City of light

Gay literary lion John Rechy reexamines his past

John Rechy stands amongst the most significant of American gay writers of the 20th century. His landmark debut novel, City of Night , caused a sensation in 1963 with its frank - and semi-autobiographical - account of working as a gay hustler in several cities across America. The book's evocative, slangy prose earned it a place in literary as well as gay history. As book followed book, Rechy's output relied less and less on autobiography. But in his recently published About My Life and The Kept Woman (Grove Press), Rechy looks back on his life and sheds a different light on his City of Night . Beginning with his impoverished childhood in Texas, Rechy shows the reader how the man who became a symbol of gay liberation and sexual freedom was himself chasing independence, personified in a fleeting childhood glimpse of a different kind of sexual outlaw: the mistress of one of the most powerful men in Mexico, a woman known as "the kept woman of Augusto de Leon." Like the kept woman, Rechy eventually learns the power and price of creating an outlaw sexual identity. From his home in Los Angeles, Rechy spoke with Bay Windows about the persistence and perils of memory and memoir.

Q: I really enjoyed Kept Woman.
A: I'm glad you did. It's going to be a favorite of mine, I think.

Q: Why?
A: This is the first time I dropped the veil of fiction. It required placing things that at other times I might have camouflaged, or did camouflage, under the guise of fiction. So for me it's almost a confessional. Having been raised a Catholic, I still adhere to the salubrious quality of the confession.

Q: [laughs] That is a great phrase. I was also raised Catholic. It really shapes your way of thinking.
Q: You never let go of it. Lapsed Catholics lapse every day.

Q: On a good day, anyway.
A: [laughs] The impressions that Catholicism makes, they continue to influence my work. Very often the kind of rich imagery I use, thought not so much in this book, I associate with the assault of colors in Catholic churches. They're always in Technicolor, with the painted windows and the saintly ladies looking like movie stars.

Q: The drama of Catholicism has a particular appeal to a certain kind of gay boy.
A: Yes, it's quite a show once you're removed from the horrors of it. I think that Mass qualifies as one of the great drag shows of all time. Where else can you see all those men in skirts, with songs and incense, and little boys in skirts? It really is quite a piece of theater.

Q: You speak of the horrors of the church...
A: Mainly the restrictions on sexuality that affect everybody, but especially gay people. All those admonitions that gay sex is sinful. You hear that even before you know you're gay. I find all religions repulsive to a certain degree, some more than others. They all have these horrible things about gay people. In the Catholic church - and I've written about this - it's a powerful thing when you're asked to kneel and pray to a naked figure on the cross. It can't help but influence how one looks at sexuality. There's that crucified figure who's often sexy and looks like he goes to the gym, wearing a loincloth like something out of International Male . It's an erotic figure, yet supposedly suffering. So that combination of pain and sexuality is at the core of a lot of Christian masochism, I think.

Q: I was a little surprised when you expressed some trepidation earlier about dropping the veil of fiction...
A: Well in fiction you can be very honest, yet be allowed to rearrange things. Once you move into autobiography, there are different requirements. I don't believe for one moment that autobiographies are true. It's just a representation of what you remember. I got angry at that scandal over James Frey. All art is lying. Especially when you're relying on memory. That's the most unreliable source. So the biggest liar in writing is the autobiographer. You can't really say: this is how it happened. This is how I believe it happened, I think it happened, or even how I hoped it happened. A biographer is an outrage. To think that you could grasp someone else's life?

Q: What about Charles Casillo, who write a biography of you in 2002?
A: Oh, no, Charles did a wonderful representation. It was good. I read it and thought, that's some guy! But it was a representation as he saw it. I respect Charles and he's a good writer, but capturing someone entirely is impossible. So I think the fiction writer is the most truthful.

Q: And this book is subtitled a memoir, as opposed to an autobiography.
A: I actually wanted to call it an autobiographical memoir, which of course is redundant, but I wanted to emphasize that the autobiographical part predominates over the memoir of the kept woman.

Q: So this is the flip side to your earlier work, which is fictionalized but often autobiographical.
A: Yes. You can confess to anything in fiction, then say 'I made it up.' Once you drop that posture of fiction, you look back at events honestly, sometimes from the vantage of many years, and interpret them more soundly. This book in a sense takes off where City of Night ends, because it deals with the section that ends City of Night , and then moves on. Those first books were definitely autobiographical, though I could always say it was all made up.

Q: That's both a survival tactic and preserves some mystery.
A: Though I never really did that. I've never been ashamed of my life.

Q: You've certainly always been frank! In Kept Woman there's the astonishing story of your arrest at a cruising spot in the park, which I hadn't heard before...
A: Most people don't know that, though I've never made a secret of it. Actually, I was arrested 3 times. This one was the most dramatic. It was really odd for the judge to move the thing into Griffin Park.

Q: So that wasn't embellished? The judge really took the trial to the park?
A: That really happened. Despite the unreliability of memory, some things get stamped in your mind. I can see that judge this very moment. I can see us going back with the district attorney into the cruisiest spot of Griffin Park.

Q: The image of the famous mistress, the kept woman, was also stamped into your brain. Tell me more about that trivial moment that turned out to be so important.
A: Well it wasn't trivial, although it was a tiny moment in a life. This particular woman was so beautiful and glamorous, she was like a creature from another world. A world that was possible, beyond poverty. The fact that she was notorious gave her the aura of something exciting and forbidden. And she had come back to El Paso under the threat of her father killing her, so she was brave. She defied everything. That was the first time I saw that kind of wonderful defiance.

Q: And did that image of her keep recurring in your mind?
A: That's where the writer uses to memory to heighten the experience. Her image did haunt me, and still haunts me now, but not at those particular points in this book. I used her image to highlight the impact of certain things. At the time, I did not know why she was so fascinating. I believe very often in nonfiction, one has to write about what didn't happen, in order to clarify what did happen. Therein lies the truth of reconstruction.

Q: That makes me think of the shadow story of Isabel, whose life we occasionally glimpse in the book. You both seem to proceed from that moment, but we surmise more than we know about her.
A: Since finishing the book, I've heard that she is still denying her heritage. It is stunning to me! That she could so remake herself - and everyone in her hometown knew what was happening - but nobody in the society she was running in, not Truman Capote, not anybody, saw through this grand Spanish lady from New Orleans. And I got to eventually admire that kind of fraudulence. She's quite a creature.

Q: With her deceptions, her story is both parallel and opposite to yours. You were able to be more truthful in your life, though you're no stranger to putting on identities.
A: Oh no, and that's part of the confession of the book. My partner tells me that I have been very harsh on myself with this book, but I didn't want to leave out my own camouflages. Sometimes they were very subtle. I never said I wasn't Mexican, but in some instances I never said I was, either. That made it easier in racist territory. The matter of being gay, what I didn't realize at the time was that hustling was a device to allow me to exist as a gay man without claiming it. As long as I said I was doing it for money, I could camouflage to myself my own identity. In this book I wanted to strip all that away. The scene where two hustlers have sex but deny they're gay is to me a highlight of the book. In the time, it was very necessary to hide. You could be arrested simply on the word of a cop. But I wanted to deal with some ugly times, so I put them in the book to be rid of them. Of course you're never really rid of things you regret, but you can try to expiate them.

Q: It sounds like parts of it could have been hard to write.
A: One passage that hurt me very much to write was the two gay men in the cafeteria, and my pretense that I was not gay. I remember it very clearly, and can look back on it as hypocrisy and cruelty. Those things are not in my fiction, and some things are retold that also appeared in City of Night . What's here is closer to the truth.

Q: Closer to the truth...I suppose you could argue that by giving a second account of some events, you're obscuring things. Muddying the waters.
A: No, definitely not. I disagree. Because in this book, I deal with the camouflages that I didn't see then. The ending is a judgment on Isabel and myself, that the kept woman makes by her statement that she's proud of who she is. None of the subterfuge is left. And I compliment myself on that, because not many people write about their deceitfulness, and expose it and judge it.

Q: I look forward to seeing how you will write about your life now that you've left all that behind.
A: Well, 300 more pages are already written. I've been writing a book called Autobiography: A Novel for about 20 years. Then I got to this section and it seemed like a unit. So I took all the relevant parts out of that book and made this book. Most of the experiences that happened after the publishing of City of Night have been left out. But I like this book very much, even though parts of it make me wince. I feel I've made a good confession.