John (Francisco) Rechy Biography

Because my first novel, City of Night, was greeted by two personally assaultive reviews, one in "The New York Review of Books," the other in "The New Republic," both of which shrilly attacked the novel's salient subject (homosexuality and male-hustling) while ignoring its careful literary form, much of my subsequent work is still frequently mis-viewed, especially since those two reviews have been anthologized. I consider myself a literary writer, one attentive to structure and style as essential to meaning. Employing a variety of forms, I've explored many subjects, ranging from male-hustling (City of Night, The Sexual Outlaw) to the power of legend over myth as epitomized by Marilyn Monroe (Marilyn's Daughter), to a day in the life of a Mexican-American woman (The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez) to a panoramic view of Los Angeles as a modern paradise of "lost angels" (Bodies and Souls). I wish that equal critical attention were paid to the literary aspects of my writing as, often—and years later—to the subject, only the subject, of my first novel.

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