Rushes
Dec 2007 · Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
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224
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About this ebook
A "tour de force" novel from the groundbreaking author of City of Night and one of the premier chroniclers of gay life in America ( Los Angeles Times).
John Rechy takes us inside a "leather and Western" bar located near the deserted waterfront of a large American city. This is a sexual battlefield—a world of trucks, piers, and warehouses—depicted in Rechy's "eloquent, convincing, basically unsparing" prose (Herbert Gold).
The bar regulars are on a ceaseless search for compatible love. The occasional customer hopes for a quick sexual fix. Female and transvestite hookers work the dark streets outside. A couple seeks a voyeuristic experience. And one young man ventures out for the first time.
During the course of a single evening we get to know them all and watch as the night descends into the depths of a sexual underworld where danger and play transform into quasi-religious rites that end in ritual sacrifice.
John Rechy takes us inside a "leather and Western" bar located near the deserted waterfront of a large American city. This is a sexual battlefield—a world of trucks, piers, and warehouses—depicted in Rechy's "eloquent, convincing, basically unsparing" prose (Herbert Gold).
The bar regulars are on a ceaseless search for compatible love. The occasional customer hopes for a quick sexual fix. Female and transvestite hookers work the dark streets outside. A couple seeks a voyeuristic experience. And one young man ventures out for the first time.
During the course of a single evening we get to know them all and watch as the night descends into the depths of a sexual underworld where danger and play transform into quasi-religious rites that end in ritual sacrifice.
A "tour de force" novel from the groundbreaking author of City of Night and one of the premier chroniclers of gay life in America ( Los Angeles Times).
John Rechy takes us inside a "leather and Western" bar located near the deserted waterfront of a large American city. This is a sexual battlefi...
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Ratings and reviews
2 reviews
Scott Hagensee
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October 16, 2023
Astounding descriptive verse
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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