City of Night

Rating:
Summary: This novel is a must read for all young gay men!
Review: I was 19 the first time I picked up this novel. I started and was unable to put it down until I finished it. It is amazing. It opened my eyes up to just how much things haven't changed. I was disillusioned by thinking just because we are almost at the end of the century that things must be so much better than they once were. This book crushed that thinking. Nothing has changed! We, gay men, are just as confused and in mental turmoil today as we were when John Rechy wrote this novel. The impact this story makes is a must. We all need our eyes opened to the fact nothing has changed and nothing will change until we become more aware of ourselves and confident of the fact that we are human, we are important, and we all have the desire to be loved.

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Summary: a dive into gay life and more
Review: It must have been 1974 when I read city of night on request of a girl pupil of mine.(In a Dutch translation!)She (yes) had found in this book her feeling of life. Her struggle with emptyness, with relations, with God. I read it. It was my first confrontation with the Gay scene. It was pictured in a vivid way, almost like watching a movie. I was with the guy who was discovering his world. And it helped me to discover mine. It was and is hard to discover your world - this being the way it was depicted in the novel - once being married. Yet it was so vivid, that I identified immediately with the married guy in the book. Yet the book was more than a gay novel. Together with the discussions I had with the girl it helped me as a teacher to understand the youth of that period of this century. I had to return the book to her. I have been looking for it ever since. Could not find it. I am glad to have it at hand again.

Rating:
Summary: A Haunting Journey Through a Vanished World
Review: John Rechy's "City Of Night" is a wistful, moving, ultimately very sad account of a young man's erratic journey through the now-vanished Homosexual subculture of America's cities in the late 1950's, early 1960's. The narrator, a masculine hustler, known in the parlance of the time as "trade", moves from city to city, searching for business, and also, futilely, a sense of self-worth and love. He actively avoids the lives and world of the self-admitted and well-adjusted gay men he encounters, and instead pursues the outcasts, the maladjusted and self-loathing men with homosexual desires who make up his clientele. The novel is repetitious and over-long. Parts of it (the chapter on "Miss Destiny", a Los Angeles Drag Queen, for instance) are powerful and moving, and stand well on their own in the reader's memory. The narrator's crippling inability to come to grips with his own sexuality is ultimately off-putting to the reader, but Rechy does a good, almost documentary, job of recording a long gone landscape and lifestyle - - the urban United States before the Gay Liberation Movement and the present day visibility and partial integration of homosexuals into American life. All in all a worthwhile, often profoundly touching novel about alienation and the pursuit of love among the hopeless and the outcasts of society.

Rating:
Summary: A Haunting Journey Through a Vanished World
Review: John Rechy's "City Of Night" is a wistful, moving, ultimately very sad account of a young man's erratic journey through the now-vanished Homosexual subculture of America's cities in the late 1950's, early 1960's. The narrator, a masculine hustler, known in the parlance of the time as "trade", moves from city to city, searching for business, and also, futilely, a sense of self-worth and love. He actively avoids the lives and world of the self-admitted and well-adjusted gay men he encounters, and instead pursues the outcasts, the maladjusted and self-loathing men with homosexual desires who make up his clientele. The novel is repetitious and over-long. Parts of it (the chapter on "Miss Destiny", a Los Angeles Drag Queen, for instance) are powerful and moving, and stand well on their own in the reader's memory. The narrator's crippling inability to come to grips with his own sexuality is ultimately off-putting to the reader, but Rechy does a good, almost documentary, job of recording a long gone landscape and lifestyle - - the urban United States before the Gay Liberation Movement and the present day visibility and partial integration of homosexuals into American life. All in all a worthwhile, often profoundly touching novel about alienation and the pursuit of love among the hopeless and the outcasts of society.

Rating:
Summary: Rechy Falters at the Gate
Review: John Rechy's pseudo-gay novel, "City of Night," tries hard to be good but lacks the lyricality and subject to be anything of a masterpiece. From the start, the book was a disappointment. It continually posed homosexuality as bad (e.g.: the father molesting the boy), as strange (e.g.: the man who acted like a mother), or as shameful and to be hidden (e.g.: when the nameless main character discovers his homosexual leanings to another hustler). The main character is, as we are told over and over and over again (becoming a sort of mantra through the work), not gay. He does this as work and precisely because it is gay-related, it is destructive. Such inability to come to terms with homosexuality ruins the entire book. You feel sorry for the boy because he is ruined by these fags around him, not for his sexual confusion (which would have been more interesting and less weak). Besides all this, the book is a disjointed series of images and places that leaves you confused as to where you are and who you are dealing with. I would like to say that Rechy intended this, but I think it is his own shortcomings that produces this. The ending is a letdown; it is like forcing yourself to eat a piece of stale cake after a very bad meal. It doesn't leave a bad aftertaste - it makes you sick.

Rating:
Summary: city of night
Review: the book was awesome! My friend ranted and raved about the book so I got a copy and read it. It gave me another perspective on life for people.

Rating:
Summary: city of night
Review: the book was awesome! My friend ranted and raved about the book so I got a copy and read it. It gave me another perspective on life for people.

Rating:
Summary: A Great Book to Read!
Review: the charictors are real, the store has stayed with me many years after i frist read it. a must have for a gay lit fan or a fan of John Rechy he is one of the best that will be missed so grately

Rating:
Summary: the best book i ever read
Review: the charictors are real, the store has stayed with me many years after i frist read it. a must have for a gay lit fan or a fan of John Rechy he is one of the best that will be missed so grately

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Summary: Zoe's Review
Review: The City of Night deals with a nameless male hustler's experiences. The book follows no especific plot. The story of the protagonist starts in his childhood; being subject of an abusive father which he admired greatly even if he never did comment this aloud. The young man suffers from a narcissistic kind of hubris wich follows him to the end. He leaves el Paso and goes travelling from popular cities to other popular cities around the States: New York, New Orleans, California, Chicago,etc. You will not find Lazzis in this work. The description of the places he visits are usually the underworld/party tipe of sets. He learns about hustlers problems, as staying young and not being defined as homosexuals, convincing themselves by staying willingly with a girl every time they got a chance so in these way they can ignore their numerous male clients. Throught his travels from city to city the young protagonist encounters many colorful characters. Like transvesties, fairies, sadics, peculiar scores and different fellow hustlers, who even having original personalities have a common objective. There's a personal tang in Reichy's novel, you can feel it through the book. If your looking for rich plots and good thrillers (i.e: The Davinci Code) look for somewhere else. Even if the novel's end is awfully open I still love this book. It's simple, kind of sweet, hot and a deal deep. I assure you you'll really like it.