“Gay men should not adopt the sophomoric model of heterosexual dating; gay men should always have sex first.”
TRQ: John Rechy, Born March 10, 1931
Novelist and literary critic John Rechy, author of City of Night (1963), was born in El Paso, Texas. His father Roberto was a distinguished musician and conductor in Mexico whose career declined once moving to the United States.
Rechy studied at Texas Western College and the New School for Social Research in New York. He taught at Occidental College, the University of Southern California, and the University of California in Los Angeles. One of the LGBT literature’s primary writers, Rechy delved into LA’s gay culture.
City of Night is Rechy’s first novel, published in 1963, in which the protagonist is a gay hustler traveling to Mardi Gras in New Orleans. The book inspired painter David Hockney’s Building, Pershing Square, Los Angeles. Rechy’s next two books, Numbers (1967) and This Day’s Death (1969), introduce increasingly graphic depictions of sex while also exploring the themes of obsession and identity. Vampires (1971), published in 1971, is a look at the nature of evil. The Fourth Angel, published in 1972, tells of four adolescents’ adventures in thrill-seeking.
The Sexual Outlaw, published in 1977, is a piece of nonfiction in which Rechy documents three days and nights in the sexual underground. Described as sensationalistic, pornographic, Rechy’s book is defiant in the face of oppression against homosexuality. For Rechy, promiscuity is revolution.
Rechy is the first novelist to receive the PEN-USA-West’s Lifetime Achievement Award (1997). He went on to receive the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from Publishing Triangle (1999). He is an NEA fellow, and a faculty member at the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California. Rechy is the first recipient of the ONE Magazine Culture Hero Award, and won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction in 2018.
Living in Encino, California, Rechy continues writing, with nearly twenty books to date.
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