and poetry. I don't mean to sound disingenuous, but like someone who hated a certain food as a kid but grew up to like it, I can barely remember what it was like to harbor that homophobia in the past. Yet, I feel more comfortable with olives than I do with my fellow human beings whose sexual orientation is different from mine.

In any case, City of Night was a wild, sometimes uncomfortable read that brought me more understanding of what is means to be human. It also made me sorrow for the ways we mistreat each other. 


(City of Night is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.) 

10 comments:

  1. To be honest, I think there is still a lot of prejudice against homosexuals. At least here...Sadly, life isn't much better for gay persons in our present time.
    I definitely want to read this book, as I have never read anything written on this topic, really.
    Thank you for your recommendation :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you for the report from Switzerland Anita!

      Delete
  2. Still another that I had never heard of, but it does sound like an interesting look into lives that are closed to many of us. I agree that reading is the way that we can open up our own minds and empathies for others whose way of being may be different from our own. I know that I am a very different person than I would have been had I never picked up a book, and I can't imagine what life would be like without the ability to enter into the lives of those diverse characters. And yet I am reliably told that there are intellectually incurious people who never read books...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Well said Dorothy. Now I am thinking about how to bring that empathy into real live conversation.

      Delete
  3. Hmm... Uncomfortable read indeed!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I love how you sum up my reviews so well!

      Delete
  4. Hi Judy, thanks for letting me know about Mary Oliver - I've now ordered a couple of her poetry books from the library. Cheers from Carole's Chatter

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. My pleasure and I hope she is yours!

      Delete
  5. It must have been more rough in 1963 being gay, though I'm sure it's not easy now either. This guy does some traveling in the book! I'm sure it's not an easy read, but you undoubtably gained some understanding it seems.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You are right. I am not sorry I read it. All part of the story.

      Delete