John Rechy born 10 March 1934John Rechy is a Mexican-American author
Born in El Paso, Mexico, John Rechy studied journalism in Texas and New York before serving in Germany in the US Army. Returning to New York, he drifted and spent some time hustling, which inspired his early writing.
He is best known for his earlier novels City of Night (1963) and Numbers (1967) which may seem dated now, but were significant in an era when gay behaviour was evolving its identity and moving towards gay liberation and community; his novels capture the gay sexual underworld in the pre-Stonewall, and pre-Aids, years.
Although almost all of Rechy's novels contain gay characters and themes, his only two other novels to deal primarily with them are This Day's Death (1969), which tells the story of a man caught in a police vice raid in Griffith Park, and Rushes (1979), which tells the bleak story of a group of friends in an urban leather bar. Rechy also has written a nonfiction 'documentary' about three days in the life of a gay hustler, The Sexual Outlaw (1977).Yet despite these obvious examinations of gay male identity, Rechy himself has consistently derided the label of 'gay writer'; indeed, his more recent novels, Marilyn's Daughter (1988) and The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez (1991), adopt heterosexual women as their protagonists.
Rechy will most likely be remembered in the tradition of gay male writing as a brutal and lyrical chronicler of the pre-Stonewall sexual underworld.
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