Rechy, John. City of Night. New York: Grove, 1963.

When I first picked this book up, I thought its first sentence was incredible:

Later I would think of America as one vast City of Night stretching gaudily from Times Square to Hollywood Boulevard — jukebox-winking, rock-n-roll-moaning: America at night fusing its darkcities into the unmistakeable shape of loneliness.

It's a bit mannered, isn't it? Doesn't read so hot after 380 pages of such stuff, and can a man get away with pronouncing his novel's title in caps in the novel's opening sentence?

This isn't a very good book, despite what people such as James Baldwin and Christopher Isherwood had to say about it. Picture On the Road as if it were written by a male hustler about the world of hustling, and imagine that this hustler narrator thought of reciprocal male-male sex as a threat to masculinity, and that masculinity as defined by, like, the 19th-century frontier was something that had to be held onto at all costs.

It, like most things, would be less tedious if it were much shorter. I think in 1963 there was something compelling by the creatures of the gay underworld that Rechy portrayed, but these days, if people want to read about a man who likes to dress up as a Nazi and get pissed on and kicked in the balls, all they have to do is watch some CBS one-hour drama.