The Coming of the Night - Brief Article

With a provocative new novel and a batch of recent honors, author John Rechy gets sexier all the time

With his new novel, The Coming of the Night, John Rechy returns to the erotically charged world he first created in City of Night, his 1963 classic about a hustler on the move. Rechy's new book begins on a hot day in Los Angeles in 1981, as a diverse group of gay men seek out sex, all under the influence of the Santa Ana winds, known for stirring up fires, sexuality, and violence.

"I chose the Santa Ana winds for many reasons," Rechy says from his home in Los Angeles, where he lives with his partner of more than 20 years. "It's dramatic, but I also wanted a metaphoric meaning--that those ravaging winds were choosing what to destroy as erratically as soon-to-invade AIDS was."

The epidemic began, Rechy muses, at a cultural moment when "sex saturated not only the gay world but our culture. It was a very exciting time. But it was also a very dangerous time. Nobody could have foreseen AIDS coming. AIDS just struck as arbitrarily as the wind and the fires struck."

Rechy himself is anything but arbitrary. Best known for chronicling the gay sexual underworld, he has sometimes been underestimated as an artist because of the sexual explicitness of his material. (Famously, he was once a hustler himself.) But Rechy is no hit-or-miss bad boy. Disciplined and prolific, he has produced such diverse novels as Our Lady of Babylon, The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez, and Marilyn's Daughter, in which a girl discovers she is the illegitimate daughter of Marilyn Monroe and Robert F. Kennedy. Still, he observes, each book reflects his experience as a gay person. "In every one of the supposedly nongay books," Rechy points out, "there are centrally gay characters. I've never left the subject."

These days his achievements are being recognized. In 1997 he became the first novelist to reap the Lifetime Achievement Award from PENUSA-West, and on April 8 Rechy received the Publishing Triangle's prestigious William Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Rechy's growing literary muscle has also brought progress on another front. "It's been only recently that I've been accepted as a Chicano writer," says the author, who was born in El Paso, Tex., of Mexican and Scottish descent. "Although I don't like labels at all--gay writer or anything of the sort."

Now in his 60s, Rechy is working at the top of his form. He's on the Internet with a Web site created as a tribute by one of his writing students. And he maintains his fitness and appearance with a workout regimen that includes 350 sit-ups a day. "I see no reason why one should have to become a mess!" he says.

"I hope that the progression that I've made will continue," Rechy says. "I hope that in ten years I'm being viewed as a writer who has roamed from the territory of not only hustling, for God's sakes, but into the territory of the Bible, into the matter of AIDS and now, with this particular book, the central question that it asks rhetorically, `Would you die for sex?'"

To learn more about John Rechy and his work and to find links to related Internet sites, visit www.advocate.com

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