Despite a taboo-shattering six-decade career spanning 18 books and counting, Rechy has been regularly hounded by such misapprehensions. The critic even cast doubt on the existence of the Mexican American Rechy, who had written the novel on a typewriter in his mother’s house in the El Paso projects. An eviscerating takedown from the period in The New York Review of Books began with the derogatory headline “Fruit Salad” and continued like something out of a “Save the Children” literary supplement, full of homophobic epithets and excruciating puns. At some point in the ‘90s, a flavorless clothing behemoth would surely have tried to appropriate his image to sell khakis.īut while Kerouac’s 1957 countercultural opus was immediately greeted with voice-of-a-generation praise, Rechy’s 1963 debut, City of Night, was met with derision, bigotry and regular placement on banned books lists. Oscar-winning directors would have spent a half century vying to bring his gay-hustling odyssey to the big screen.
Posters of Rechy’s matinee idol profile would adorn dorm room walls, brooding above poetic aphorisms capturing the dissonant orgy of modern life. Middle of the Road” trope so exalted in Adair’s documentary.In a more reasonable America, John Rechy would be as iconic as Jack Kerouac. Putting Rechy’s text in conversation with the contemporaneous documentary Word Is Out (1977), by Peter Adair, the article establishes The Sexual Outlaw as both a response to and a parody of these landmark films, specifically by shedding light on the invisible and oft-forgotten outcasts of the LGBT community, those young outlaws of the working class who cruise and define themselves against the white and affluent “Mr.
While tracing the continuities between this text from 1977 and his earlier best-selling novels, the article locates this genre-bending novel in the context of the boom in LGBT documentaries of the time. Interrogating this characterization, the present article takes up the subtitle to Rechy’s sixth novel, The Sexual Outlaw (“a prose documentary”), as a way to analyze the novel’s generic and formal choices. Known for his controversial first novel, City of Night (1963), John Rechy is a Chicano gay writer whose reputation as a documenter of the seedy sexual underworld of hustlers and tricks has set the tone for discussions about his work.
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