I’ve wanted to read this book for decades. It’s a gay classic, a not-so-nice ‘Frontrunner.’ I’d always heard it blew the lid off the seamy underbelly of gay life, the world of hustlers and dark, forbidden sex. Finally I bought a Kindle edition, loaded it on my Android tablet and dove in. Here is what I think:
It is beautifully written. Really: Rechy is in great control of the language throughout and at times he is almost breath taking in his descriptions, his choice of words and turns of phrase.
At times it is poignant. There are moments of recognition in here that almost every gay man will experience: the hookup that never quite materializes, the longing for something more, for friendship.
It is pretty tame by today’s standards. The book was written in 1963 and is a semi-autobiographical telling of a year in the life of a male hustler, a guy who has sex with men for money. You’d expect paragraph after paragraph of lurid description, titillating scenarios. Not so. The actual mechanics of sex are left out of this book. It’s mostly about moods and atmospheres and the mini-stories of the people who pass through the hustler’s world.
Many – many – pages are devoted to drag queens, their conversations and outfits and the bars in which they hang out. I realize in the early ’60s the gay world was very underground and there was an undercurrent of thought that to be gay meant to want to be a woman. But in Rechy’s book it seems that the only masculine men are hustlers who tell themselves they’re only doing it for the money, who don’t reciprocate, who pretend to be detached from any feeling associated with the act. My how far we’ve come! Today, being gay is as much about discovering your masculine side as it is your feminine!
There’s not much of a plot here. The story doesn’t really go anywhere. I have the sense that I am reading somebody’s elaborately written diary. It is possible that Rechy was trying to show the emptiness of the hustler’s life and his eventual recognition of his need for something more, for love. There is one place near the end of the book where our hero is picked up by a ‘score’ who, after having sex and a nap, has a deep conversation with him. The talk is pointed and perceptive and touches on the reasons why one might choose to be a hustler, the empty unsustainability of that choice and the love-hunger that accompanies it. But it feels almost tacked on to this collection of anecdotes, as if it were put there to have it all mean something.
All-in-all, City of Night is a book you should read, but that may leave you unsatisfied. It did me. I’m glad I can put a check in the box on my to-do list where it says ‘Read City of Night,’ but it is nothing I will re-read. It doesn’t compare with a similarly themed book I have read three times, Christopher Bram’s ‘Hold Tight.’