44 CRUISING CULTURE

The once rigidly held shoulders have softened. . . . His look liddedly mellowed,
and he began to thrust flirtatious glances in my direction. ‘Im [sic] Unhappy,’
he drooled in wine-tones. . . . ‘you wanna know why Im Unhappy? . . .
[B]ecause – I – wanna – wanna – lover. Yes! A Lover! And all this – this
motorcycle drag – it doesnt mean shit to me. I’d wear a woman’s silk night-
ie if it got me a Lover. . . . If he wants me to be a woman, I’ll be the greatest
lady since Du Barry. I’ll be all things to One Man! . . . I – am – lonely.’ . . .
The glass smashed on the floor.
He was still passed out on the couch when I left.14

Here, another proudly masculine-identified man, who has initially

been portrayed as a promiscuous SM ‘top’, is disapprovingly shown to
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confess a yearning for monogamy that is conventionally feminised

both by the defiant Carl himself and by the pitying narrator. While Rechy
has repeatedly emphasised the factual basis of all of his characters (‘I
can’t write make-believe’),15 at the same time, this coolly detached
depiction of Carl serves to heighten momentarily the narrator’s misog-
ynist and homophobic sense of distance from the ‘shaming effeminacy’
of queerness and/as monogamous romantic love. As Stephen Adams
notes in his insightful discussion of Rechy, this hustler’s ‘sympathies
are more easily aroused by those who offer no threat to his masculinity
and heterosexual pose.’16
Rechy has since acknowledged the frequent defensiveness of City of
Night, which, as Adams points out, attempts ‘to make homosexuality
symbolic of some more universal condition with which . . . [Rechy’s]
narrator may safely identify’.17 The author similarly commented in
1977 that:

City of Night is a book about a male hustler who does not ever really admit
that he’s gay. . . . It represented quite honestly where I was at the time. I didn’t
bullshit. I was honest. So I am fond of confessing that City of Night is a very
honest book about a dishonest person.18

This narrational ‘dishonesty’, and the author/narrator’s frequently

normative gendering of gay sexual practice, need however to be placed
in the broader cultural context of the late 1950s and 1960s. As we saw
in the introductory chapter, despite the gradual loosening of social
restrictions on sexual diversity from the mid-1950s onwards, and
despite the gay boom of the migratory war years, the postwar trend
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towards aggressively renormalising the heterosexual family unit

(especially in emerging suburbia) meant that the expanding gay world
‘became more segregated and carefully hidden, and the risks of visit-
ing . . . [it] increased.’19 Seymour Kleinberg reminisces that:

As students in the mid-fifties, most of the gay men I knew thought about

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