“This is all there is…sex and more sex and still more sex,” says a young gay man in John Rechy’s The Coming of the Night, getting philosophical in the middle of some coke-fueled, no-holes-barred fucking on Fire Island in the summer of 1980. “That’s all God gave only us–and to no one else–to compensate for all the shit they keep throwing at us.”
City of Night drew much of its power, and much of its cred, from the fact that it’s largely autobiographical. Rechy’s unnamed hustler protagonist is, like the author, a Mexican-Scottish native of El Paso who travels around the country. The book’s story is inextricably linked to Rechy’s own; it began not as a work of fiction but as a letter to a friend. Parts of the book were published as Rechy wrote it, traveling, hustling, and presumably living scenes that later found their way into his novel. After the book was published, Rechy’s romantic image as a cock-slinging minstrel was inevitable, helped along by his good looks and dust jacket photos that would make even Truman Capote blush.
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The pages are filled with so many questing people that Rechy must heavily stylize them in order to keep each distinct. Most of the characters (all men, except for two minor characters who depart early) are in denial–shallow denial, close to the surface. Space is tight when you have to split 244 pages among this many people, so nearly everyone’s conflicts must be spelled out as economically as possible. Internal struggles are established through overly simple formulas. Closeted Mitch convinces himself–but not his girlfriend–that he’s not checking out a hot guy on the beach. Bodybuilder Ernie constantly reminds himself his dick isn’t that small. (“He had read in a men’s fitness magazine that the average cock was five inches–and his was over that by half an inch, at least, and the fact that he wasn’t all that tall, five feet six, made it look even bigger.”) Gay basher Buzz is obsessed with anal sex, and ends up raping another story line’s protagonist, calling the victim “a queer”–and the kettle black–all the while.
As in other points in his long career, Rechy seems to be withholding emotion, struggling to distance himself from the prejudices he’s suffered as a sexy author of sexual books. In The Coming of the Night, the anguished young man from more than three decades ago has sadly chosen to think and preach, when he used to think and feel and seek.
The Coming of the Night by John Rechy, Grove Press, $24.
