John Francisco Rechy (born March 10, 1931) is a Mexican-American novelist and essayist.[1] His novels are written extensively about gay culture in Los Angeles and wider America, among other subject matter. City of Night, his debut novel published in 1963, was a best seller. Drawing on his own background, he has contributed to Mexican-American literature, notably with his novel The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez, which has been taught in several Chicano studies courses throughout the United States. But, even after the success of his first novel, he still worked as a prostitute, teaching during the day, and hustling at night. He worked as a prostitute into his forties while also teaching at UCLA. Through the 1970's and 1980's he dealt with personal drug use, as well as the AIDS crisis, which killed many of his friends.[2]
Early life
Rechy was born Juan Francisco Flores Rechy[3] March 10, 1931, in El Paso, Texas.[4][5][6] He was the youngest of five children born to Guadalupe (née Flores) and Roberto Sixto Rechy.[7] Both of Rechy's parents were natives of Mexico; his father was of Scottish lineage.[5][8][9]
He earned a B.A. in English from Texas Western College (now University of Texas at El Paso), where he served as editor of the college newspaper.[7]
Following graduation from college, Rechy enlisted in the U.S. Army. He was granted early release from the Army to enroll as a graduate student at Columbia University.[10] He applied for admission to a creative writing class taught by novelist Pearl S. Buck by submitting an unpublished draft of a novel he had written titled Pablo![11] While his application to Buck's class was not accepted, Rechy was admitted into the writing classes of Hiram Haydn, a senior editor at Random House, at the New School for Social Research.[11]
The Cooper Do-nuts Riot happened in 1959 in Los Angeles, when the lesbians, gay men, transgender people, and drag queens who hung out at Cooper Do-nuts and who were frequently harassed by the LAPD fought back after police arrested three people, including Rechy. Patrons began pelting the police with donuts and coffee cups. The LAPD called for back-up and arrested a number of rioters. Rechy and the other two original detainees were able to escape.[12] He later wrote about it in City of Night.
Literary career
Rechy is considered one of Mexican American Literature's founding authors, and based his early writings on Mexican values and cultural problems that were available to him in Mexican films.[13] Though he is probably the best-known gay male Latino writer in the United States, his gay-themed work reflects little of his Mexican-American heritage, except for the surnames of some of his characters.[14]
While Rechy was working on his first novel, installments began to appear in 1958 in literary magazines such as Evergreen Review, Big Table,Nugget, and The London Magazine. These excerpts were fictitious recreations of his life working as a hustler in New York, Los Angeles and New Orleans and appeared alongside writers like Christopher Isherwood, Jack Kerouac and Jean Genet.[15] The largely autobiographical novel City of Night, debuted in October 1963. Despite the predominantly negative reviews the book received at the time of its publication, City of Night became an international bestseller.[7][16][17] Alternately, it is also often included on lists of the most banned books in America.[18]
In addition to the dozen novels he has written to date, Rechy has contributed numerous essays and literary reviews to various publications including The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Los Angeles Times, L.A. Weekly, The Village Voice, The New York Times, Evergreen Review and Saturday Review.[7][8] Many of these writings were anthologized in his 2004 publication Beneath the Skin.
He has written three plays, Tigers Wild (first performed as The Fourth Angel and based on Rechy's novel of that title), Rushes (based on his novel of the same title), and Momma as She Became—Not as She Was, a one-act play.[7]
Rechy was cited by journalist Amy Harmon in a 2004 New York Times article that reported about a computer glitch on Amazon.com that suddenly revealed the identities of thousands of people who had anonymously posted book reviews. It was revealed that Rechy, among several other authors, had "pseudonymously written themselves five-star reviews, Amazon's highest rating". Amazon stopped accepting anonymous reviews as a result of this finding.[19]
In 2021 Rechy was at work on a new novel entitled Beautiful People at the End of the Line, inspired by "comic books and celebrity culture."[citation needed]
Rechy says of his work, "An early admirer of my work labeled me 'an accidental writer' — the kind who writes randomly, off the top of his head, the way Kerouac is reputed to have done. But that's not true of me. I'm a very conscious writer, attentive to the right word, even the lengths of sentences, and punctuation for effect."[20]
In 2018, Rechy was also awarded with the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement noting that he is "a major figure in Mexican, LGBTQ and Los Angeles literary communities."[citation needed]
In 2020 The Texas Institute of Letters honored Rechy with its Lon Tinkle Lifetime Achievement Award. TIL President Carmen Tafolla called Rechy's work "a significant turning point in modern American literature, and a prose so poetically crafted it sharpens our perception of both the beauty and the ache of the human experience."[citation needed]
Rechy's contributions to women-centered narratives and the Chicana feminist canon are reflected in many of his works. Maria DeGuzman argues in her book, Understanding John Rechy, that "his decolonial Chicana feminist representations of women indicate the fact that he has long understood the relationship that exists between misogyny and homophobia (against gay men as well as against LGBTQ+ more generally). The oppression of women and trans women (for example, "Troja" in Marilyn's Daughter) is not just about Latinx communities; it is, in Rechy's work, also about the larger U.S. culture."[27]
English pop artistDavid Hockney's painting Building, Pershing Square, Los Angeles was inspired by a passage in City of Night.[28]
The 1983 song "Numbers" by the English synth-pop duo Soft Cell was inspired by Rechy's 1967 novel of the same title.[29]
A CD-ROM of Rechy's life and work was produced by the Annenberg Center of Communications and is titled Mysteries and Desire: Searching the Worlds of John Rechy.[30]
In 2019 the Wittliff Collection at Texas State University acquired Rechy's complete archive stating, "This treasure trove of letters serves as a virtual diary of one of the most significant periods in Rechy's personal and literary life"[citation needed]
^"EL PASO COUNTY, TEXAS - BIRTHS 1931, N-R". USGenWeb Archives. Retrieved April 18, 2014. NOTE: Although many literary encyclopedias and biographies published in the 1960s through the 1990s list Rechy's year of birth as 1934, most such publications released since that period list the birth year as 1931. The latter is consistent with the year stated in the official Texas birth records, and Rechy himself has acknowledged 1931 as his birth yearArchived April 16, 2014, at the Wayback Machine.
