John Rechy’s first and most famous novel, City of Night, was published to great acclaim from James Baldwin, Christopher Isherwood, and many others nearly forty years ago. Born in El Paso, Texas, in 1934 to Mexican immigrants, Rechy studied for a B.A. degree at Texas Western College. He continued his studies in New York before going to Germany with the U.S. army.
Rechy’s writing career began with “Mardi Gras,” originally a letter written to a friend, but published as a story in Evergreen Review no. 6 (n.d.). This formed part of City of Night (New York: Grove Press, 1963), a semiautobiographical fiction concerning hustlers, transvestites, and other street life, set largely in New York. Four years later, Rechy transferred his novelistic attentions to Los Angeles, where it has largely rested since. His celebrated Numbers (New York: Grove Press, 1967) documented the serial sexual conquests of its troubled gay narrator “Johnny Rio” in L.A.’s Griffith Park. Three further novels followed: This Day’s Death (New York: Grove Press, 1969), concerning sexual entrapment in Griffith Park; the gothic The Vampires (New York: Grove Press, 1971); and The Fourth Angel (London: W. H. Allen, 1972; New York: Richard Seaver/ Viking, 1973), which features a collection of disaffected L.A. youth.
However, it was the nonfictional The Sexual Outlaw: A Documentary (New York: Grove Press, 1977), a return to the world of public sex of Rechy’s first two novels, which next caught the attention of many gay readers. Rushes (New York: Grove Press, 1979), a controversial fictional exploration of the gay S&M subculture, was followed by Bodies and Souls (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1983), a return to the teenage world of The Fourth Angel.
The 1980s saw Rechy move away from predominantly gay subject matter. The thriller Marilyn’s Daughter (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1988) examined the nature of celebrity, using the example of Monroe. The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez (New York: Little, Brown, 1991) considered the life of a poor Mexican-American woman in Los Angeles. Our Lady of Babylon (New York: Arcade, 1996) deployed elements of fantasy to review Rechy’s background, career, and reputation.
The Coming of the Night (New York: Grove Press, 1999), Rechy’s most recent novel, has marked a return to the themes of City of Night and Numbers. It concentrates on a 24-hour period in 1981 as the HIV virus first reaches L.A.’s gay sexual subculture. While writing this, Rechy continued working on “Autobiography: A Novel,” a sequel to City of Night. An excerpt from “Autobiography” (“Love in the Backrooms”) was published in George Stambolian, ed., Men on Men 4 (New York: Plume, 1992).
Rechy has adapted Rushes for the stage, and written two other plays, Tigers Wild and Momma as She Became—But Not as She Was. He has also adapted City of Night for film. Rechy was awarded the Publishing Triangle’s Lifetime Achievement Award and the PEN-Hemingway USA West’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997. His home is in Los Angeles, where this interview took place on Friday, November 21, 1997.
RC You’ve often spoken of the relationship between fiction and autobiography, and of fiction as a way through to autobiography. Obviously such topics are relevant to your earlier works: City of Night, Numbers, and The Sexual Outlaw play on and between these genres. Recent novels, though—especially your last, Our Lady of Babylon—contain a lot more invention, transposition, and self-conscious fantasy. Nevertheless that fantasy, I still felt, was deployed as context for concerns which remained autobiographical.
JR That’s very astute. I wish others who’d read Our Lady of Babylon and purported to write about it had been quite so astute. In point of fact, it’s not really a deviation from my work; nor was Marilyn’s Daughter. I’m always dealing with self-creation—the imagination and the transformation of imagination into reality, which is, of course, the whole concept of art. In Marilyn Monroe’s case, this involved the literal change of an ordinary young girl into a sexual goddess, and also my own fascination not only with the transforming of my work into form but also of my body into form.
RC What led you to the highly allusive, intertextual handling of such themes in Our Lady of Babylon?
JR The primary influence was the passage I quote from the Book of Revelation about Our Lady of Babylon, and my fascination with who that illusive figure could be: the woman who was branded the mother of all transgressions; mother of all sinners. I think society’s hatred of homosexual men is really an extended hatred by the heterosexual male of the female, so I found that very relevant and it comes into play in the book. My view about why homosexuality’s so detested is that the powerful group in society—heterosexual males—considers it an abdication of their maleness; therefore, a betrayal of their machismo. They equate homosexuality in their wayward equations with choosing to be the weak female. Yet of course the female controls them by her passion and power. So my fascination with women like Our Lady of Babylon is that they’ve been blamed for enormous catastrophes because of their sensuality. Sensuality’s a subject I write about all the time.
RC To some readers, your recent books simply suggested a moving away from your earlier preoccupations—specifically, with male homosexuality—in favor of considering the social position of women.
JR Yes. Of course it’s nonsense because there’s a connection. But as early as City of Night I was already dealing with form, appearance, and the idea of converting oneself into the figure of what one appears to be. I dealt with that idea constantly in my earliest books. The narrator of City of Night is a very sensitive young man who converts himself into a pose. So are all my other characters, such as Marilyn Monroe who fascinates me. So I’m developing themes I’ve dealt with all along.
I consider Our Lady of Babylon possibly my best book. I think I’ve been evolving towards it. I’ve always been very attentive towards literary form. The misconception occurred early on that I was an accidental writer; that I hadn’t actually written these books, even—all kinds of nonsense. Because the subject was sexual, the form and structure of the books wasn’t viewed.
RC There was that odd review of City of Night which suggested “John Rechy” didn’t exist.1 You rework that in Our Lady of Babylon.
JR Yes. I have a passage in Our Lady of Babylon in which Our Lady’s in a salon—supposedly with Racine. I placed Alfred Chester there, the critic in question, and Richard Gilman, who was another. They’re both there questioning the identity of a writer Our Lady knows very intimately.
RC You’ve repeatedly said that formal questions are neglected in accounts of your work. There’s such a distinctive form to Our Lady of Babylon, however, that, though we can speak of continuities with the earlier works, at the same time there seems to be a formal break in your embrace of an entirely fantastic world. What led you to that?
JR Well, Our Lady of Babylon’s actually very realistic. I’ve yet to encounter anyone who understands what I do at the end of it; what makes it—to me—an astonishing literary creation. At the end, a new interpretation of the book’s form is revealed, which is that it may be that Our Lady of Babylon is really a very wounded woman, living in Los Angeles in some kind of tenement. She lives next door to an outrageous psychic, who’s out to exploit her but actually takes compassion and listens to all her stories—stories which then find a parallel in the very tragic, realistic life of a woman from a great family. She’s like a Patty Hearst figure who gets abused by men, is forced to kill her own child, moves into drugs, becomes a prostitute, and therefore sinks into this grandeur of imagination. Finally she sets out to become all violated women. Then I wanted to add an additional twist, which is that at the end I reverse it all and have her now—through this experience—having achieved what she was only pretending to be.
It was very carefully prepared. Every myth in the book corresponds to something that might have happened to this woman. Her lover may have committed suicide; that becomes Adam’s suicide. Her tyrannical father sent her out; that becomes God expelling Our Lady. She’s had various lovers, some of whom have abused her, and one of whom did love her—the man who pimped for her. The novel within the novel reasserts certain themes of the book, which may after all exist in the present day, as a satire on this great family, this American dynasty.
RC When writing Our Lady of Babylon, you must have been aware of the danger that its blasphemy and shock value could blind readers to these other elements. Were you conscious of writing only for the most discriminating readership?
JR I always have. I can tell you truthfully that when I wrote City of Night, I was convinced it would be critically hailed and sell very little. The reverse occurred—which astonished me.
I find very distressing the kind of censorship that came and squelched Our Lady of Babylon. The publisher ran scared. With my next book, The Coming of the Night, I’m convinced people will say I’ve run away from this new direction. In fact, I’ve done nothing of the kind, though at the same time it returns to the subject I left with City of Night. This will also be the first time I deal with AIDS, though I don’t mention it.
RC Why not?
JR The book takes place on one day in 1981; AIDS wasn’t even named at the time. I imagine a day in summer in Los Angeles when AIDS entered the city. I gather all the characters in a single sexual encounter. It’s based on something I saw, and couldn’t bear to write about all these years. The interim wasn’t the time for this book to be written. It’s only now that there seems to be something more hopeful with AIDS—though, then again, a greater danger of the replication of the whole thing, too—that I feel it’s right.
RC Wasn’t your other work-in-progress, “Autobiography: A Novel,” going to reach into the time of AIDS?
JR Yes, but that will deal completely with its arrival, then move through to the present. The Coming of the Night concerns simply one day. It was a memory that haunted me of something I actually saw in 1981. It was so powerful that I haven’t been able to shed it. In West Hollywood Park one very hot Santana night, a very beautiful young man pressed himself against a toolshed, pulled off his clothes, and allowed everybody to fuck him. It was right when people were asking: “Have you heard? No, it’s impossible.”
I wanted to convey the franticness that had been reached in gay men’s lives, where we were now in danger of surrendering everything to our sexuality and entering a new time of danger, where that same confusion of realms may occur. It’s about the question of where abundant sex is rich and where it devours us. I don’t mean only in illness, but when psychically it destroys us.
RC Taking your works together, you’ve very carefully documented both contexts in which sex seems to you liberating, and those in which it seems the opposite.
JR Yes. I think the line’s clear. I think confusions occur presently because of a lot of loud-mouthed people who I wish would shut up. Abundant sexuality—which is what I’ve always propounded and continue to—is one thing. But then there’s pushing that to a point where everything else is throttled and sex is no longer sex, but dips into a self-hatred which then takes over entirely. That’s what I saw coming and wrote about in Rushes. That’s when I stopped writing about the homosexual world. I thought we’d reached a dead end—not because of AIDS, which nobody foresaw, but because I thought we were now destroying ourselves and confusing sensation with violence and humiliation.
RC Presumably this was not a message people wanted to hear then.
JR That’s right. Likewise I remember when The Sexual Outlaw came out. People thought it was very romantic; everybody bought it. Then there was an incredible wave against it, when people reached the point where I very intelligently discussed S&M and my opposition to it. I don’t think the people who once admired me on incorrect grounds have ever recovered from the discovery that I’d feel that way about S&M—and from my own participation in it, which is important.
RC You spoke of sexual drives spilling over into self-hatred. Is this behind your dismissal of S&M?
JR Yes. In fact, I say the most honest manifestation of what’s happening to us occurs in S&M. It’s the most honest, yet most destructive form of relationship. [Gay porn director] Fred Halstead and I were friends some years back. We’d seem to be diametrically opposed philosophically, but we got along very well. He agreed with me about S&M, but said: “I like that sense of humiliation.” My point was that humiliation is there in gay lives; that it’s the most destructive thing on our horizon and the main thing that keeps us from freeing ourselves, as long as we ritualize it and turn it into another lifestyle and don’t question it. I’d never suggest banning it or anything of the sort. I’d fight against anyone who wanted to do that, or close bars or anything. But people should just question it.
RC Why does gay sexual culture tend toward extremes? On the one hand there’s extreme sexual libertarianism. On the other, there’s monogamy, self-censorship, the fight for gay marriage. Then there’s the debate over the middle ground.
JR Which is a terrible one. For one thing, that nonsense about monogamy doesn’t take into consideration what we are and how difficult it is in the gay world. I can see a new development where we’d have gay spinsters whom we’d ostracize for not having found a partner. I hate the word lover, by the way. But the question of dealing in extremities makes me want to speak of that nonsense that divides our history at an event called Stonewall. What an absolute abomination that is—the way of thinking that makes a line and says: “Before this, all was repressed; after this, all was liberated.” It’s wrong on both counts. It distorts history and becomes very harmful.
RC In literary terms, it suggests a disservice to a range of gay writers published before the 1970s.
JR Yes. It is a disservice because the literature hasn’t really changed. It’s crass stupidity, yet people go along with it: the “Stonewall Parade”; the terms “before Stonewall” and “after Stonewall.” Stonewall was one event. But equally disastrous is the fact that the line indicates that, after it, everything became liberated, whereas in reality we were faced with sexual excess and AIDS. How could we say our horizons had been cleansed?
RC Clearly, “Stonewall” and the distinction it led to is a myth. The question must be: “Why is it so prevalent?”
JR I’ll give you one reason. You’re going to think I’m being flippant, but I’m not—truly. The fucking thing occurred in New York! A lot of those New York homosexuals were there. A myth’s made when somebody’s there to record it. There were several people there to do that. It happened in New York; there were a lot of people about then, so it became the nonsense it is. Meanwhile we had the Black Cat riots here in Los Angeles. I’d been in several demonstrations and parades on Hollywood Boulevard and the raid on the Slave Auctions and the trials that happened out of that.
RC Some books seem to suggest New York invented “gay.”
JR There’s a dreadful book out now, Charles Kaiser’s The Gay Metropolis, that says just that. It’s very much like the clutch that New York has in determining literary things. The New York establishment has had to deal with me, but it hasn’t done so correctly. This is one reason I’m so glad just to have received the PEN-Hemingway West Coast award.
RC The idea of gay literature emerging in the seventies ignores your own early work. But are there other writers you feel have been similarly neglected?
JR Well, I don’t want this to seem self-serving, but in effect it will be. When I look at literature that’s considered “pre-Stonewall,” I find so much defiance and honest-to-God pride because there were real dangers then. The dangers were jail, arrest, persecution. Nevertheless, you have a book like Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man, which is beautifully accepting and full of pride. Then you have the brazenness of Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge—my God! And I have mixed feelings about Mr. Vidal. We’ve had conflicts, and for good reason. But that doesn’t detract from the fact that Myra Breckinridge is a work of absolute revolution in its questioning of genders, in its gender transformations back and forth, and in its mockery of attitudes. It’s much more revolutionary than anything I could mention that’s recently been published.
RC These two examples, and many gay novels predating Stonewall, generally didn’t consider themes of sexuality and sexual identity narrowly, or even as the main focus of interest. Have there been more recent works of comparable breadth?
JR None! Let me say this without qualifier or hesitation: I’m always astonished at some of the attitudes of the people who criticize pre-Stonewall culture. They’re based on ideas I propounded back in 1977 in The Sexual Outlaw. I was on a conference panel where some of the things I’d expressed in that book came out. It really is silly when you think of some of the things that present themselves as so brave and daring. If you go back to The Sexual Outlaw, you’ll know what an enormous effect it has had—nowadays, always without attribution.
RC Since your novels were always about blurring the boundary between the real and the imaginary, between fiction and autobiography, why was The Sexual Outlaw classified as nonfiction?
JR I didn’t really care whether it was or not. I think that the line between fiction and nonfiction’s blurred. I don’t see any rigid separation.
RC You’ve spoken of the importance of the authenticity of that book, though.
JR Yes, but The Sexual Outlaw’s also a composite. That’s why I very carefully called it a “documentary.” A documentary isn’t just a camera sat down; a documentary’s a composite too. That book, again, is very carefully structured. I was doing something new in form, which wasn’t seen.
RC You speak of its structure and form in terms of an analogy with film. Has film been an influence generally in the structuring of your work?
JR Yes. Both film and comic strips were great influences—on a lot of the large images especially. I used to love movie serials such as Terry and the Pirates. I loved comic books like Batman and Robin too. I always saw myself as Batman; never Robin. They were both great visual influences. My writing’s mostly very visual; almost filmic.
RC There’s the scale of your books too. They have the ambitious canvas of cinema. People talked of Christopher Isherwood being influenced by film, but he isn’t—not in this sense, anyway.
JR No. Christopher’s being influenced by film would’ve been because he wrote so many screenplays—very good ones. I knew Chris and got along with him. One of my friends here’s another Englishman, Gavin Lambert, who dealt with all sorts of wonderful things in his novels such as The Slide Area. He’s terrific.
I’m not nostalgic about past times. I just very much resent attitudes that were created in the past now being arrogated as only from the present. Some of these fuckers don’t even know what it was like to walk into a goddamn bar where you could get busted for walking in. Most gay people think history begins the last time they had sex with somebody. I’ve pointed out that our history’s very long, but the record of it’s very short. The gay culture I know is very often unconcerned about that. I know it’s terribly unpopular to think this, but there are reasons for it being so. The reasons lie in our oppression. As long as we don’t deal with those, the thing extends.
RC This suggests that “gay culture,” if there is such a thing, hasn’t come very far. To look at it from the outside, for example, one measure of the maturity of a community might be the extent to which it can take criticism. Gay culture often can’t. Positive images, for example, still have a hold on gay creativity.
JR Yes—that nonsense of positive images and of the artist as role model! We have to be cheerleaders. Then there’s the posturing around the idea that everything’s liberated now. We’ve just had our Holocaust, yet that, apparently, doesn’t lie in anything we did. Promiscuity’s not to blame; it isn’t the reason for AIDS. AIDS is just an illness, and out of it we’ve seen a lot of courage. But now I think there’s a lot of recklessness appearing in people’s attitudes, and a forgetting of the courage that emerged out of AIDS.
If I sound a bit saddened about the whole thing, it’s because of things which haven’t happened, especially because we’re saying they have. The evidence is overwhelming that they haven’t. The danger is that in insisting they have, we’ll simply perpetuate the same disasters. Also, look at what’s happening to our art and literature. It’s getting smaller and more narrow. We now have a genre called “gay literature.”
RC Which is more numerous, though.
JR Yes, but very little real art’s emerging from that subject anymore—and I read a lot.
RC The context of fiction seems a good one to test out your ideas. In fiction, one might expect the dissident voice to appear.
JR Yes—not only the dissident voice, but the dissident artistic voice; the intelligent voice. But you have writers now who delight in squabbling with each other about who had more sex. Really silly things. So I find the literature’s shrinking.
RC Notwithstanding these reservations, are there fiction writers—gay or not—whose new work you seek out? When does a book come out and you say: “I have to read that”?
JR I get sent every gay book that appears. The demands now are for a gay writer to write about gay subjects. We’re not even penetrating the state of literature. I’m delighted when I learn my books are taught in literature courses—which several are. A whole course is going to be done on my literature at Irvington University. My Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez I’m going to Harvard to lecture on. I think something’s happened that didn’t happen before: gay freedom has allowed us now to ghettoize and see only each other; so we preserve all our attitudes—which are all the same attitudes.
RC Some gay writers I speak to suggest they resist ghettoization in their work, and that they write about archetypal and/or nongay themes: the state of the family, for example.
JR Yes. I was writing about the need for that in The Sexual Outlaw. I don’t like to talk about individual writers; it always seems as if one’s in competition. But I can say that in general the reaction against David Leavitt and his work has been very symptomatic of the problems we face. I think he too was seen to be deviating from the expected. I’m not saying I admired him any more than any other writer, but because he was deviating by putting things in a greater context—whether he was achieving it or not, attempting to create literature—I think you now have him being pushed away most dramatically. It becomes rote that a dismissal of such a writer has to occur.
RC I wanted to ask you about writing practice. How do you approach writing?
JR I’ve gone through the whole evolution of it. I began writing in longhand; then moved to a Royal typewriter my father had bought me. Then I moved to a rented Underwood, which is still here, on which City of Night was written. I couldn’t part with it, so I bought it. Then I bought an IBM Selectric; now I use a computer. However, I still print out all the drafts and rework everything in pencil. I don’t think I’ve ever written anything, including my articles, that hasn’t gone through at least twelve complete drafts. The finished one begins at around the sixth draft; then begins the honing for language, sense, structure.
RC How much do you have before the first draft?
JR Well, I’ve used many different techniques. For example, City of Night began as a letter, which is well known. It was written entirely out of sequence. It almost killed me trying to bring it all together, in fact. Numbers, on the other hand, was written in three months. I had the sexual experiences in Griffith Park and, with the same urgency to give meaning to those adventures, I wrote Numbers.
RC You’ve vividly described yourself at the steering wheel, dictating parts of that book to your mother, who sat in the passenger seat with notepad and pen. Are you going to insist that image is true?
JR Yes! How can I convince you it’s true? I know. When we were children, my mother’s firstborn was called Valesqua. She died before I was born. She became a saint-figure in our Mexican-Catholic upbringing. When we didn’t want to doubt anything somebody said, we’d say: “In the name of my dead sister Valesqua.” What followed then was never questioned. We used that as children, but I’m going to borrow it now to say that, in the name of my dead sister Valesqua, Numbers was begun on the console of my Mustang. I looked up and saw Los Angeles, all shrouded. My mother was with me. She hadn’t stayed with me in Los Angeles; I was in a motel. The pad was a legal pad; she held it and I wrote.
Numbers was as near as possible to autobiography. How can you recapture experience? Now, if you asked me whether City of Night was entirely autobiographical, I’d say: “Of course not.” It’s what is remembered.
RC Do you mean to say that as soon as you describe experience, you’re lying? That language is lying, in effect?
JR Of course it is. There was something really wonderful about where I got the PEN-Hemingway Lifetime Achievement award. It was at the Biltmore Hotel, downtown. Many years earlier, when I was hustling in Pershing Square, a gentleman tried to get me into that same hotel. We were accosted by the detective and I was sent out. Many years later in the same hotel, I received a Lifetime Achievement award for my writing. That feels appropriate.
RC I wanted to ask about your coinages: your use of the term “youngman,” for instance. Did you start doing that by chance?
JR In point of fact not. It always astonishes me that that particular combination’s credited to me. My goodness, I borrowed it from John Dos Passos. It just seemed good. The odd capitalization I used, though I developed it into a theory of my own, comes from A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh. Nobody’s ever asked me about that before. But you can find “youngman” and other combined words in Dos Passos. That wasn’t imitation. It was being influenced by something very good.
RC In your recent books, how much of a project’s clear from the start? Is the shape and size of a book clear, for instance?
JR Increasingly so. This new book The Coming of the Night was shaped in my mind. Our Lady of Babylon was too. They usually become grander though. I sometimes think I’m going to write a short novel; by the end, it’s become much bigger. Like Bodies and Souls, another of my best books. I began calling it Bodies. It was about people who cherished formations of the body. Then it became Bodies and Souls and just grew. I think Rushes is my perfect novel. It takes place in a leather bar, ends up in an S&M orgy, and is constructed just like a mass. Rushes is perfect in terms of structure, theme, language, and narrative all coming together.
RC Numbers is the book that has received most attention from critics.
JR Numbers isn’t bad, though it’s very flawed. I’m the best critic of my work. I wouldn’t change a word of City of Night, but I wouldn’t write it like that again. God, what I thought was so realistic is so romantic and so young! Numbers is flawed—though I love it—simply because it doesn’t have the thrust of horror which I wanted throughout. There’s a sag in the middle. After it, I wrote a horrifying book—This Day’s Death—which I’ve asked to be left out of print. It’ll never be published again until I lose control of it. It’s terrible. Then I wrote The Vampires, which augurs The Coming of the Night; then The Fourth Angel, a very wonderful book about my mother’s death, where I change myself into a child. Then came The Sexual Outlaw, which is very good, though some of the essays by their very nature have become a bit dated. But the form of it’s superb. If you look at my work, you’ll see I’ve adapted style to content. Call it arrogance, but fuck it, I am at a point where I can be arrogant for Christ’s sake: I’d compare my sentences to those of any other writer—gay, bisexual, Chicano, female, whatever.
RC Who would you want them to be compared to?
JR The best. Anybody where somebody’d say: “This is the best we have.”
RC In your case, who’s the best?
JR I don’t really want to say that. I veer away from that hierarchy.
RC It’s just that in Our Lady of Babylon and in Marilyn’s Daughter, there is so much literary cross-referencing.
JR Well, Nabokov, very much. Henry James. They’re both dead, so I’m safe. But I’ve found it very troublesome to mention modern writers. Emily Brontë—I loved the melodrama and the toughness that lies under her so-called romanticism. There’s a parallel between the theme of my Marilyn’s Daughter and Brontë’s Wuthering Heights: in both, a very frail young woman has enormous power. I also admire Marcel Proust very much and James Joyce. I finished a lecture on Joyce last night.
There are some contemporary writers I think are terrific; first-rate. But I really don’t like to evaluate them here.
RC I want to return to the various stages in the creation of your works. What does a first draft typically look like? Is it a rather unformed outpouring of ideas, in need of much shaping, given how many revisions you said you typically make?
JR Yes. The Coming of the Night I’ve actually finished, for instance. But I haven’t had chance to do the crafting. It’s all very loose, but I’ve put everything down. Now my mind’s ordering much more as I go. The books start finding their form much more clearly. Then I have much more time to craft; to sculpt.
RC Is the experience of writing things down as first draft typically much quicker than the subsequent crafting?
JR Well, I’ve used different approaches. City of Night was written chapter by chapter. I wouldn’t let a chapter go until it was finished. That was stupid and drove me crazy. Numbers was written from an outline. First I knew what I was going to write; then there was this anarchy of memories. When we reached El Paso in the Mustang, I had the opening of the book, as I said. I didn’t have it refined, but I did have the opening pages. Then I outlined: in this chapter, Johnny Rio did such-and-such, giving order where there had been none. The reason This Day’s Death became so bad was that it was dealing in a trial I was involved in. I’d been arrested myself and I couldn’t shape it. But a book that ended up relatively short, like The Vampires, was originally two thousand pages long.
RC Do you have all the drafts of your books?
JR Yes, except for the original manuscripts of City of Night, which were all destroyed. But I have the galleys on which I rewrote that book.
RC Why did you destroy the manuscripts?
JR Romantic stupidity.
RC That sounds like regret.
JR Oh, absolute regret—good Lord.
RC Is it financial regret in part?
JR Financial regret, yes, though what’s really now considered the acquistion at Boston where my papers are are the galley proofs on which City of Night was virtually rewritten in pencil. Now I keep all my manuscripts. I could show you boxes of pages of Our Lady of Babylon.
RC Is the process of revising your work, then, usually more a matter of cutting down material than adding to it?
JR Of course. I wish I could show you some pages from an early draft. Sometimes you’ll find in twenty pages that maybe one phrase will remain. This is one thing that delights me so much about getting the PEN prize: I’m a terrific writer, and it hasn’t been acknowledged.
RC Fiction’s invariably considered and discussed more widely in terms of content than technique and craft. In your case, the kinds of things you wrote about and the frankness with which you wrote about them both contributed to a certain notoriety which led people way from thinking of you in literary terms.
JR Yes. It’d be sheer ignorance to deny that.
RC Don’t you feel you contributed to it to some extent? That sweaty, topless photograph of you on the cover of some of the books, for example. You were having fun.
JR Of course. Also, my enormous narcissism comes into play. There was a certain amount of exhibitionism in that; my delight in my body and in bodybuilding. All those things come into play and all of them alienate. I know that. On the other hand, that’s part of the creation; it is what I am now. When a book’s formed, then it becomes an art form. So now I’m saying: “Yes, all these other things are there; now look at this—look at craft.”
RC Do you think the humor in the books has been acknowledged? When you spoke of your narcissism, it occurred to me that where critics were preoccupied with that, they took it far too seriously. Surely it was meant to be amusing.
JR Well, I think I’m hilarious, so of course it is. Something I put in the books that’s missed is that they’re not only about myself, my bodybuilding and posturing. They’re also about the posture being crushed, whether in reality or within the books themselves. So the humor in that’s enormous, and the awareness of the posturing is very much there.
RC Our Lady of Babylon is funny, too—maybe because this great abstraction, this move away from something immediately true to something fantastic and untrue; this diffuse approach—not withstanding what you’ve said about it also being realistic—to your own experiences and to your own literary reputation: all this makes the humor that much more obvious.
JR But the humor’s always been there. The sections on the queens in City of Night are hilarious. In Numbers Johnny Rio does some things that are very serious but absolutely hilarious.
RC In that book I’d mention the “double standoff” scene, where neither sexual partner will feminize himself by making the first move.
JR Yes. And the playing at cowboys with their cocks, for example, which to me’s parody. I’ve played at that myself, yet I find it really hilarious.
Now about Our Lady of Babylon being realistic: look, that’s only on a certain level, because obviously it’s also an enormous fantasy—those two women sitting there having tea; the beautiful character Emily Guildo, the peacock.
But the humor’s always there. I have characters in The Coming of the Night that I love, and that make me laugh, particularly in their poses, because I share their knowledge of posturing. It’s an art form, and a good one.
RC Its physicality makes it a difficult thing to capture in language, I suppose. In a sense, body language is the opposite of written or spoken language; after all, it involves a decision not to render oneself through language but something else.
JR Yes, but one can convey it. The language itself can be very narcissistic and humorous. In one passage in Our Lady of Babylon I have God exhorting the angels, and directing them in a certain entertainment. I give to God verbatim a little lecture I give my students. It’s about how to highlight this and that. Then I give him some of the same gestures I’ve been told I use. That amuses me very much.
Something I appreciated very much happened some years back when I was teaching at UCLA. I was still on the streets. At about three o’clock in the morning on Santa Monica Boulevard—which was thriving then—I was standing without a shirt, with an oiled body, obviously ready for a certain person. A young gentleman drove by in a car, lowered his window and said: “Good evening, Professor Rechy, are you out for an evening stroll?” I loved that. It called into account the duality of the situation, and its humor: the fact that I was both teaching at UCLA and standing on the street. This young artist came along and brought the two together.
RC He caught you staging yourself in another context, and, in effect, gave you permission.
JR Exactly. It was thrilling; a terrific moment. I’d have given him a prize for that. In my writing I try very much to bring the sort of energy there was in that moment.
RC Do you miss that sort of self-staging on the street? Are there other contexts now—university lecturing, perhaps—which offer similar opportunities?
JR Well, I’m still very good at posturing when I’m not a writer. I’m a very good actor. I adhere to my philosophy of living, which is that one should live as the star of one’s life.
RC You’ve always experimented with voice and person. I’m interested in how you’d characterize writing in the first person as opposed to the third person.
JR It just happens. I don’t really know how. I just start and the voice’s there. Sometimes I get confused about it. For example, there are times when I think Numbers is told in the first person. For a moment when we were talking about it, I thought Marilyn’s Daughter was told in the first person, but it isn’t.
RC Throughout your career, you’ve oscillated between voices. But you’re saying you don’t think of that as significant?
JR I really don’t. One could say: the closer you are to the thing, the more likely you are to use someone like you. But that’s not so, because though the material in Our Lady of Babylon is very close to me, I use a fabrication.
RC Our Lady of Babylon involves a sort of merge. There’s a first-person narration, but for extended narrative sections, it gives way to the third person.
JR Exactly. I’m glad you saw that so clearly. I wanted the voice to disappear.
RC In earlier works, though, you’ve more of a split. A new reader of your first two novels might say: “There’s a clear split or movement here.” What’s the shift from the first-person voice of City of Night to the third-person one in Numbers about?
JR I really don’t know. It’s like explaining the fact that “youngman” came from Dos Passos, and knowing I’ll strip some kind of mythical quality from the book. I can tell you that the first person of City of Night probably came out of the fact that I started it as a letter, then simply continued in the same voice. Why did I choose Johnny Rio in Numbers? I used to use that name on the street myself. It was very wonderful because after Numbers came out, I returned to the park as Johnny Rio—in Boston, in fact. A gentleman said somebody’d written a book about me, not knowing I was the author. That sort of thing pleases me very much. As a writer, I’ve then become my own character.
I was still cruising after The Sexual Outlaw came out. Somebody would take me home and I’d see a copy of the book. Later I’d tell a friend of mine, who’d say: “How could you possibly keep from saying you wrote the book?” But the whole thing would’ve been destroyed. It was and continues to be a private pleasure of mine. I don’t like to play writer.
RC What do you mean by that exactly?
JR Well, when I’m talking like this to you, I want to be thought of strictly as a writer. But I don’t like to play writer in the sense that writers assume a role born of what they think a writer is; what they carry with them. I like to shed that when I go out.
For example, because this apartment doesn’t look like it belongs to the person I was pretending to be on the street, if anybody came over here from the street context, I’d say: “I’m keeping this place for somebody,” because I’d clash with the surroundings. That’s also the source of my fascination with Marilyn Monroe. I think she undid herself because she forgot she was always Norma Jean.
RC This move between extreme or oppositional roles is figured in the earlier books as something to do with the need to escape: to escape background, identity, family.
JR Yes. But it’s really escape from death. In Numbers I modeled a man who at the end of the book becomes death. He stalks Johnny Rio, who tries to push him away.
RC So if one were to say your theme is death; that your work’s about death . . .
JR That would be right. That, and transformation: the transformation from what one is to what one becomes or appears to be.
RC This brings us neatly to film. Have filmmakers taken an interest in your work?
JR Yes, and I’ve influenced several of them. There is a thrilling script of City of Night that I wrote myself that’s completely accurate to the original. Everybody who reads it loves it.
RC But nobody proposes to make it?
JR Well, for one thing, it’d be very expensive, unlike the small movies we’re allowed today. This would have to have an epic scope.
RC There are problems with the graphicness of the sexual material, presumably?
JR Sure. It’s very sensual and sexual. And I’d kill whoever played the lead.
RC Do you mind if it never gets made?
JR I’d love it to be made, only because my companion’s a brilliant director; eventually he’d make it, and that would bring us even closer together. That I’d like to see.
RC I wanted to ask why “Autobiography: A Novel” has taken so long. Parts of it were published some years ago: “Love in the Backrooms” featured in Men on Men 4, for instance. Have you been writing it alongside or between other projects?
JR It’s been happening simultaneously with other things. “Autobiography” will be the book that brings everything together. A CD-Rom’s being made on it—an equivalent to the book in CD-Rom form, where you can move into certain areas and reinterpret them visually. That’s why this person went to Boston University—to get all my photographs. “Autobiography” has taken me a very long time. It’ll be my Remembrance of Things Past. It moves from the thirties to the present. It will be very long—it already is. There are different versions of it, because it keeps changing. I may never finish it, but if not, I’ll let my life be it instead.
RC Do you have any idea when it will feel right to close it?
JR I think once I’ve moved from The Coming of the Night, I’m going to move into “Autobiography” and concentrate on finishing it.
RC Apart from “Autobiography,” have you invariably worked on a single project for a fixed period of time before moving on?
JR No, several books have come between others. For example, The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez I had no intention of writing. I was sunbathing in Griffith Park and saw two clouds intersecting. I thought: “My God—those look like a cross. What would a Mexican woman from my background think of that? She’d think it was a miracle.” I stopped Our Lady of Babylon, which was already in a thousand-page draft, to write The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez. I stopped something else to write Marilyn’s Daughter. I’ve stopped several books when another one takes over. I probably stopped “Autobiography” to write The Coming of the Night.
RC Are there ideas that don’t work: abandoned projects, in other words?
JR Sure. I know Christopher Isherwood put out a book called Exhumations. I’d put out a book called Extractions, featuring what I’ve taken out of books and ideas for books. I think a book about the books and stories one has never written would be fascinating.
RC I was thinking specifically of a project you might have tried to execute; then, at a certain stage, realized wasn’t what you thought it was, or lacked, for the time being, a suitable form.
JR Well, they develop. For example, Bodies and Souls was originally just about people who specialized in constructing their bodies; then it moved far beyond that. It became entirely other than what I’d intended. I never abandon anything though. I wish I had: with This Day’s Death, I wish I’d done what I knew I should when I saw I was going out of control. But I couldn’t bring it back. I should just not have written it. But if I start a book, I’ll finish it. I’ve started stories that I don’t finish, though. But a book’s a major commitment and too big to let go of.
RC It seems as if ideas come easily to you; there are always enough of them.
JR There are always too many! There are so many I’ll never write.
RC Have you never suffered from writer’s block?
JR I don’t believe there’s such a thing. I think it’s a fancy name. I mean, “grass-mowing block”; “plant-watering block”: these are things we don’t want to do. But you give it a fancy name. None of the writers in my workshop had better tell me they’re suffering from writer’s block. Just write—and keep writing. But don’t be fancy by calling that writer’s block. It’s nothing but laziness. If you don’t want to write, you don’t write.
RC How much writing are you capable of in a day?
JR When I’m really into a book, I can write from the time I get up without stopping—after I’ve worked out, that is. Working out’s an ordering device. I work out with weights for two hours, four days a week. I’ve written fifty pages in one sitting.
RC Some writers prefer to start in the early morning, before their heads fill with other things. It’s interesting that you like to work out first.
JR I do it early morning on the mornings I don’t work out. But my energy’s higher when I’ve worked out; and working out’s become a part of my life. Once I’ve worked out, I’m very energized and ready to write.
RC You spoke of not being interested in the idea of the retiring, disengaged writer. But there’s always something solitary about writing itself, isn’t there?
JR Of course. I don’t mind the withdrawal. In fact, I’m as close to reclusive as one can get and still go out as much as I do. The older I get, the more selective I am about things. I cherish my home life. Michael and I’ve been looking for a house together. The reason we haven’t lived together until now is because of my need for privacy. When we do find a house, it’ll have separate quarters. It worries me that he’s so much younger than I am. He might be sacrificing some of his own contacts. Anyhow, we live a very good life.
RC I wanted to ask about your creative writing teaching. Some writers involved in teaching are privately skeptical about how much can be taught.
JR The majority. But I could show you at least twenty novels either dedicated to me or acknowledging me—books that I’ve nursed from the very beginning.
RC So you do believe creative writing can be taught?
JR I don’t think you can teach it exactly. But if you find talent you can certainly encourage it; make it much better by bringing consciousness to it: the same consciousness I bring to my own writing; a consciousness of technique.
RC But you didn’t need that nurturing yourself.
JR No, truthfully I didn’t. But so what? Maybe I’d have written twenty books if I’d had that.
RC The finding of the letter which led to City of Night suggests the accidental finding within yourself of John Rechy, the writer. Was that how it began—accidentally?
JR No, that isn’t true because I’d already been writing. I’d just never conceived of writing about the world I was living in.
RC Had you always thought you’d be a writer?
JR No. I was an actor when I was a little kid. Then I painted and drew. I started my first novel, which was about Marie Antoinette, when I was about eight. Then I wrote an exposé of high school. At eighteen, I wrote a novel, Pablo, which I’ve never wanted to publish. I wrote some articles, too, under a nom de plume—Jack Chance—before I wrote City of Night. There was always a writer in me, and an artist.
RC Have you ever written drama or poetry?
JR When I was a kid. It was in rhyming pentameter at a time when all that was out. I did parodies of Paradise Lost.
RC It seems that narrative’s what really grips you.
JR Yes. I have to admit I don’t understand poetry. I read some and like it, but I don’t understand what the form’s attempting to do, and form’s so important to me.
RC Do you reread the writers you revere for pleasure?
JR Yes. I read a lot, but prefer to reread now. I get virtually every gay book that’s published in this country. I feel a duty at least to sample it. A lot is terrible; appalling. Jesus Christ. So after that I like to read Proust a lot.
RC When we were speaking of overlooked figures that predate Stonewall, we didn’t mention James Purdy.
JR Yes. Again, there’s the imagination, lucidity, and humor of his work—especially in Malcolm and 69: Dream Palace. They’re fantastical but also very tough. What’s the one about the rapist? Cabot Wright Begins. The imagination of that book—and terrific writing! I think I’ve read every one of his books, except for this last one, Gertrude of Stony Island, which originally only came out in England. He’s been thrust away by everyone—including gay writers, who don’t even know about him.
I was invited to a literary thing PEN was doing in New York on “the literary gay hero.” They’d asked Mr. Purdy. It was really wonderful, because they mentioned that they were going to get him. I said yes when I knew he was going to be on. To my delight, he also said he’d appear if they could get me. This was perfection! At the last moment I couldn’t go. I had to have three knee operations, but—again, the posturing—I pretended it was because they hadn’t given me adequate accommodations. They substituted a dreadful writer, so I rue that. And Mr. Purdy didn’t show up either.
RC Like you, he feels very much that he’s written things people just don’t want to hear.
JR Don’t want to hear, don’t understand either, and don’t see the art of. I’m very lucky in this sense: I’ve had commercial success. City of Night was a huge bestseller and continues to sell. So do Numbers and The Sexual Outlaw. Marilyn’s Daughter did well, as did The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez. What’s really sad is when you’re underrated and also undersold.
RC Still, any lineage of postwar gay writers would feature you—if, perhaps, for reasons you’re less than happy with.
JR More important is when people put out lists of all writers. You might think who the hell cares. But I’m in Webster’s and the Oxford Companion Guide to English Literature. That’s one thing I don’t think we’re aiming for anymore: to be acknowledged in the general requirements of reading. I’m in the Columbia Encyclopedia of Literature. Actually I’m more often left out of gay and Chicano anthologies than I am out of so-called mainstream books.
RC Do you think the one identification causes problems for the other?
JR No. I think it’s because I don’t toe the line. I’ve been very celebrative of the gay world, but also very critical of it. The same’s true on the Chicano frontier. I’ve never totally fitted. I’ve never seen myself totally fitting in anything. I suppose that’s conveyed in the books.
RC What is left to do, other than to keep trying to educate a readership by writing more?
JR Writing terrifically, so I leave ample evidence that I was right.
RC To make a mark, then? To say: “I was here”?
JR More than a mark. A big splash! I don’t like small goals.
RC The PEN Award stresses your regionalism, which I find interesting. One can’t imagine your works coming from anywhere other than Los Angeles.
JR Yes. It’s also Los Angeles being very brave: giving this award first to Billy Wilder, then to Neil Simon, Betty Friedan, and me. I like that.
RC You convey the feel of Los Angeles very distinctively to non-natives. Have you ever written with a particular reader in mind?
JR Never.
RC Would that amount to self-censorship?
JR Very much so. That’s one thing I dislike very much about the genre of “gay novel” and publishers who advertise in gay magazines only. I know gay writers who feel a review in The Advocate is their goal.
RC I wasn’t thinking only of marketing. Do you ever have a sense of the reader of what you’re writing?
JR No.
RC Do you show the finished work to trusted friends?
JR I read it to Michael now. I read City of Night to my mother.
RC This I find astonishing—all of it?
JR Selected passages I translated into Spanish for her. None of the sexual parts. Michael now even reads drafts. He’s often been very instrumental. I trust him; he has impeccable critical sense.
RC But you’ve effectively waited a long time for that sort of critical relationship. To some extent you must have learned to live without it.
JR Yes—to write by myself. I do trust myself finally, because I know what I’m about. Not too many writers know that.
RC Do you have a good relationship with editors and publishers?
JR With some; some not. Don Allen was a legendary editor—terrific. Ken Carroll too. But then they try to screw you: as with one of my best books, Bodies and Souls. Then there’s somebody like Richard Seamer, who published Our Lady of Babylon. The son of a bitch ran scared! He reduced the advertising; turned down the number of copies. Then he told me I’d been blacklisted by the New York Times and that I must write letters of protest. Christ, that kind of lack of courage!
Our Lady of Babylon hasn’t gone into paperback. I don’t hesitate to say it’s a great literary creation and is going to be discovered as such. I’ll see to it. But that fucking publisher saw that too. He’s a legendary figure in publishing; he knew what the book was. But then a juggernaut occurred. The sex scene between Jesus and Judas became a thorn—not with him. But once it was clear to him that the bookdealers weren’t going to carry this book, he just ran away from it—and lied about it. He knew by the advance orders that they weren’t going to carry it, so he cut down the first printing to something miniscule; the least any book of mine’s ever been issued at. Then he just issued it with no advertising.
RC Norman Mailer wrote about a sexualized Christ in The Gospel According to His Son and publishers made it a selling point. Do you think it’s the gay element?
JR Yes. I’m still controversial in the oddest way. I can identify why but can’t understand why it should be: the kind of arrogance I’ve expressed; the kind of thinking that I won’t deviate from something just because it’s not popular. It took me over thirty years to get the New York Review of Books to publish an apology for the City of Night review they ran. I pursued Gore Vidal for praising that review in his book of essays, United States.2 I reminded him that he’s been the object of this kind of derision too. He wrote me back, telling me how much he admired my work, and that he’d just fallen under the spell of this reviewer, and that he was never going to write again for the New York Review of Books. The son of a bitch writes for the New York Review of Books every other issue!
RC These concerns can become very distracting from the real purpose: to write. Is there ever a point where you just want to give up public disputes?
JR Never. I have enough energy for all of it, believe me. I’ll never leave it.
Criticism is fine; assault—which I’ve been the object of, from the very beginning—is cruelty. Fucking Alfred Chester in that review: “. . . despite the adorable photograph on the rear of the dust jacket, I can hardly believe there is a real John Rechy.”3 Chester created real problems for me. The rumor was out that there was no John Rechy; that it was fabrication. I’ve struggled through those things. Every time the artistry is in my books, then I have to battle for it. I had the previous editor of the New York Times on the telephone after I wrote her a scorching letter. I’ve been told that’s why I’ve been blacklisted—fuck it! In fact, I tell my student writers to protest. There’s too much mistreatment of writers.
RC What if somebody simply reads a book in a way you haven’t anticipated? There are writers who in that case say simply: “This is my book; it goes into the wider world; people think of it what they will.” Some writers are even stoical when the response isn’t what they imagined.
JR That’s fine for them. It isn’t for me. I can’t stop it. I’ll write letters when people get things right, too, and thank them—always.
RC I asked James Purdy whether he’d accept the term visionary. It sounds rather elevated, but would you consider it being applied to you? I think what one means by it is simply that one has something that has to be translated in literature that . . .
JR That hasn’t been seen or told before—or told that way before, yes. Then my answer for myself would be yes.
RC On that note, thanks very much for your time.