John Rechy Interview, 1990
In late 1990 I was in Los Angeles on some job or other, and I decided to go on a pilgrimage. Two of my favourite novels of all time are John Rechy’s “City of Night” and “Numbers” – both of which, amongst many other things, take you to the dark side of Los Angeles. Thanks to the novelist Dennis Cooper, I got an introduction to Rechy and went off to interview him at his home in Los Feliz. The house was comfortable, and Rechy was extraordinary: very gym-fit, bronzed, with a face that did not quite match the body – a true and wonderful creation. The occasion for this interview, never published before now, was his then soon-to-appear book “The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez”, but he also referred to “Bodies and Souls” (1983) and “Marilyn’s Daughter” (1988).
A lot of the people who are smitten by Los Angeles then go and write those devastating articles about it, employing every one of the cliches without looking beyond it. My view is that those cliches, if explored a little more deeply, become those elements which make Los Angeles a truly great, and not at all flippant, city, but a very profound city. So I resent when the cliches are extended and not explored.
The title, “Bodies and Souls”, indicates how I view Los Angeles, as a city of enormous physicality, and equally enormous spirituality. I don’t mean mystic, I’m not mystically oriented at all. And yet some of the cultishness that people laugh at, represents to me the yearn-ing that is here, whether its found in conventional religion, or non-belief like myself, or in artistic creation.
I love the narcissism of Los Angeles. Its a city that permits it. I find myself at home here as a “self-avowed” gay writer – I never took a vow, but I’m glad to call myself a self-avowed narcissist! It still has a lot of forbidden elements in the midst of the narcissism, the flaunting, the attention to bodies, to creation.
This is what I find reprehensible in the so-called New York attitude towards Los Angeles. The people who dominate the intellectual culture, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, allow the narcissism and cannot reconcile that with physical narcissism.
There’s an original lithograph of Marilyn Munroe in my kitchen, and in my novel, not out in England yet, Marilyn’s Daughter, an imaginary creation, she’s a metaphor of self-creation, an ordinary girl named Norma Jean Baker, set out to recreate herself as the most extraordinary representation of beauty. Eventually she will rival Helen of Troy in legend.
On the other hand I have a series of photographs of a body-builder of a certain age, and to me, one is not at all unlike the other. The conscious, even self-consciousness… Los Angeles elevates self-consciousness into an art form. The awareness of Marilyn Munroe converting all her wounds into this extraordinary creation, all the inadequacies in physicality can go into body building and create muscles…
Voguing is another metaphor that I adore, its both an acceptance and a challenge of nightcoming. Los Angeles is the last frontier be-fore the sun comes down on the country, its a city that acknowl-edges death, and at the same time puts on its best performance be-fore the night comes.
In California most people behave as if they are supporting players in their own lives, but one should always be the star of one’s one life, because if you’re not going to star in your own life, who is? One should live one’s life as if it were an art form. I truly believe this. Brash, choreographed, everything. Self-consciously.
For example I love to go out to Griffith Park and go sunbathing, and that’s absolutely permitted, although it still creates resent-ments.
The physicality of London is very different to the physicality of Los Angeles. The fact that we’re on the edge of a particular world, and the idea of apocalypse, the end of things. Is there a relationship between these things?
Movement west. There was a physical need to move west, as the cities grew, and the frontier moved west until there was no more frontier. Now there’s the ocean. So there continues to be a frontier, the physical one is of course established, but there is also a certain emotional, psychological, artistic frontier, where everything, rather than pushing out physically, pushes into marvellous artistic explo-ration, spiritual exploration, which again I shy away from, but I can see the attraction to people of that sort. Its quite an extraordi-nary city that contains the best and the worst of the country.
When did you first come to LA?
The mid-fifties at first, I lived here briefly, then I came back and forth, and I came back in ’73 and I’ve been living here ever since.
In City of Night, the description of downtown has changed dramatically – when and how did that happen?
That happened to get rid of the so-called undesirables, the police come in and push everyone out. That always happens when land interests are about to claim a territory for their own. It began when the Music Centre and buildings like that, it became obvious that there was a lot of money to be made like that, and these people would have to be pushed away. The extension of that attitude is that now you’ve got to squelch immorality. The park got swept away, and literally re-done, re-architectured. There was a move toward Hollywood, Hollywood Boulevard has experienced the same thing, though it has not produced the renovation, then the move happened to Santa Monica.
Downtown looks like somebody had the idea to put New York on the coast and it didn’t quite work.
Exactly, its quite extraordinary. In the fifties, downtown was a totally different place to what it is now. Its become really poverty stricken now. The change began in the sixties, and its been progressive, you have all those giant buildings where wealthy people live, new apartments, lawyers’ firms…
Its one place where I get a feeling for the deeper side of 60s pop music, about loss and revenge…
I did use a lot of lyrics in City of Night, and whilst writing it I saturated myself with a lot of early rock’n'roll, Elvis Presley, Fats Domino. I wanted to get that rhythm into the prose, that sultry undertow that is at the core of rock, and in Numbers again, suggestions of all kinds of deep concealments.
There was a song in England called Numbers by a group called Soft Cell, about five years ago, it went top thirty.
There’s a bar here in Los Angeles called Numbers! Several of those things have happened now. I’m happy that a lot of important people in music have admitted being influenced by me. Jim Morrison did a kind of homage to me in LA Woman, with the recurring “City of Night…”. Tom Waits, Patti Smith. I had a call from Mick Jagger at one point about doing a screenplay. It was a very erratic sort of thing, it never worked out.
I think that is because… its part of pop music’s project, to bring stuff like that out of the shadows.
I know that Gore Vidal winces and cringes and renounces that there is any such thing as the gay sensibility, but I insist that there is, and that it is fine. The whole movement began in the early six-ties, not just in the years that we think of as the sixties, the movement around Warhol beginning with the fifteen minutes, had at its core a lot of gay inspiration. For me, the Warhol thing was influenced not only by the gay mode, as it were, but also by Catholicism. The two make a very exciting combination.
I was talking to a man who uses City of Night as one of the required books in modern American literature, and he was asking about influences, and I told him my prose was profoundly influenced by the Catholic Church, its gaudiness. I think of the Catholic Church very much in terms of drag. The Warhol exaggeration, and decoration of rooms was very very Catholic, technicolor — technicolor suffering, if you like.
Its not accidental that priests wear drag, and the colour and everything. Take drag, and compare it with the extravagance of the cardinals and the popes, and you have an extension of the same thing.
What do you believe are the main elements of the gay sensibility?
Definitely, marvelous exaggeration, self-consciousness elevated to an art form. The obvious reason I think, is that in the culture that we know, the element of disguise comes in very early. Gay people are the only minority who is born into the enemy camp. Black people are born with a supportive black mother and father, we are born into heterosexual families, and we can pass as heterosexuals, and we do, indeed, so we learn how to do that, and we learn secret codes early on.
Gay people will say one thing and at the same time we know its otherwise. That has not changed, we deal a lot with disguise and with play-acting. I know I create a lot of controversy by saying these things, but I think that is indeed why so many of us go into the arts. We have learned how to masquerade.
I think if they are sorted out, gay people have confronted the truth of who they are, often through a bitter process, and if they come through it, they are very strong, prepared to live and think in a new way…
I have a film course, and among the films I show is Sunset Boulevard, and I talk about the myth of Narcissus, and we forget that the core of Narcissism is self destruction. Narcissus destroyed himself, and we’re moving into a psychological, Freudian area. Implicit in Narcissism, which Warhol, represented so much, is the self destruction. I was doing a book on Warhol with Gerard Malanga, which was going to be called ‘Narcissism, Madness & Suicide: The World of Andy Warhol’.
Were you at all influenced by the Beats?
Not really, the reason being that that was all happening while I was roaming the country, and I wasn’t really aware of movements, and I wasn’t interested in them. I was very isolated, in the sense that I was again, acting a role, I didn’t move in any artistic circles at all, I would hang around the scene that I described, pretending not to be intelligent, which was absolutely necessary, picking up the jargon, and it became me so entirely.
Despite the fact that the Beat movement proclaimed itself to be intellectual. It was not, it was like a new intellect. The scene I was moving in, early on when I first started hustling in New York – I think this is in City of Night – a man who discovered me to be intelligent when I saw a book by Colette, and reached for it, and he said, do you read? I said sure, and he said, I’m sorry I don’t want you anymore, you’re not masculine enough…
My reputation as a writer, I make no apology for saying that I don’t think I’ve gotten my due, and the main reason has been the resentment that goes with the books that I wrote that were so obviously connected to me, City of Night, Numbers, Sexual Outlaw. The demarcation that says if you’re this you can’t be that, and if you’re that, you can’t be this.
I tried to break away from the title of Gay Writer, and I’m constantly writing letters to anyone who puts me down, every one of them, and I use their actual names as minor nasty characters in my books. Every one of the so-called New York theatre critics who put down my beautiful play, Tigers Wild, which opened there in 1986, non-gay, that gang of muggers and ignoramuses ended up in Marilyn’s Daughter as a minor, minor nasty character.
You wrote about this in the chapter about the lecturing writer in Bodies & Souls. Gayness is obviously important, and also sex, because in Anglo-American society, sex is the way to really get up people’s noses, it really does piss them off.
What I resent is when gay people become puritans. When The Sexual Outlaw first came out, my god, I was astonished but should not have been, that what was then emerging as the gay establishment was not only appalled but then did the sort of thing that the straight establishment had done, which was to ridicule, because of the sexuality. Some of that dishonesty is still there, in not facing the fact that our uniqueness has to be clung to. We cannot disappear into heterosexuality, it is not only our sexual choice that makes us different, and that is good, not bad.
There’s the character, Dave Clinton, who’s into the leather scene, where you say he’s been involved as an initiator of this particular scene and it had now become something he didn’t understand. Did you find that happening yourself?
Yeah. I don’t know if you’re familiar with a book of mine called Rushes. It didn’t get published in England because I didn’t want a gay press to bring it out, and the straight people were afraid of censorship. Very very graphic book, a big hit in France, and a critical success. I wrote about it there. I think I helped create a mood, certain attitudes that were very good, and they then became extreme.
At Land’s End Dave Clinton wonders whether we had pushed sensation so far that we could no longer feel, I thought that had happened in the so-called leather world. Sensation was not enough, we had to dream to ourselves, we were killing our very sexuality by saying we were extending it, and in doing so, we were touching the nerve of our oppression, which was masochism, and ritualising it.
I got criticised a lot for that, it was a lot to do with that. It was set in the Mineshaft…
Your early books are very sexually oriented. How do you feel about the impact of AIDS on the gay scene, and in relation to what you’ve written?
The first horror of AIDS is that is has destroyed, murdered so many of us, but the second devastation is if we see it, as so many people have do, as a metaphor, as a judgement on our sexuality. I think that is terribly damaging. It is just an illness but because it is in the area of sex, judgement is so readied. No-one attached that kind of metaphor toward polio, that you could get it by swimming, that sort of thing. I don’t speak much about these things now, be-cause its a very dangerous time, the main thing is to deal with living, and nobody should be rash in that area. Everything must defer to survival.
The impact that it has on an identity that was created so much on sex, and on the kind of sex that you have written about…
Yes, that’s too bad, On the other hand, we were reaching an area of another kind of destruction. I sometimes ponder, if AIDS had not come in – and this is not by any means to justify, this is conjecture – I wonder where we would have gone, there was that exploration, a penis was not enough, it had to be a fist, a whole arm. Sensation was not enough, it had to be whips, boots… as somebody who was constantly on the battle line, I began seeing that, where could it possibly go?
There was a new puritanism that was seeping in, where the un-clothed body was shunned in place of the total decoration of it, in leather. To me that was astonishing. I think that’s what makes the metaphor of AIDS so very dangerous. The time was dangerous, but in another way, psychically dangerous. The physical danger that then came, had no connection to the other.
Let’s talk about the new book.
The title is The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez. To me, one of the greatest dangers that’s occurring now that has to do with gay literature is a very insidious one. In the guise of liberation, our art is getting put into a further ghetto. I welcome the emergence of the gay press that allows books and artworks to be published that wouldn’t be published by the so-called mainstream press, but what is happening is that there is a ghettoisation of our art, we are writing now only for other gay people. Lesbians are writing for lesbians, gay men for gay men.
I don’t want that. If it had happened at the beginning of the century you would have Gide, Genet, Oscar Wilde, Proust, in alternative lifestyle sections of the bookstores, instead of the giants of literature that they are. I am read across the line, but very good new writing is being shoved away, and that is another way of dismissing us, and making our art invisible.
The book is one day in the life of a Mexican American woman, a maid who lives in Hollywood, her world begins falling, her back-ground is Catholicism, she has a daughter who is carrying a knife to school, a son who is disappearing strangely at night, who turns out to be a hustler on Santa Monica Boulevard, another son who is a gang leader, and the confrontation is between her belief in an old kind of world and which she comes to confront.
It deals with immigration and Catholicism, and the questioning of her day, and her life has reached a point where it will either collapse or she will be saved, and her salvation can come only if the Blessed Mother will give her a miracle. The day culminates with her going into the church on Sunset Boulevard and standing in front of the Blessed Mother and saying, I demand a miracle, and I won’t tell you whether or not she gets one.
Can you describe to me the process of immigration does to the American psyche?
It’s difficult to answer that because it has so many variations. Some of the very reactionary people in San Diego drive to the border and turn up their lights in order to help the very brutal, vicious members of the border patrol ensnare the people who are fleeing to another part of the border, then snipers wait for them… then there are other people of course, including some catholic churches, who then extend protection, but even the people who have been here a long time, you have tension between the black people and the new Latino peoples, because they were here first. Its very complex.
I’m part Mexican, my mother was Mexican and my father was Scottish, so I have the Scottish name but I learned Spanish before I learned English. I didn’t have that particular experience, but I have watched, and I feel a lot of compassion, because they are being brutalised by their own people, and then also by other people. Its very complex though.
What, historically, have the successive waves of immigrants to this country, do they think? What is it they feel about this country? Is it a dream for them?
Of course it is. You must remember that where some of the people come from is the worst kind of poverty. Not always, some want to go back. The lady who works for me now has come expecting all kinds of marvelous opportunities, and she is finding exorbitant rent, terrible conditions, and she longs to go back. But she can’t make money there, and she can’t make enough to live here, now. Its a dual thing.
There’s a whole group of immigrants that have fled from leftist governments, they are the lawyers and doctors and everything, and they’re doing quite well, and they look down on the other kind of immigrants. You have all those variations. In this building, I heard a man refer to the workmen as the peons, and they were from the same country.