The Sexual Outlaw

A Documentary

John Rechy

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781555847326
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi su tematiche LGBT

From the award-winning writer, "a passionate manifesto for gay rights by an author who openly and unapologetically identifies himself as a participant" ( People ). In this angry, eloquent outcry against the oppression of homosexuals, the author of the classic City of Night gives "an explosive non-fiction account, with commentaries, of three days and nights in the sexual underground" of Los Angeles in the 1970s—the "battlefield" of the sexual outlaw. Using the language and techniques of film, Rechy deftly intercuts the despairing, joyful, and defiant confessions of a male hustler with the "chorus" of his own subversive reflections on sexual identity and sexual politics, and with stark documentary, reports of the violence our society directs against homosexuals—"the only minority against whose existence there are laws." "An intelligent, persuasive and, in its way, heartbreaking manifesto." — The New York Times "A jolting book... An intense, personal, and courageous document. A book written out of rage, unnerving, thought provoking." — Los Angeles Times Praise for John Rechy "Rechy shows great comic and tragic talent. He is truly a gifted novelist." —Christopher Isherwood, author and playwright "His tone rings absolutely true, is absolutely his own, and he has the kind of discipline which allows him a rare and beautiful recklessness. He tells the truth, and tells it with such passion that we are forced to share in the life he conveys. This is a most humbling and liberating achievement." —James Baldwin, novelist, playwright, and activist "His uncompromising honesty as a gay writer has provoked as much fear as admiration... John Rechy doesn't fit into categories. He transcends them. His individual vision is unique, perfect, loving and strong." —Carolyn See, author of Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in America

VOICE OVER: Interview 1

A WRITER FOR a literary magazine calls me up about an interview. I'm wary. I ask him to send me some of the interviews he's done. They're good, and with writers I know. When he calls up again, I agree. My place or his? His.

I arrive at the building. Two-story Spanish-style apartments, gardens with bleeding flowers kept neat by—of course—an oriental gardener: like a forties movie. Barbara Stanwyck might answer the doorbell. Now I realize I've been here before. With the interviewer's neighbor? it amuses me to think. Maybe with his roommate. That would be— … Or— … 1 No, impossible.

Yes. The man who opens the door is a man I've been with, anonymously, right in this apartment. Instantly we recognize each other. Identities and splintered memories spiral. The first time, neither had known who the other was. Then—I was a silent street figure. Now—here I am a writer, and there he is the interviewer! Finally, I laugh. “Oh, no!”

“Oh, yes,” he says.

“Hey, man—…” I begin to lapse into street jargon. Then I say, “At least you won't have to ask me if my work is autobiographical.”

We start the interview slowly, adjusting to the fusing realities. He asks me mild questions—about Los Angeles (I say it is perhaps the most exciting city in the world), about New York (I tell him that when I left there, I thought, My God, I'm still alive!).

Still slowly, but edging along, he asks me: “Don't you think that now all the blatant sexuality has made Los Angeles less sexy?”

I answer: “No. For me the ideal sexiness, finally, is a loose one, not a hidden one. Some people think a tantalizing sexuality is more intriguing. I love going around without a shirt.”

I go on to evoke a symbol of repression. I tell him I was on a private beach recently with some very gorgeous people, males and females, tanned, exposed, beautiful, bikinied bodies. Suddenly a figure appeared, a small, wrinkled dinosaur of a man; he was wearing a shirt, shorts, shoes, body hidden almost totally to the brash sun. A woman was with him, and a bodyguard followed behind. The eyes of the sagging-skinned man met ours, invisible guns pointed at us. Ronald Reagan, his wife, and bodyguard passed on.

Now the interviewer asks me how old I was when City of Night was published.

I try to be cool, but a monster figure of the gay world has been evoked—age. “That would be a way of figuring out how old I am now, and I'm very sensitive about telling my age.”

A bad moment. He asks my opinion of the gay liberation movement.

“It's done a lot of good, and I am for it.” But I add mentally: When it isn't being used as ultimate cop-out, as it is now, increasingly.

The interviewer moves into the mined area of relationships.

Well, I have made mild flirtations in that area, and I might still try. I tell the interviewer: “A brilliant psychiatrist friend of mine upheld that what is so alienating about homosexual relationships is that they begin with the intimacy of sex instead of proceeding toward it. To get a relationship going, you have to work back. Perhaps this is the reason so few homosexual relationships last.”

(Reading that portion of the interview now, two or so years later, I'm disappointed with myself for that answer. By implication, I elevated relationships over promiscuity. I will have to think about that more.)

Suddenly the interviewer shocks me: “Why are you so reticent about your age?”

I stumble badly: “… extremely narcissistic … appearance … bodybuilding … muscles…. My body is important, I love my body…. “I pull away: “I never tell strangers that I'm a writer.” I'm telling him what he already knows, and I'm putting him down subtly. “On the street, I'm another person.”

He smiles. He knows. “There's also a certain suggestion of violence in your street appearance,” he recalls. “I assume that's intentional?”

The bad moment passes. Our identities adjust again to the present. “I've been told that often. There are times when I use it deliberately. People are attracted to it, and the narcissism in me loves the adoration. But there are times when, with someone, I think it's going to be sweet. Suddenly, though, what the other person wants is the fulfillment of the promise, even unconsciously sent out, of toughness. Sometimes I'm with someone and I get a hint of his humanity—and I would like to pursue that more. But I know that if I drop the street role, that will destroy his fantasies about me. In a way it's a trap: What often attracts people to me on the streets is what often isolates me.”

“You presumably make a living by writing, so why do you still go out hustling the streets?” he asks me bluntly.

“Listen, I shouldn't answer that question,” I surprise myself by saying. But I do. Yet when he sends me the typescript of the interview, I surprise myself again. Feeling slightly unfaithful to the streets I love, I substitute the following evasive answer: “Hustling is linked to narcissism, and being paid is proof that one is very strongly desired and desirable.”

We move into the area of promiscuity. I define my “numbers” trip—sex with one after another after another. I estimate I've been with over 7000 people, but I know it's more. I chose the “7” because it's my lucky number. Thousands of sex encounters are not rare in the gay world.

Now the saboteur in me interrupts: “But I don't mind telling you, sometimes I feel despair about the promiscuity scene.” In fascination, I hear the saboteur go on: “It has nothing to do with morality; all I know is that sometimes after I've been with dozens of people, I just want— …”

To die.

The part of me true to the streets wrestles with the strong saboteur: We're still so influenced by the straight world's crap. Tell someone recurrently that he's a sinner, sick, and a criminal—and how do you escape totally?

The interviewer asks me: “Is your entire sexual scene one of not responding to other people?”

I answer: “My primary scene, yes.”

But I should say: Not totally. When I hustle, yes; when I'm into “numbers,” mostly. But there are other times of mutual exchange, yes. Yes; and I do cherish those times.

There's a pause. I speak about the need to do away with all laws against consenting sex acts.

“But if sex in the streets became legal,” he voices the familiar argument, “don't you think that when the danger disappeared, so would most of the excitement?”

If so, then cops and judges and closeted police chiefs should be the first to talk it up! I answer: “It would merely result in another kind of joy, an unthreatened excitement.” I think now of the remark by an ex-vice cop turned writer, who in an interview voiced the stupid cliché of bigoted psychologists and sex-threatened cops that the main element in gay public sex is “the chance to be caught, the chance to be punished.” Wrong, wrong, ignorant bullshit. Public sex is revolution, courageous, righteous, defiant revolution.

He asks: “Does your ‘numbers’ trip help you avoid the realization that time is passing?”

Again. I answer nervously: “Of course.” I don't tell him what I'm remembering, the initial terror I experienced on returning to Selma after years away. I go on: “In my book Numbers there's a place where Johnny Rio thinks that if he keeps going sexually, time and death can't reach him.”

(I began—literally—to write Numbers as I drove out of Los Angeles back to El Paso, with my mother—who had stayed with my sister—holding a writing pad on the console and me steering with one hand, writing with the other, veering off the road now and then, and my mother warning gently, “Be careful, my son.” … I had returned to the sexual arena of Los Angeles after years of relative seclusion in El Paso, preparing my body with weights—and the arena soon centered in Griffith Park, that Eiffel Tower of the sexual underground. I went there every day, counting sexual contacts, the frenzy increasing to make up for “lost time”—which, of course, is never done; and years later I would spookily return to break “Johnny Rio's”—my character's, based on my own—”record” in that park. That book was written in three months with a compulsion as fierce as that which had propelled the sexual hunt in the park.)

I should have told the interviewer that perhaps I feel totally alive only when I'm working out with weights, when I'm having sex, and when I'm writing a book.

The interviewer asks, “Where does a sexual life like yours lead?”

The outlaw hunt, the precarious balance, dangers, excitement, the joy, freedom, defiance, the aloneness (the times when I can taste aloneness like ashes in my mouth), all that—and the acute sense of being in touch every single moment with life.

I answer: “I'll just go on becoming better—or, if things get grim, there's always suicide.”

Too grim. I say:

“I think it's important to make an attractive death, and that's where the concept of suicide comes in. One's autobiography as novel. My life is so intertwined with my writing that I almost live it as if it were a novel. When do you end a novel? At its most dramatic moment. Your life, if you make it a work of art, should end at exactly the right moment. Like a novel. So I simply conceive of things going on and on until I don't want them to any more. Then they can be stopped.” Still too grim. I laugh again. “Finally, that's the only freedom you have … the freedom to die.”

7:01 P.M. Selma. The Hustling Bar. Selma.

RENDERED GLORIOUS BY the deadly smog, the setting sun burns brilliant red. Palmtrees cut long shadows as Jim walks along Selma. The blond hustler is gone. Many other hustlers are out in the warm evening.

“MOVE ON! THIS IS A NO-LOITERING AREA! YOU ARE SUBJECT TO ARREST IN FIVE MINUTES!”

The harsh voice coming suddenly from the bullhorn of the cruising cop car jars the early night. The car following slowly, the malehustlers saunter away. But they'll return in a few minutes.

Jim will last out the cops. Hell go to the hustling bar a few blocks away, until the street cools.

A yellow-lighted bar—two rooms, a pool table in one, a dirty umbrella of smoke encloses it. Later tonight this bar will be jammed with drifting, sometimes dangerous, young-men, slightly older than most on the streets. In the back room a few—it's too early yet—shoot pool, displaying tight bodies in slow motion. A man offers Jim a drink, but he doesn't want that slow commitment, not now, not when the outlaw stirrings are already demanding a night drenched in sex.

On his way out, he's stopped by a tough-looking lean youngish man wearing an eye patch. Jim recognizes him as a male pimp who runs a motel; different types of available men mill in the lobby late at night. “I could use a guy like you,” he tells Jim. “Safer this way—and more bread.” Jim takes the man's card, a printed card. Safer. He knows he won't call.

On the street the cops are gone for now, and the outlaws are back.

8:05 P.M. Dellwith.

He ate at a restaurant; meat, rare, and vegetables and salad and milk. He imagines the nutrients coursing to feed his muscles.

Now he drives along the grand old houses of Los Feliz Boulevard, elegant Hollywood; palmtrees are haughtier at the foot of once-fabulous estates hiding in the hills. The sun floats eerily low for orange moments.

He drives into Dellwith, a section of Griffith Park. A brook feeds lush trees and burning-bloomed flowers.

Into the park. A restroom hides among quiet trees. Beyond it, small forests of brush shelter paths into the soft hills. Many cars are parked on the sides of the dirt road. Jim can see men floating in the darkening greenery.

A youngman approaches him. “Wanna come home with me?”

He's not that attractive, and Jim wants more than one person now. “Uh—I just got here.”

“I'd go in the bushes with you,” the youngman understands. He blurts out the hateful memory: “But I'm scared. I was almost busted here a couple of weeks ago. We were in the bushes, and two vice cops yelled Freeze! I ran away, I stumbled, I thought I'd broken my ankle, I couldn't move. I just lay there hiding in the bushes for hours, till it got real dark, and then I crawled to my car.”

Rage rising orgasmically, Jim walks into the dangerous area. A man sits hunched on a rock. Jim stands before him, letting the man blow him openly. Jim's rage ebbs. Nearby, pressed darkly against the trunk of a tree, hugging it tightly, pants to his ankles, a man is being fucked by another. The man against the tree invites Jim to join. But the thought of the earlier youngman's painful flight, the hiding for hours, persists. Past men cruising, Jim walks back to his car.

9:08 P.M. Downtown Los Angeles.

Moodily he decides to drive to downtown Los Angeles, in search of ghosts.

Wilshire. LaFayette Park. Often on late warm nights he would lie on the concrete ledge in back of the closed branch library, surrendering to a daring mouth…. West-lake. He pauses in his car, remembering. Ducks clustering coldly on a small island on the lake made strange sounds while silent outlaws gathered in alcoves or in a grotto under a gently flowing fountain, water splashing bodies lightly…. Oh, and the theater across the street—the enormous balcony where Jim was “wounded” one late night. He stood on the steps, his cock in someone's mouth. Footsteps! He pulled up his zipper, it caught the skin of his cock. Panicking, he pulled down, and the zipper bit the skin again. He bears the tiny wound of battle, an almost indiscernible scar, like the ghost of a butterfly.

Hunters have long abandoned this area to the jealous cops and the senior citizens waiting sadly to die.

Jim drives on.

Downtown Los Angeles. Hope Street, where he lived years ago.

Pershing Square. Preachers bellowed sure damnation, always for tomorrow. Malehustlers sat in the benign sun. Queens dared to appear in make-up. Torn down, the square rebuilt. The outlaws fled. To Hollywood Boulevard.

Jim parks his car on Spring Street. He drinks from the thermos of protein. He puts on a brown leather vest. No shirt; his chest gleams brown.

Tattered hopelessly, Main Street is a gray area smothering in grime. Afloat in dope and the odor of cheap fried chicken. Harry'...