"City of Night began as a letter to a friend of mine after I had been to New Orleans. I wrote City of Night because they were my experiences hustling, and it began as a letter. I didn't think of it as a book."John Rechy Bachy 17 Spring 1980 "But it should begin in El Paso, that journey through the cities of night. Should begin in El Paso, in Texas. And it begins in the Wind..."from City of Night |
This is a novel about America. It is a novel about loneliness, about love and the ceaseless, furtive search for love. Set in the seamy, neon-lighted world of honky-tonk USA--Times Square in New York, Pershing Square in Los Angeles, Hollywood Boulevard, and the French Quarter of New Orleans--and dealing with a little-known world of hidden sex, City of Night represents a radical departure from all other novels of this kind. It is not lurid or defensive; it treats its subject squarely and forthrightly, revealing many facets of this subculture in a way they had never been revealed before when the novel was published in 1963, even in the novels of Jean Genet. It is a journey by a nameless narrator, through this clandestine world of furtive love. His journey takes him through the major cities of the United States, and through the lives of an extraordinary collection of characters who dwell either in this world or on its fringes: Pete, the "youngman"--or male hustler--at 42nd Street, who like the other |
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