John Rechy
John Rechy is a notable American author, born on March 10, 1931, in El Paso, Texas. His literary career began with the publication of his groundbreaking novel *City of Night* in 1963, which delves into themes of gay sexuality, identity, and the complexities of Chicano and European American heritages. Throughout his work, Rechy employs a style he describes as "autobiography as fiction," creating narratives that explore the intersections of personal and cultural identity, often against the backdrop of the harsh realities of urban life and the strictures of the Roman Catholic Church.
Rechy's protagonists frequently grapple with the challenges of self-absorption, spiritual yearning, and the search for human connection. His experiences as a young man, including time spent as a sex worker in various U.S. cities, profoundly inform his writing, offering both an unflinching portrayal of the sexual underground and a quest for meaning and connection. Over the years, his contributions to literature have been recognized with numerous awards, including the PEN Center USA's Lifetime Achievement Award, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction, and the Lon Tinkle Lifetime Achievement Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Rechy's ongoing exploration of the themes of sex, spirituality, and identity continues to resonate in contemporary LGBTQ+ literature.
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Subject Terms
John Rechy
Novelist
- Born: March 10, 1931
- Place of Birth: El Paso, Texas
Author Profile
With the publication of his first novel, City of Night (1963), John Rechy commenced a lifelong process of self-analysis. “My life,” he wrote in his nonfiction work The Sexual Outlaw (1977), “is so intertwined with my writing that I almost live it as if it were a novel.” In particular, Rechy’s work examines the ways in which gay sexuality, Chicano and European American heritages, and the strictures of the Roman Catholic Church struggle with one another, and sometimes harmonize despite their incompatibilities. Rechy writes what he calls “autobiography as fiction” in order to construct parables of spiritual salvation and damnation. Alternately remote from and near to God, family, and human connection, Rechy’s protagonists struggle against self-absorption and the fear of death.
John Francisco Rechy-Flores was born in El Paso, Texas, on March 10, 1931. His parents had immigrated to the southwestern United States during the Mexican Revolution, and Rechy grew up torn between his father’s stern sense of defeat in the face of anti-Mexican discrimination and his mother’s intense protection of her son. The combination of his father’s Scottish heritage and his mother’s traditional Mexican background made Rechy intensely aware of his status as a person of mixed ancestry in the El Paso of his youth.
Conflicts and pressures at home caused Rechy to move into a narcissistic remoteness that found comfort in the emotional distance of purchased sex. Wandering the country after high school, he worked as a prostitute in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and New Orleans, experiences that he later drew on when writing City of Night. The novel's first-person narrative of sexual and spiritual salvation combines an unapologetic depiction of the sexual underground with a sympathetic protagonist’s search for ultimate connection and caring. In a 2008 interview, film director and screenwriter Gus Van Sant revealed that City of Night was the initial inspiration for his films Mala Noche (1985) and My Own Private Idaho (1991).
Set against either the urban indifference of Los Angeles or the unforgiving landscape of the southwestern desert, Rechy’s novels explore the thematic connections between sex, soul, and self. In subsequent works, particularly This Day’s Death (1969) and The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez (1991), he has extended his explorations of the spirit to the particulars of Chicano family and culture.
Rechy’s autobiographical fictions chart the intersections of ethnic, sexual, regional, and religious identities. He journeys across the Southwestern landscape, through sex and spirit, along the night streets of Los Angeles, and through his own memories of growing up in El Paso.
In 1997, Rechy won the PEN Center USA's Lifetime Achievement Award, becoming the first novelist to do so. His body of work was again recognized in 1999, when the Publishing Triangle association awarded him the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 2014, he received the Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara. At the University of California, Riverside's annual Writers Week Conference in 2016, the university and the Los Angeles Review of Books jointly honored Rechy with the conference's first Lifetime Achievement Award, Rechy's third.
Rechy won the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction for his story After the Blue Hour (2017). That same year, he published Pablo!, his fourteenth novel. In 2020, Rechy was granted the Lon Tinkle Lifetime Achievement Award by the Texas Institute of Letters.
Bibliography
Bredbeck, Gregory W. “John Rechy.” Contemporary Gay American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport: Greenwood, 1993. 340–51. Print.
Bruce-Novoa, Juan. “In Search of the Honest Outlaw: John Rechy.” Minority Voices 3.1 (1979): 37–45. Print.
Casillo, Charles. Outlaw: The Lives and Careers of John Rechy. Los Angeles: Advocate, 2002. Print.
Miller, Bettye. “UCR Presents 39th Annual Celebration of Writers Feb. 2–4, 2016.” UCR Today. U of California, 13 Oct. 2015. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.
Nelson, Emmanuel S. “John Rechy, James Baldwin and the American Double Minority Literature.” Journal of American Culture 6.2 (1983): 70–74. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.
“Novelist John Rechy to Receive UCSB's Luis Leal Literature Award.” Noozhawk. Malamute Ventures, 29 Jan. 2014. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.
Ortiz, Ricardo L. “LA Women: Jim Morrison with John Rechy.” The Queer Sixties. Ed. Patricia Juliana Smith. New York: Routledge, 1999. 164–86. Print.
Ortiz, Ricardo L. “Sexuality Degree Zero: Pleasure and Power in the Novels of John Rechy, Arturo Islas, and Michael Nava.” Journal of Homosexuality 26.2–3 (1993): 111–26. Print.
Pearson, Jesse. "The Oldest Living Literary Spartan Tells All." Alta, 25 Sept. 2023, www.altaonline.com/books/a44951525/john-rechy-city-of-night-jesse-pearson/. Accesed 16 Oct. 2024.
Rechy, John. About My Life and the Kept Woman: A Memoir. New York: Grove, 2008. Print.
Rechy, John. Interview by John-Manuel Andriote and Tom Lutz. Los Angeles Review of Books. Los Angeles Rev. of Books, 17 Jan. 2015. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.
Rechy, John. Interview by Debra Castillo. Diacritics 25.1 (1995): 113–25. Print.
Rechy, John. The Sexual Outlaw: A Documentary; A Non-Fiction Account, with Commentaries, of Three Days and Nights in the Sexual Underground. New York: Grove, 1977. Print.
Steuernagel, Trudy. “Contemporary Homosexual Fiction and the Gay Rights Movement.” Journal of Popular Culture 20.3 (1986): 125–34. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.
Tatum, Charles M. “The Sexual Underworld of John Rechy.” Minority Voices 3.1 (1979): 47–52. Print.
Van Sant, Gus. “Gus Van Sant: Swimming against the Current.” Interview by Graham Fuller. Focus Features. Focus Features, 21 July 2008. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.
Zamora, Carlos. “Odysseus in John Rechy's City of Night: The Epistemological Journey.” Minority Voices 3.1 (1979): 53–62. Print.