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About My Life and the Kept Woman
by John Rechy
Grove Press
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John Rechy is an enduring pillar of gay literature. His first novel, City of Night, was published in 1963 -- more than a half-decade before Stonewall. Since then, Rechy has constantly been in public view, publishing 12 more novels (including the groundbreaking Numbers in 1967), as well as a book of social criticism, The Sexual Outlaw (1977), and Beneath the Skin in 2003. It's difficult to image these days the impact that City of Night had when released. Sure, there was already a wealth of gay writing published by mainstream American presses before 1962­. But City of Night was something different: overtly gritty, it was a street-level view of gay life, the story of urban hustlers and their cross-country migrations.

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t a time when gay novels tended to come out of specific literary traditions -- variations on the postwar novel or the pastoral American romance -- Rechy's debut marched to the tattoo of the Beats and the lure of the open road. But unlike Jack Kerouac's heroes, who sought freedom by going "on the road," Rechy's men attempt to define themselves, and assert their masculinity, by having sex with other men and claiming as their territory the crevices of urban decay.

Rechy took his title from James Thomson's famous 1880 poem "The City of Dreadful Night" that was a despairing hate-letter to London. Rechy erased the "dreadful" of the original, but it was certainly implied in his book's narrative. While all of his characters are on the run to find themselves, unlike Kerouac's, few ever do. The city's pall and American culture's lovelessness (the heterosexuals we met here are similarly lost) preclude any real happiness. It was a first major step that American gay fiction took to realism.

Rechy has written autobiographically in the past; certainly readers were led to believe that large portions of City of Night, Numbers, and Sexual Outlaw were based on personal experience. But the new About My Life and the Kept Woman (Grove Press, 329 pages, $24) is overtly a memoir. Rechy tells about growing up as a Mexican-American in El Paso, Texas, and trying to figure out what it means to be, not just a gay man in American of the 1950s, but a Latino living in a country filled with racism. Although Rechy, the book's narrator, does go on a series of journeys here -- from poverty to the world of Anglo literature, to the U.S. Army and Korea, from a student of writing to a published author -- the overall thrust of the memoir is less a bildungsroman than a personalized social history of aspects of the U.S. during the 1950s and the 1960s. You could sum it up as a portrait of the artist as a young homosexual Latino man.

Rechy has never been a great prose stylist, although he can shape and work with words in wonderful ways. His strength is the sheer force of honesty conveyed by prose that is plain and urgent. We are caught off-guard, and seduced, by his seeming simplicity and drive to tell his story.

Here John Rechy comes full circle. Most of the last third of About My Life and the Kept Woman details the writing and publication of City of Night -- a book that was so shocking to some at the time that a famously panicked review in The New York Review of Books even doubted that the author existed, implying that the novel was really an in-house job by hack pornographers at Grove Press. Reading of Rechy's literary studies and ambitions we get a sense of what City of Night means to both him and the American literary canon.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com