The Coming of the Night
Dec 2007 · Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
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259
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About this ebook
A stunning evocation of gay desire in the moment just before AIDs by the acclaimed author of City of Night: "Taut writing and unapologetic sexual energy" ( The Dallas Morning News).
It is 1981, a hot summer night, and an unscripted ritual is about to take place. Jesse, "the kid," is celebrating one year on the dazzling gay scene and plans to lose himself in its transient pleasures. Clint has fled New York with a sense of unease in the wake of a vicious gay-bashing. Buzz, Boo, Toro, Fredo, and Linda are cruising the city looking for danger, and so is Dave, a "leatherman" devoted to S&M and testing limits. And a priest is searching the streets for a young hustler named Angel, determined to bring him to Jesus.
In this city of night we meet a black cowboy, a bodybuilder obsessed with his sexual prowess, a drag-queen porn director hired to rehearse her stars for a closeted Hollywood mogul, and a middle-aged romantic hiding from a new gay world increasingly obsessed with youth and beauty. As the Santa Ana winds, renowned for stirring up desires and violence, breathe fire down the hills of Los Angeles, this cast of characters circles ever closer to the night—and to a confrontation as astonishing as it is inevitable.
The Coming of the Night is an ode to the golden age of promiscuity and an unflinching exploration of the dark side of desire. "As exciting as it is chilling," it proves once again that John Rechy, the trenchant chronicler of gay life, has no parallel ( Los Angeles Times).
It is 1981, a hot summer night, and an unscripted ritual is about to take place. Jesse, "the kid," is celebrating one year on the dazzling gay scene and plans to lose himself in its transient pleasures. Clint has fled New York with a sense of unease in the wake of a vicious gay-bashing. Buzz, Boo, Toro, Fredo, and Linda are cruising the city looking for danger, and so is Dave, a "leatherman" devoted to S&M and testing limits. And a priest is searching the streets for a young hustler named Angel, determined to bring him to Jesus.
In this city of night we meet a black cowboy, a bodybuilder obsessed with his sexual prowess, a drag-queen porn director hired to rehearse her stars for a closeted Hollywood mogul, and a middle-aged romantic hiding from a new gay world increasingly obsessed with youth and beauty. As the Santa Ana winds, renowned for stirring up desires and violence, breathe fire down the hills of Los Angeles, this cast of characters circles ever closer to the night—and to a confrontation as astonishing as it is inevitable.
The Coming of the Night is an ode to the golden age of promiscuity and an unflinching exploration of the dark side of desire. "As exciting as it is chilling," it proves once again that John Rechy, the trenchant chronicler of gay life, has no parallel ( Los Angeles Times).
A stunning evocation of gay desire in the moment just before AIDs by the acclaimed author of City of Night: "Taut writing and unapologetic sexual energy" ( The Dallas Morning News).
It is 1981, a hot summer night, and an unscripted ritual is about to take place. Jesse, "the kid," is celebrating...
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About the author
Rechy is an important gay writer also linked to the Beat Movement, whose work has been recognized by a number of prestigious grant nominations or awards, including one from the National Endowment for the Arts. He grew up in El Paso, Texas, in a poor, Mexican American family. Because of his poverty and his ethnic heritage, he learned very early in life to feel himself an outsider, which was intensified by his later experiences as a gay hustler traveling America in search of his social and sexual identity. He came to popular and critical attention with his first published novel, City of Night (1963), which was a bestseller and was nominated for the International Prix Formentor. A fictionalized account of his travels, the novel focuses on the people whom the unnamed narrator encounters on the hustling scene in a number of cities, including New York, San Francisco, New Orleans, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Together, these cities make up the titular "city of night," or, as Rechy writes, "the city of night of the soul." A state of mind rather than a particular place, this "city"---modern America---is where hypocrisy and homophobia are reconciled with the fact of homosexuality in various forms, and poverty may be more spiritual than material. The book owes something to two classics: Jack Kerouac's Beat novel, On the Road, which celebrates countercultural alternatives to middle-class culture and lifestyles, including bourgeois marriage and family life, and Djuna Barnes's modernist novel Nightwood, which explores a tragic gay "nightworld" as a symbol of the modern urban wasteland. Rechy addresses similar themes in a later work that is equally well known, The Sexual Outlaw (1977), which he has described as an experiment with the novel form. Ostensibly a documentary of the life of a gay man, the book is also a critique of American values and morality. Commentaries throughout the text are really journalistic essays that expose the double standards and double binds of a "closeted" culture, in which many fear to be openly gay because of homophobic reprisals. Rechy has suggested that all of his work (which includes plays, essays, and reviews, as well as novels) articulates the need to preserve gay "difference," which he associates with "abundant sexuality," in the face of increasing "heterofascism."
Rechy is an important gay writer also linked to the Beat Movement, whose work has been recognized by a number of prestigious grant nominations or awards, including one from the National Endowment for the Arts. He grew up in El Paso, Texas, in a poor, Mexican American family. Because of his povert...
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