Book Review: City of Night

"Later I would think of America as one vast City of Night stretching gaily from Times Square to Hollywood Boulevard - jukebox-winking, rock-n-roll moaning: America at night fusing its dark cities into the unmistakable shape of loneliness." - City of Night

One of my favorite things about summer is actually having the time to read for pleasure. (My least favorite thing is having all of your belongings stolen in an aiport, but that's another story). Like many college students, I was an eager consumer of literature during my childhood, though this passion was inevitably pushed out first by the demands of school, and then college as I grew older. I'm not one of those people who can read books in snippets either, prefering rather to knock them off in big chunks. So I've really come to appreciate the time available during the warmer months that I can devote to reading.

The most recent book that I've read is called City of Night, by the American writer John Rechy. Published in 1963, it is considered one of the seminal classics of LGBTQ literature, being one of the first novels to explore the underworld of 1960s LGBTQ culture, and the many-faceted characters that inhabited it. City of Night chronicles the journey of the unnamed main character, a young Hispanic man, as he travels across the US from his birthplace of El Paso to the various 'Cities of Night' referenced in the title - New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and New Orleans. Working as a 'youngman' (the word Rechy uses for hustler throughout the book), he encounters the full gamut of characters in the cladestine LGBTQ world - the scores, tricks, lesbians, drag queens and closeted guilt-wracked husbands among many others.

Rechy's writing is vivid, describing every detail of the main character's various interactions in an immersive stream-of-consciousness manner. Each of the chapters are devoted to the relationship between the young man and one particular player in the underworld's drama. The fastidiousness with which Rechy illustrates these individuals leaves no doubt that they are based on real people - especially since Rechy lent much of his background to the main character. Deliberate grammatical errors and idiosyncratic word choice further the envelopment of the reader into the Night City world. All of this adds up to an story that is hugely engrossing thanks in large part to its credibility.

City of Night fascinated me, not least because it gave such an unflinching look into the realities of the LGBTQ underworld of 1960s America. With the hindsight of the AIDS era, the promiscuity of the main players seems shocking, and throughout the book the knowledge of what was to come in the 1980s hangs heavy. I found myself wondering, more than once, whether I would have coped as a young gay male, born just a few decades earlier. The sense of guilt and confusion felt by the characters in the book is instantly recognizable, as is the unfulfilled voyage of trying to understand one's identity, which so many LGBTQ people still go through today.

I would really encourage everyone to read City of Night if they have the chance, not just for its historical narrative on LGBTQ culture, but also for its musings on identity and our place in the world. Or if not this book, definitely make use of the time remaining before classes start to enjoy some other great novel (oh look, now I sound like a librarian). The Duke LGBT Center also has a huge library of books which are sadly under-utilized (and no I don't include in this The Joy of Gay Sex - Volume III). I'd also encourage everyone to make use of this fantastic library, which has some real gems that would be really difficult to find elsewhere.

Enjoy the last week or two of summer!

City of Night
Rechy, John
1963, Grove Press
ISBN 978-0-28563-837-2