John RechyRezensionen

I did not enjoy reading this book, so I stopped at 21% through it. It's difficult to say anything good about it.

USA, Los Angeles, ca 1965
En ung mand, Johnny Rio, kører rundt i Los Angeles området og bliver brugt og bruger selv en masse mænd seksuelt. Christopher Isherwood og Don Bachardy er forlæg for et par af personerne (og Don Bachardy syntes dårligt om det).

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This is the first novel John Rechy published, based on his life as a hustler. Not one city--adventures take place in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and New Orleans--but the hustling scene of masculine hustlers, queens, scores and vice cops is similar in all these places. The protagonist is torn between the world of education, career and writing, which he has worked to gain admittance to, and the attractions of confirming his desirability in the simplest possible fashion: being paid for access to his body.

I have been reading this book in tandem with _City of the Night_, one of the novels Rechy based on parts of his life described in this book, which was written later. In both works one can see the extreme role-playing of the gay lifestyle in the 50s and 60s, the fear of arrest or exposure, and the denial and self-hatred. Rechy spent years centering his identity on his sexual desirability, his ability to attract men willing to pay him for fleeting, non-reciprocated sex. In the hustling world he had to conceal his intellect and deny that he was attracted to men. His descriptions of interactions regarding his writing are reminiscent of the pitfalls surrounding women with talent-- as he avoids the 'casting couch' and insists on having his work accepted for it's own sake. The kept woman of the tile was a figure from his childhood: the older sister of Rechy's younger sister's husband, who had defied her father's wrath to attend the wedding. The young Rechy saw the woman, mysterious and veiled, and heard her referred to as 'the kept woman' of a powerful and wealthy man in Mexico. She becomes s symbol for him of someone who lives her life in defiance of conventional morality. Another memory from his youth is a young woman whom he had dated briefly, who remakes herself by taking another name and leaving El Paso. She successfully poses as Spanish and marries a prominent San Franciscan. Many of the people mentioned are given fake names, as most were not out of the closet. Others, such as Christopher Isherwood and Allen Ginsberg are named. It is interesting to note that open rebellion against police abuses was sporadic in LA long before the Stonewall riot.

This is American writing from the great era of the typewriter that never sleeps, when to use apostrophes in "don't" and "can't" would have been irredeemably square, and when writing "youngman" as a compound noun and arbitrarily capitalising random adjectives (adjectives are profuse, even superabundant, in this book) was a sure sign that you were someone who could swap authentic jive talk with the best of them. It would be unfair to blame Rechy for any of those things, any more than you can blame him for the bombastic images that angrily open each chapter with the impact of a panting animal. I did blame him for all of those things when I started reading the book, of course, but I got over it surprisingly quickly, because they turn out to be completely irrelevant to what makes this quaint survivor from the early days of LGBT writing such a wonderful treat.

Rechy's unnamed narrator travels from city to city in fifties America, selling his body on the streets and in the gay bars, and telling us in fascinating and vivid detail about the characters he meets in what was still "the strange twilight world of the homosexual": the hustlers and drag queens, their clients, the fag-hags who hang around them, the vice cops, barkeepers, and all the rest. In the process, the narrator - who obviously sometimes is Rechy, with his typewriter stashed away in his room at the Y, and sometimes isn't - explores his attitude to his own sexuality, and unpicks what it is that drives him to live a life in which men have to demonstrate their desire for him by giving him money, but he doesn't allow himself to desire anything except sexual release.

Described like that, it sounds cold and anthropological, but Rechy obviously does have far more empathy for the people he describes than he allows his narrator to show, and he brings them to life very vividly on the page. And as a reader, you can't help getting involved with the fate of the Professor, Miss Destiny, Chuck, Chi-Chi and the rest of them. We even find ourselves engaging with the pathetic would-be-Nazi leather queen Neil for a few pages...

No surprise that this book was a big commercial success despite uniformly negative reviews in 1963, but a pleasant surprise to see that it's managed to retain at least some of its charm half a century later.

I sometimes wonder how I ever managed to make it through the days when I lived in the City explored by Rechy's _Night_. How did any of us? It was captivating, but so elusive. Rechy captures the elusiveness perfectly. However, I have to say that the patrons in this book are mostly captured as pathetic and predatory grotesques...Is Rechy a self-hating invert?

Read this about 20 years ago. It seemed sad then. Reread parts of it recently because Christopher Isherwood and his lover appear under other names. Bachardy seems to think the portrayal was unflattering. The Isherwood character was a trifle pretentious--hardly surprising that a gay hustler from Texas turned author might find an English expatriate who was best friends with W H Auden a little pretentious. The book and the main character still seems sad.

One hot day in Los Angeles, Amalia Gómez look to the sky and sees a large, silver cross. Or did she? After all, such miracles only happen to a chosen few, but maybe....

Over the course of the day, Amalia wanders through Hollywood, reflecting on the life she's lead, raising three children while working menial jobs and struggling against the threat of gangas dragging her children into a harder life, especially after losing her beloved son Manny to them. The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez offers a gritty look at the life of a family in the heart of Los Angeles as seen through eyes of Amalia. Mixed in with the tourists, the bullying policeman threatening deportation or beating up seeming innocents, and the constant presence of gangs, she finds ways to keep her spirits up: discussing the latest novela with her friend Milagros or a single rose blossoming from a bush thought to be dried up.

The story is her journey to re-discover the belief in herself that slowly seems to be deserting her. Amalia feels like a real person, the kind you see walking down the street every day, and her story is interesting and ultimately uplifting (with an ending that I wasn't expecting). It's a great read, and I highly recommend it.

City of Night
By John Rechy
Review by Karl Wolff

Personal History: City of Night by John Rechy was another discovery I found in Paul's Bookstore in Madison, Wisconsin during my undergraduate years. Sequestered in a crate of random paperbacks was a 1964 edition. (A second paperback edition in this particular instance.) The initial attraction to the book was its vintage status, already more than twenty years old when I purchased it ('97? '98?). I was also drawn to the noir-ish cover photograph by Grove publisher and translator Richard Seaver. (Seaver would go on to publish everyone from Beckett to Ionesco to Henry Miller to the Marquis de Sade.) Since Rechy's book could be considered gay erotica, I will admit that I came to this book with some nostalgie de la boue (ungrammatical French for "yearning for the mud"). It's why I took Latin to read Catullus and Propertius and why I read William S. Burroughs in high school. I also wanted to know the history of all things forbidden.

High school and undergraduate history courses don't normally cover the history of gay prostitution. This made reading City of Night for the first time an eye-opening experience. This second time around, I read it as more of a historical relic. (And treated with the awe and reverence relics deserve.) One of the consequences of reading is discovering entirely new territories. While minority and women got their cursory token placement in my history classes, nothing was mentioned or acknowledged about gay history, American, global, or otherwise. For me, reading across orientations wasn't an exercise in increasing my awareness and lessening my liberal white guilt, it was feeding a lustful greed to know more. Between Naked Lunch and City of Night, gay life sure seemed interesting, exciting, and forbidden. Luckily the University of Wisconsin-Madison had a vibrant and supportive LBGT student life. I had gay classmates and even went to a LGBT film festival. ("So that's what drag kings are. Huh. America is awesome!") While I was initially drawn to the book's tabloid nature and winking hints at gay sex between the covers, I realized after I read it that there was more to modern American society than that disclosed in my suburban middle-class upbringing.

The greatest thing City of Night did for me was open up a galaxy of fiction to me. Gay fiction, BDSM fiction, New Orleans fiction, and so on. From Rechy I moved on to Ethan Mordden, Alan Hollinghurst, Ronald Firbank, John Waters, and Todd Haynes. There are more, but you get the general idea.

The History: City of Night was written by John Rechy in 1963. In other words, it is a work about being gay in Fifties America. The year 1963 was the cusp year at the end of the Long Fifties, an attempt by historians to square the circle of periodicity. From Ike's inauguration in 1951 to Kennedy's assassination in 1963, the United States experienced a long period of economic growth and prosperity (albeit for white people) and a cultural attitude focused on creating stability. Two perspectives collide in this decade and how you assess this decade will be based on your own personal interpretation. One perspective is that the Fifties saw the creation of a stable society after two decades (roughly 1929 to 1945) of economic depression, war, suffering, psychological despair, and shared sacrifice. This feeds into the popular mythology of manicured lawns, nuclear families, smiling housewives, and an idyllic Republican suburbia. Another perspective sees the Fifties as a decade of blacklists, redbaiting, redlining, bigotry, segregation, the lynching of Emmit Till, and hysteria about juvie gangs, junkies, Commie infiltration, and a castrating conformity. Both have a kernel of truth to them, but as a historian, I tend to avoid either/or propositions. Mythology isn't just limited to Greek and Roman myths taught in literature classes. Mythology is also taught in history classes. The Fifties and the Sixties have their own mythologies and one should be discerning enough to recognize them for what they are.

This is a roundabout way of arriving at John Rechy, a Mexican-American writer, raised in Texas, who wrote City of Night. Life for gays in the Fifties and Sixties was not easy. Existing in a world largely hidden, these places included gay bars and areas where men exchanged money for sex. Unless one was in a large metropolis, the notion of homosexuality didn't exist in the minds of many. Publicly shunned, ghettoized, and persecuted, the threat of discovery included severe consequences. One could lose his or her job. To straight America, gays existed as caricatures, comic relief, and freaks of nature. In the back of my paperback edition, there is a list of books published by Grove. One of these is Three Men by Jean Evans. Here's the synopsis: "The shocking life stories of three warped and tortured men - a criminal, a necrophile, and a homosexual - brilliantly told in this widely hailed masterpiece of psychological reporting." Equating these three men is pretty horrifying stuff. It's hard to lobby for equal rights when one is likened to a criminal and a necrophile. Compounding this dilemma was the Mid-century Modernist habit of glorifying the declasse. Case in point, "The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster," by Norman Mailer, where he equates the jazz-loving white hipster to the psychopath. Part of the popularity of such writers like William S. Burroughs and Jean Genet was their criminality and violent prose. While both writers transcended the caricatures provided by their literary champions, the overall effect on gay liberation was far from positive.

Gay Americans weren't entirely invisible in Mid-century America. Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and William Inge took Broadway by storm with groundbreaking drama. Senator Joseph McCarthy's familiar Roy Cohn would later be revealed to be a practicing homosexual, along with Communist spy Whittaker Chambers. And one can't avoid mentioning J. Edgar Hoover's perplexing relationship by Clyde Tolson. (Perplexing because being married was de rigueur for special agents working for the FBI and Hoover was an adamant believer that homosexuality was another means of Communist infiltration.)

The Book: City of Night follows an unnamed narrator across the United States in a nomadic version of the bildungsroman. His coming of age is coupled with his coming to terms with his own homosexuality and dealing with the threat of aging. After a torturous childhood in El Paso, Texas, a dusty border town, he witnesses his dog die during a wind storm and has issues with his father, a failed musician now working as a janitor in a hospital. Following a brief stint in the army, he makes his way to New York City, having his "first contact with the alluring anarchic world which promised such turbulence." Throughout the novel, he meets various memorable characters and in the end attempts to come to terms with being gay.

Unlike Our Lady of the Flowers or Naked Lunch, Rechy's novel can be likened to a gay Grapes of Wrath. There is abundant personal suffering and the occasional heavy-handed metaphor. (The narrator's attachment to his dog and wondering why it can't go to Heaven is the most egregious example.) But not everything about the novel is quite so blunt and obvious.

Unlike Steinbeck's characters in search of a Promised Land, the narrator's pilgrimage is simultaneously internal and external. He visits Times Square, Hollywood Boulevard, Pershing Square in San Francisco, and the French Quarter, New Orleans. Each of these locations has become a pilgrimage site for gay Americans. Besides his geographic pilgrimages, the narrator also travels on a psychological pilgrimage, in this case being comfortable as a gay man. But like Moses, he never reaches the Promised Land. The novel is light on plot, but makes up for it with in-depth character studies. These range from a closeted individual calling himself "The Professor," who collects beautiful gay men for his amusement. There is Pete, a closeted hustler who calls queens "queers." There is Neil, the bondage aficionado and wannabe fascist. The novel has others as well, each offering up a personal testimony, a literary monument to their individuality and meaningfulness as human beings. Not all of these portraits are that idealized, since Rechy's portraits of drag queens and leathermen tend to be quite crude. We see how Gay America isn't a secret conspiratorial monolith, but a subculture riven with factions, rivalries, and resentment. Pete tells the narrator that since men have sex with him for money, he isn't "queer." He resents the female parody represented by the drag queens. Yet the queens are out and despite their make-up and campy mannerisms, they are authentically who they are, not compromising to society's wishes for them to conform to pre-determined gender norms.

While the novel's narrative is very loose and shambling, Rechy gives each character the time and space for a personal testimony. This is where the novel succeeds. This was pretty subversive, since it dares to put a human face on the various figures that make up the cosmology of American gay culture. The narrator gets out of the way and let's them speak.

The Verdict: The novel is a classic of gay American literature. It is also a relic of a gay America before Stonewell and before the AIDS epidemic. Both of these events galvanized, unified, and even normalized the gay community. Not to sound glib, but City of Night shows straight America the Closet and its like the TARDIS. It's bigger on the inside. Rechy shows us entire universes inside lives tightly secured and secreted away from persecution and ridicule.

The novel also established the Gay Hustler as an American literary icon. (Other literary icons include the cowboy, the hard-boiled private eye, the Italian gangster, etc.) It is an enduring figure, even if it is from a socioeconomic stratum many would prefer not to recognize.

http://www.cclapcenter.com/2013/07/the_nsfw_files_city_of_night_b.html

OR

http://driftlessareareview.com/2013/07/26/the-nsfw-files-city-of-night-by-john-r...

A memoir by a fine writer but I didn't care about his coming of age. I could have skipped the first three quarters of the book and been fine. The last quarter when he is an adult, hustling, and writing is interesting.

"A Non-Fiction Account, with Commentaries of Three Days and Nights In the Sexual Underground" from title page.

By the author of The Sexual Outlaw. Probably not for the faint-hearted.

An unnamed narrator (who shares a similar life story with the author) takes the reader on a journey from his impoverished childhood in El Paso, to stints as a hustler in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and New Orleans. The novel is primarily an exploration of the gay male bar scene of the 1950s, which, according to this account, was profoundly sad, lonely, and depressing.

Does this 400-page novel have a plot? Not really! Roughly half of it consists of people and bar cataloging – endless descriptions of this hustler and that drag queen and this bar and that bar. To make matters worse, many of these passages have a rambling, pretentious, Beat-era vibe that I have a very difficult time embracing. However, within the aimless ramblings there are some wonderful short stories, where the narrator delves into specific life events of the characters. Some of my favorites are the heartbreaking story of an aging (meaning mid-thirties, at most) hustler who carries around an envelope containing photos and newspaper clippings that depict him when he was young and desirable; another is the story of a dying professor who obsesses about young men from his past who he calls “angels,” while ignoring the man who loves and nurses him during his sickness; and, finally, the story of an emotionally unstable fascist (yes, literally), S & M guy with whom the narrator unfortunately comes into contact.

I also feel like the novel could have benefited from a more thorough exploration of the narrator’s thoughts and feelings, rather than his endless description of other people. We learn a bit about him at the very beginning and a bit at the very end, where some character growth can be detected, but otherwise it feels, for the most part, like he’s a stranger. I suppose this could be deliberate, demonstrating that the narrator is essentially running away from himself and chooses to focus on that which is outside, but it certainly makes for tedious reading.

So, rather than a 400-page novel, this could have been edited down into a 200-page collection of very high-quality short stories. This was Rechy’s first published novel and it’s clearly a bit of a mess and was in need of a good editor. However, there are moments of excellent writing, and I may try something else by him, further down the road.

For the first time, I'm at a loss for words to describe the story without giving too much away. As the title says, it's about Lyle Clemens. Actually, Lyle Clemens the Second. The first Lyle Clemens was a handsome cowboy who one night wooed a beauty pageant hopeful named Sylvia Love, got her pregnant and showered her with promises, then skipped town. Lyle grows up with his Mother's sadness lingering around the house and tries whatever he can to make her happy. But he's turning into a handsome young man, the spitting image of Lyle the First, and Sylvia's emotions push her over somewhat over the edge. Lyle decides the best thing to do is to leave Rio Escondido and falls under the greedy eyes of Brother Bud and Sister Sis, the two religious zealots who convince him to work for their "Write a Letter to Jesus" campaign. They take him to the glitter and lights of Southern California, where he meets with a myriad of characters some wonderful and some devilish, some helpful and some blinded by greed. Through all the trials and temptations, Lyle finds the strength to be himself and to stay true to his heart.

My, what I've left out! Rechy includes quite a few sub-stories, all having some kind of effect on Lyle in subtle ways -- from Sylvia's disastrous involvement with the Miss Rio Escondido Beauty Pageant to Lyle's stint with Brother Bud and Sister Sis on their televised letter campaign to a determined aging actress trying to regain the spotlight with the film sequel to Valley of the Dolls. While most of them are fun, they seem to be layered on one after the other, jumping quickly before one tale can finish. As I reader, I wasn't given enough of a chance to get into a storyline before all the characters moved onto something else. After a while, the stories begin to lose believability and seem more coincidental than necessary.

I hate to say it, but I'm not all that fond of the characters. They come across as over-the-top and one-dimensional, like characters in a telenovela. They're either good or bad, with no grey area in between to allow for growth. Lyle's almost too much of a goody-goody that he seems almost oblivious to negative situations unless they're pointed out to him. I did, however, think it a nice touch to add the character of Enrique Fielding o the mix, since the spiel on the dust jacket mentions that this story is loosely based on "The History of Tom Jones" by Henry Fielding.

"The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens" is interesting to read, but from what I've read of Rechy's other books, he's offered much better stories and characters.½

The Forth Angle is a compelling, ferociously relevant story of four teenagers playing deadly games with drugs, sex, and one another. Behind a facade of tough cynicism, on a raging search for kicks, they explore the hot, dusty city, bent on trouble.

Fighting themselves and the boredom of the hot Texas summer that stretches before them like a barren desert, they range parks, streets, derelict houses, killing time by playing private and very dangerous games. They get their kicks by picking on people--strange people, perverts, anybody--trying to get into their heads.

As they hover in the limbo between childhood and adulthood, the four "angels" maintain a precarious balance among themselves and within the intriguing but hostile world confronting them. They keep playing with fire until the playing explodes into a terrible reality they all have to face.

The title tells us already that this rather short novel takes place on a single day in the life of Amalia Gomez. Through out this day she remembers details of her life and we get her and her past better to know. As a twice divorced woman, with three kids, of which her eldest is already dead, from two different men and living with a long term boyfriend her life isn't as exemplary as it should be considering her highly religious attitude. Somehow she has managed to get along so far, even when she moved from one crisis to another and her own mother constantly criticised her.
But on this miraculous, when everything starts to crumble around her, she changes considerably and becomes active for the first time in her life.

Some themes which are touched within this novel:
Mexican subculture, problem of immigration, conflict of generations, dealing with the coming out of a kid, dealing with sexual abuse, emancipation from the church... and some more.

Well, now my personal opinion (o:
at some point I got annoyed because of Amalia's constant need of approval. She wants God to approve her behaviour, she wants the men to be attracted to her and thus approve her outward appearance, she wants the approval of her kids... She simply depends on the reactions of others, she seldom showed any initiative. God knows, the ending of the novel was necessary, otherwise it hadn't been bearable for me. Can't say more, you are supposed to read it yourself, if you're interested (o:.
But all together it is a pretty precise depiction of the life of a Mexican American woman, though some may argue it is a little to heavy with clichés. Still it wasn't that hard to read. But I found it difficult to enjoy while that woman had to go through so much.

As far as the style is concerned, it was rather interesting. You get a lot of introspection, the narrator gives full account of Amalia's thoughts at times, just as streams of consciousness, pieces of her thoughts, whenever she hesitates...
The text is also interspersed with Spanish vocabulary, well, some sentences and single words every now and then, due to the Mexican heritage of the protagonist.

In comparison to his first novel, Rechy got a lot better - in my humble opinion.
This book is tightly glued together through a sharply defined period of time in which the protagonist takes a trip to Los Angeles. Also a lot of recurring themes or 'rituals' - as the narrator states it somewhere - help to make it a much more complete work than his first novel.

Through the narrator we get insight in the protagonist, Johnny Rio, and even the major parts of his life led so far. He states Johnny to be a good-looking, but narcissistic person, who needs to be desired by others and never ever desires someone back.
Ultimately I felt pity for the protagonist, cause he suffers from his desire to be desired that much, that his self-esteem every now and then would crumble, if it wasn't for his strange 'reasons', which are sometimes merely weak excuses to do, what he does, and to justify what he does without admitting that he wants to do it. The narrator clearly comments on this, while Johnny puts his reasons together, he simply contradicts and is therefore somehow a symbol of truth for me throughout the novel. Personally I thought those comments that contradicted the protagonist quite charming.

The one negative aspect, the only annoying thing I could find, were introductions of descriptions of characters or scenes that contained the phrase 'like this:'. This invoked a feeling as if the author lacked the creativity to give a proper introduction to his descriptions. And he did this frequently.

After I have read those praising words on the back, I was high spirited when I started reading.
Though through out the novel Rechy depicted several characters pretty detailed - what I thought was a nice gesture - I felt somehow a indeterminable lack of depth.
Also I totally disagree with the statement 'Probably no first novel is so complete, so well held together, and so important as City of Night.'(The Houston Post). Though every chapter in its own right is good, its content is comprehensible and coherent in itself, most of the chapters were only loosely interconnected. Others where tightly knitted together - and this discrepancy really disturbed me while reading.

But it was - of course! - not bad at all. The insight this book offers of the homosexual scene at that time is very detailed. This as well as the personal view, thoughts and feelings of the first person narrator helps a lot to get an impression aloof from the usual prejudice concerning the life of people called 'homosexuals'.

Like many of Rechy's books, THE SEXUAL OUTLAW is powerful, fascinating, and very depressing. The themes present in his novels are here in this non-fiction work - the power of physical beauty, narcissm, sex as liberation, unfulfilled desire, etc. Along with a narrative of one hustler's quest for validation through his sexual encounters, Rechy threads in a treatise on what it means to be homosexual in twentieth century America. Much of what he says is relevant to the twenty-first century as well, as the current battle over same-sex marriage attests.
Those looking for explicit sex will find it in abundance here. Rechy pulls no punches in his depiction of homoerotic love. Yet he is wise enough to see the sadness in the "sexhunt," and his "character" Jim, we know, will never find that elusive thing for which he searches, the combination of sexual gratification and personal intimacy. None of us will find it. We hate Jim for his narcissm and his superficiality but admire his rebel stance. He is a man-loving man not ashamed of the fact.

Rechy's accounts of police corruption concerning gay men and the hours spent nabbing "sexhunters" that could otherwise be spent apprehending murderers, rapists, and thieves are enough to make one's blood boil. And I love his comments on gay sensibility. But I find his whole stance on S&M somewhat puzzling and hypocritical. While no advocate of or participant in that particular sexual lifestyle, I fail to see the difference between the physical pain inflicted by "masters" upon "slaves" and the psychological pain engendered in the course of the sexhunt. Indeed it would seem the latter pain would be the more enduring and damaging.

This is an important book, more than twenty-five years old, but still relevant.

Reviewer: Randall Ivey "Randall" on Amazon.com

The earliest of these essays is from 1958, the latest from 2004. Naturally, there is some repetition of ideas. They range from essays about other writers (he's virulent about Joyce Carol Oates' Blonde) to the portrayal of homosexuality in film to politics, past and present.

I very highly recommend this book. This is my first experience with Rechy's writing but it will certainly not be my last. What a talented writer! The book is very short but extremely powerful. And he describes Los Angeles so perfectly -- not the LA that most people know, but the neighborhoods. If you've ever been in East LA or the "other" side of Hollywood, you will recognize it immediately. I did some teaching work in East LA for a while at a school of predominantly Latino children, and his descriptions of the houses, the people and the atmosphere were right on the money.

In the middle of the book Amalia Gómez is watching a semanal and identifying bits and pieces of the conflict being televised with events & people in her own life. At the end of the show, one of the characters notes

"'O Dios, O Madre Sagrada! Is there no way out of of this nightmare, O God, O Sacred Mother?' ... 'None except ---' She gazes at heaven" 'Only a miracle can save us now! Give me a sign that you understand!" (104)

And that is precisely what Amalia Gomez thinks she sees one Saturday morning, looking up into the sky. She thinks there is a silver cross in the sky, a sign sent by God, "by way of the Blessed Mother." (105) And poor Amalia could use a miracle just now. Her eldest son, Manny, died while in jail under some mysterious circumstances, her younger son Juan has been acting weird and her daughter is much too young to be dressing and acting so maturely. There are a lot of pressures facing the family as they are living in the neighborhood and the pressures of being Mexican-American. She has to face the present while remembering her own past, and on this day, everything seems to be coming down on her all at once.

The book is very well written and pulls at your heartstrings. Don't miss the introduction -- it will offer some good insight into Amalia's character. I very highly recommend this one.

This is a classic in gay literature. Rechy reveals a seemy underside of life in the 1960s among hustlers and drag queens. This tale is not for the faint of heart. Although a mirror of some aspects of gay life of its time, it seems a bit quaint and dated these days.½