This is a 'classic' but I treat it as something sacred - my perspective may be slightly different because I live in and grew up in the UK and Ireland and, although this novel had hostile reviews in the USA in the UK it received very thoughtful reviews from publications like 'The Spectator' (imagine the 'National Review' giving the work a positive review?!) Sunday Times, Telegraph, Guardian and Times Literary Supplement - it doesn't mean things were better in the UK, but they were different. 'Homosexuality' was never quite as frightening, nor as taboo, nor had medicine or psychiatry dominated the discussion over here as it did in the USA - it just wasn't feared in the same way. There are parts of this novel which are powerful, but it has great longueurs where it is over written and way too long. I found the 380 pages of the hard back version tough going because it was repetitive and never seemed to go anywhere - except different places to say the same things again.
Although trumpeted as a 'gay' novel it is really a novel of a world and way of thinking, acting and behaving that the 'gay' movement was about to consign to the rubbish bin of history. That was the world of drag queens, trade and johns in a fabulously complex ritual performance of rigidly confined roles which allowed for no deviation and in which the cruelties of of queens, trade, johns etc. towards each other merely reflected and amplified the persecution that straight society was inflicting.
This novel depicts a world that was created in response to oppression, although it has roots going further back it is very much a creation of post WWII USA society and circumstances. Although I can see elements that are familiar there is no way the world Rechy describes could be translated to London, let alone Paris, Berlin, Rome or Amsterdam at that time. In the UK class would have made impossible any similar society or relations. Rechy is also depicting a world that was just on the point of disappearing. He mentions throughout that there are 'gay' men who are out looking for sex with each other outside of the 'fairy/queen, trade, john' dynamic and world that he is inhabiting and describing. Rechy's world is perhaps the most obvious, but it is only outsiders and maybe those entering the 'gay' world for the first time, who imagine that they actually reflect what being homosexual/gay/queer is, was, has, or will be. This novel was published only three years before Stonewall and by the time Edmund White, and others, in the late 1970's and early 80's were describing the 'gay' world, the one that they discovered when they first went out into the 'gay' world, the worlds of 'City of Night' was as vanished and near forgotten as that of pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg, and as unlikely to be resurrected. They needed to explain all of it to their readers because almost all of it it had been rejected by the first post-Stonewall generation as a way of life, acting and thought that had been imposed on them by their persecutors.
But this is what makes City of Night so interesting, and why Rechy is, despite my earlier complaints, such a good writer. He is not trapped by the cliches and stereotypes and he writes movingly, and beautifully about many of those queens and the 'youngmen' who could sell their bodies only so long as they were young, but more importantly as long as they didn't appear to enjoy it. The tales of these 'youngmen'* who had to put on a performance of dumb masculinity is perhaps the most tragic thing in the book. Also, unstated because American literature and society didn't, and maybe still doesn't, think about the poor and disadvantaged that they exploit, there is throughout the novel a portrait of poor men and women on the very lowest level of economic life who have no rights, receive no respect and are outside of any 'community', they are simply the exploited. They are the ones who fought Stonewall, filled out the early marches, and while making up the statistics for campaigners all too often died alone and forgotten when AIDS hit. Being poor is still the greatest mortal sin.
There is a great deal in this novel as long as you don't sentimentalise it or the period it describes. It is an important book but I cannot imagine rereading it any time soon.
*Rechy's spelling.