City of Night (Independent Voices) (Independent Voices)

An innovative description of the urban underworld of male prostitution. Rechy portrays a nameless narrator as he travels through several US cities, meeting a collection of unforgettable characters, from drag queens and criminals to the bedridden Professor and Lance O'Hara, once Hollywood's biggest star. Rechy describes this world with brutal candour and understanding but without sentimentality or self-pity, in a prose that is highly personal, vivid and boldly descriptive. Rechy has never equalled in later novels the dynamism and freshness of City of Night. In that groundbreaking book he was... observing a whole new array of characters: drag queens, the still-beautiful boy living dangerously beyond his sell-by date, the guilt-ridden married men eaten up by desire and remorse, the vice cops and fag hags they re all there, many of them for the first time in American literature... this classic American novel. --Edmund White

Absolutely true... He tells the truth, and tells it with such passion that we are forced to share in the life he conveys. --James Baldwin

An American classic, with its loner hero, its juke joints and neon signs, its restless shifting from city to city, bed to bed; a hybrid of On the Road and Catcher in the Rye.