John Rechy

Artist Biography

is a first generation Mexican American novelist who was born in El Paso, Texas and who in 1997 received PEN-USA-West's Lifetime Achievement Award. He came to world attention in 1963 with the publication of his first novel, City of Night, which revealed the previously unknown world of gay hustling and immediately became a best seller and an American classic. Finding it difficult to believe that someone so young who knew that world so intimately could possibly be such a brilliant writer, many critics at first speculated that the book must have been written from another's experience by an established writer under a pseudonym--perhaps James Baldwin or Tennessee Williams. The book had a profound influence on many other artists, including Jim Morrison, David Bowie, Gus van Sant, and David Hockney. Rechy went on to write eleven more novels, which have been translated into over a dozen languages and which are frequently taught in university courses.

With subsequent provocative works on the gay world, such as Numbers, The Sexual Outlaw, and Rushes, he has remained a controversial and influential figure. With later works like The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez and some of his essays, he has also become an important figure in Chicano literature. In fact, all of his protagonists are Mexican American, and a number of them are female (as in Marilyn's Daughter and Our Lady of Babylon as well as in Amalia Gomez). He is also the author of three plays, several short stories, and many essays on a wide range of topics--gay politics, bodybuilding, book reviews. He was also a journalist for the Texas Observer and The Nation, championing many leftist political causes. In the early 1970s when Rechy settled in Los Angeles, he began teaching writing courses that have become legendary--first at Occidental College, then at UCLA, and now in the Masters in Professional Writing Program at USC. Many of the students in his workshops have published novels and plays, and won Emmy's and Oscars, but still continue under his tutelage, claiming he is a master teacher.

Bibliography
Books:
City of Night, 1963.
Numbers, 1967.
This Day's Death, 1969.
The Vampires, 1971.
The Fourth Angel, 1973.
The Sexual Outlaw, 1977.
Rushes, 1979.
Bodies and Souls, 1983.
Marilyn's Daughter, 1988.
The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez, 1991.
Our Lady of Babylon, 1996.
The Coming of the Night, 1998.

Plays
Momma As She Became--Not As She Was, 1968.
Rushes, 1978.
Tigers Wild, 1986.
Visit John Rechy's site at: www.johnrechy.com,
or contact him via email at: johnrechy@aol.com

<return to Database Narratives