Bold and inventive in style, City of Night is the groundbreaking 1960s novel about male prostitution. Rechy is unflinching in his portrayal of one hustling 'youngman' and his search for self-knowledge among the other denizens of his neon-lit world. As the narrator moves from Texas to Times Square and then on to the French Quarter of New Orleans, Rechy delivers a portrait of the edges of America that has lost none of its power. On his travels, the nameless narrator meets a collection of unforgettable characters, from vice cops to guilt-ridden married men eaten up by desire, to Lance O'Hara, once Hollywood's biggest star. Rechy describes this world with candour and understanding in a prose that is highly personal and vividly descriptive.

The “shocking, erotic, and suspenseful” winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Fiction from the author of City of Night (Out Magazine). John Rechy’s first novel, City of Night, an international bestseller, is considered a modern classic. Subsequent work asserts his place among America’s most important writers. The author’s most daring work, After the Blue Hour is narrated by a twenty-four-year-old writer named John Rechy. Fleeing a turbulent life in Los Angeles, John accepts an invitation to a private island from an admirer of his work. There, he joins Paul, his imposing host in his late thirties, his beautiful mistress, and his precocious teenage son. Browsing Paul’s library and conversing together on the deck about literature and film during the spell of evening’s “blue hour,” John feels surcease, until, with unabashed candor, Paul shares intimate details of his life. Through cunning seductive charm, he married and divorced an ambassador’s daughter and the heiress to a vast fortune. Avoiding identifying his son’s mother, he reveals an affinity for erotic “dangerous games.” With intimations of past decadence and menace, an abandoned island nearby arouses tense fascination in the group. As “games” veer toward violence, secrets surface in startling twists and turns. Explosive confrontation becomes inevitable. “A beach read for those who prefer to thumb Genet rather than Grisham on the deckside chaise.” —Los Angeles Review of Books “Mysterious, intriguing, and brashly amatory, Rechy’s take on gamesmanship, power, domination, and deception is a welcome return to form for the author and a wild ride indeed.” —The Bay Area Reporter “Steamy . . . with a kind of Gatsby-by-way-of-Henry James subplot. Beautifully written.” —Kirkus Reviews

In this first book-length monograph on the Mexican American novelist, essayist, and playwright John Rechy, best known for his debut novel City of Night, María DeGuzmán offers a conceptually clear yet aesthetically, philosophically, and socio-politically fine-grained analysis of the spectrum of his writing. Recipient of PEN Center USA's Lifetime Achievement Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, ONE Magazine's National Gay and Lesbian Cultural Hero Award, the William Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Luis Leal Award for Excellence in Chicano/Latino Literature, and the Robert Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement, Rechy is the author of fifteen novels, at least three plays, and several volumes of nonfiction. He has written for the Nation, the New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, the New York Times, and Saturday Review. In Understanding John Rechy, María DeGuzmán offers a brief biographical overview and then traces the development of Rechy's craft through his major works by calling attention to central issues, recurring situations and characters, styles, and special techniques. She examines the complexities of his representation of identity, the subjectivity in his male homosexual odyssey and identity quest novels, and his experimentation with genre. She offers a concise yet intricate analysis of the major organizing paradigms and themes, genres, modes, styles, and handling of the gay Chicano's oeuvre. The book's guiding analysis pays particular attention to the ways in which Rechy's works function as cultural critique challenging mainstream values in a deep-structure manner.

In this angry, eloquent outcry against the oppression of homosexuals, the author of the classic City of Night gives "an explosive non-fiction account, with commentaries, of three days and nights in the sexual underground" of Los Angeles in the 1970s--the "battlefield" of the sexual outlaw. Using the language and techniqus of the film, Rechy deftly intercuts the despairing, joyful, and defiant confessions of a male hustler with the "chorus" of his own subversive reflections on sexual identity and sexual politics, and with stark documentary reports our society directs against homosexuals--"the only minority against whose existence there are laws."

An aging male hustler wages an obsessive battle against the passing of his youth in this darkly compelling follow-up to the cult hit City of Night. Johnny Rio, a handsome narcissist no longer a pretty boy, travels to Los Angeles, the site of past sexual conquest and remembered youthful radiance, in a frenzied attempt to recreate his younger self. Like a retired boxer—an undefeated champion—who refuses to accept the possible ravages of time, Johnny is led by some unfathomable force to return to combat once again. Combat, for him, takes place in the dark balconies and dismal bathrooms of LA’s all-night movie theaters and on the hot sands of the city’s gay beaches. But these are only warm up bouts. The real test, Johnny soon learns, will be in the shaded glens of a rambling park on the outskirts of the city. Through those alcoves, as a gallery of sexhunters emerges, he sets out to discover whether the passage of time—as terrifying to the male hustler as to the dancer or ingenue—has diminished the allure that was the source of his pride. For Johnny, the final proof resides in numbers. So he sets himself a rigorous time-table—ten days—and goal: thirty “numbers” to prove is mettle. But through all the sexual episodes, the self-indulgence which comprises Johnny’s tawdry world, there resounds the universal cry of a human being’s desperate need to be loved.

The long-awaited memoir by “one of the few original American writers of the last century” is a testament to the power of self-acceptance (Gore Vidal). John Rechy, author of City of Night and The Sexual Outlaw, has always known discrimination. Raised Mexican-American in El Paso, Texas, at a time when Latino children were routinely segregated, Rechy was often assumed to be Anglo because of his light skin, and had his name “changed” for him by a teacher, from Juan to John. As he grew older—and as his fascination with the memory of a notorious kept woman in his childhood deepened—Rechy became aware that his differences lay not just in his heritage, but in his sexuality. While he performed the roles expected of him by others—the authoritarians in the US Army during the Korean War, the bigoted relatives of his Anglo college classmates, or the men and women who wanted him to be something he was not—he never allowed them to define him. The “riveting” story of a life that bears witness to some of the most riotous changes of the past century, About My Life and the Kept Woman is as much a portrait of intolerance as of an individual who defied it to forge his own path (The Advocate). “Rechy might be called the first bard of West Hollywood.” —The New York Times “A skillfully paced story . . . As a memoirist, Rechy is both participant and observer, and he segues as easily between narrative and exegesis as his younger self did between the lure of the wild streets and the embrace of his traditional family.” —Los Angeles Magazine

An exceptional novel from the best-selling author of the modern classic City of Night, Bodies and Souls is a portrait of modern Los Angeles on an epic scale, "the most spiritual and physical of cities." Gorgeous, seedy, and striving, the Los Angeles of Rechy's imagination is a magnetic city that draws to it the nation's brightest and darkest energies--characters that include a female porn superstar; a young Chicano punk-rock fan; a Bel Air matron and her tyrannical husband, a Supreme Court judge; an aging male stripper; a black maid with apocalyptic visions; and a cynical TV anchorwoman. Through this rich tapestry of human struggle, Rechy paints a lush portrait of a paradise lost but also a heroic odyssey in search of redemption.