John Francisco Rechy is an American novelist, essayist, memoirist, dramatist and literary critic. In his novels, he has written extensively about gay culture in Los Angeles and wider America, among other subject matters, and is among the pioneers of modern LGBT literature. City of Night, his debut novel published in 1963, was a best seller. Drawing on his own background, he has contributed to Chicano literature, notably with his novel The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez, which has been taught in several Chicano literature courses throughout the United States.
Background
Rechy was born March 10, 1931 in El Paso, Texas. He was the youngest of five children born to Guadalupe and Roberto Sixto Rechy. Both of Rechy's parents were natives of Mexico; his father was of Scottish lineage. He earned a B.A. in English from Texas Western College, where he served as editor of the college newspaper. Following graduation from college, Rechy enlisted in the U.S. Army. He was granted early release from the Army to enroll as a graduate student at Columbia University. He applied for admission to a creative writing class taught by novelist Pearl S. Buck by submitting an unpublished novel he had written titled Pablo! While his application to Buck's class was not accepted, Rechy was admitted into the writing classes of Hiram Haydn, a senior editor at Random House, at the New School for Social Research. The Cooper Do-nuts Riot happened in 1959 in Los Angeles, when the lesbians, gay men, transgender people, and drag queens who hung out at Cooper Do-nuts and who were frequently harassed by the LAPD fought back after police arrested three people, including Rechy. Patrons began pelting the police with donuts and coffee cups. The LAPD called for back-up and arrested a number of rioters. Rechy and the other two original detainees were able to escape. He later wrote about it in City of Night.
Literary career
Rechy's first published work, the largely autobiographical novelCity of Night, debuted in October 1963. Despite the predominantly negative reviews the book received at the time of its publication, City of Night became an international bestseller.
In addition to the dozen novels he has written to date, Rechy has contributed numerous essays and literary reviews to various publications including The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Los Angeles Times, L.A. Weekly, The Village Voice, The New York Times, Evergreen Review and Saturday Review. Many of these writings were anthologized in his 2004 publication Beneath the Skin. He has written three plays, Tigers Wild, Rushes, and Momma as She Became—Not as She Was, a one-act play. Rechy was cited by journalist Amy Harmon in a 2004 New York Times article that reported about a computer glitch on Amazon.com that suddenly revealed the identities of thousands of people who had anonymously postedbook reviews. It was revealed that Rechy, among several other authors, had "pseudonymously written themselves five-star reviews, Amazon's highest rating". Amazon stopped accepting anonymous reviews as a result of this finding.
Writers Michael Cunningham, Kate Braverman, Sandra Tsing Loh, and Gina Nahai were students of Rechy's creative writing classes before becoming published authors. English pop artist David Hockney's painting Building, Pershing Square, Los Angeles was inspired by a passage in City of Night. The 1983 song "Numbers" by the English synthpop duo Soft Cell was inspired by Rechy's 1967 novel of the same title. A CD-ROM of Rechy's life and work was produced by the Annenberg Center of Communications and is titled Mysteries and Desire: Searching the Worlds of John Rechy.
