About Me
Author! Hustler! Professor! Provocateur! John Rechy is one of the true living legends of the literary world. His 1963 classic novel "City of Night"--about a sensitive young man hustling his way towards self-awareness--literarily set the publishing world on fire. It was the first best-selling American book to openly depict homosexuality. The protagonist, a nameless male hustler, roams from New York to Los to New Orleans, interacting with a startling and very real array of male prostitutes, drag queens, johns, and social outcasts along the way.
Both shocking and beautiful, "City of Night," paved the way for the frank and explicit books that would soon follow. It's safe to say that the current literary world would be very different if it weren't for this groundbreaking writer. The novel is still as powerful today, not for the subject matter, but because of its lyrical prose and heartbreaking depictions of misfits and loners who wear different masks in order to hide their true identities while trying to fit into a world where they are outlaws.
Rechy has since published 14 books. Some, like "Numbers," "The Sexual Outlaw," and "The Coming of Night" revisited and expanded on the sexual subterranean of hustling and cruising. Others such as "Marilyn's Daughter," "The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez," and "The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemmens Rechy," tackle subjects like race, religion, lust, fame, love, and death.
Read about Rechy's extraordinary body of work here: http://www.johnrechy.com/
Always controversial Rechy is as known for his remarkable body as for his powerful body of work. Now, in what is sure to be a literary event, Rechy is publishing his memoir: "About My Life and the Kept Women." In this wide-ranging work, Rechy extends far beyond the confines of the usual memoir. Full of memorable sequences "About My Life and the Kept Woman," is an unforgettable mixture of colorful characters, diverse locations and exciting experiences--very much what you would expect coming from the life of John Rechy. This is the work of a powerful writer with a powerful life story.
Order "About My Life and the Kept Woman" from amazon.com here by clicking here:
About My Life and the Kept Woman: A Memoir ..
From the flap: Hailed by Gore Vidal as "one of the few original American writers of the last century," John Rechy has always been a path‑breaker. His first novel, City of Night, has becomes a modern classic, and his subsequent body of work has kept him among America's most important writers. Now, for the first time, in a volume that is a testament to the power of pride and self-acceptance, he writes openly about his life, from his childhood years of poverty during the Great Depression to his rebellious times in school, his defiant period in the army, years hustling on the streets of America, his arrest in Los Angeles--on to his emergence as a writer.
Rechy was raised Mexican‑American in El Paso, Texas, at a time when Latino children were routinely separated from their Anglo classmates for daily lice checks and English pronunciation lessons, and being proud of who you were was unheard of. Because of his light skin, he was often assumed to be Anglo, and his name was "changed" by a teacher, from Juan to John. As he grew older--and as his fascination deepened with the memory of a notorious kept woman in his childhood--Rechy became "a ghost boy" who preferred to be alone, feeling different in his heritage and, eventually, in his sexuality. While he performed the roles others wanted for him, he never allowed anyone to define him--whether the authoritarians in the U.S. Army, the bigoted relatives of his Anglo college classmates, or the men and women who wanted him to be something he was not.
In these pages, Rechy revisits events fictionalized in his famous autobiographical novel, City of Night, fleshing them out with a new vibrant cast of characters: his loving Mexican mother and violent Scottish father; Alicia, an enigmatic young woman whose life intertwines with his from El Paso to San Francisco; and a roster of such luminaries as Alan Ginsberg and Christopher Isherwood.
Navigating the Depression, the Second World War, the Watts Riots, the Vietnam War protests, About My Life and the Kept Woman is a moving, powerful story of a life that bears witness to some of the most turbulent changes of the past century. Resonating with fierce individualism and utter candor--and interspersed with flashes of humor--it is as much a portrait of intolerance as of an individual who defied it to forge his own path.
John Rechy is the author of two works of nonfiction and twelve novels, including the controversial best seller The Sexual Outlaw and the modern classic City of Night, as well as Numbers, Bodies and Souls, The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez, and The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens. In 1997, he became the first novelist to receive PEN-CENTER-USA's Lifetime Achievement Award. He is the recipient of the Publishing Triangle's William Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, and an NEA fellow.
Praise for John Rechy:
"One of the few major American writers whose life is almost as interesting, and meaningful, as his work."--Michael Cunningham."John Rechy doesn't fit into categories. He transcends them. His individual vision is unique, perfect, loving and strong."--Carolyn See."One of the most heroic figures of contemporary American Life ... a touchstone of moral integrity and artistic innovation."--Edmund White.
Publishers Weekly says: There's something essentially naked about novelist John Rechy. I mean more than the cliché that he writes the “naked truth†about marginal people living outside polite society, a theme struck yet again in About My Life and the Kept Woman [Grove, Feb.]. Nor does that refer to the blunt sexuality that grinds away at the lives fleetingly recollected in this beautiful first memoir. Rechy slips identities on and off like a winter coat. Born Mexican-American, he passes for Anglo. He plays the “straight†hustler, but he also needs to be desired by men in a way that's desperately compulsive. A tough guy of few words when working the street, he sneaks off to the library to read Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Each time he becomes someone else, we glimpse a little more of the person underneath, bared in small glances here or there. About My Life and the Kept Woman is a marvelous autobiography by a writer whose life is as interesting as his fiction.Although this page is not run and operated by John Rechy, it is created with his consent and he will check its content from time to time. Feel free to send your comments, questions, and messages.
Order "About My Life and the Kept Woman" from amazon.com here by clicking here:
About My Life and the Kept Woman: A Memoir ..
