Darkness falls

 This is mildly delayed, mainly because of some personal trauma. 

I recently finished John Rechy's 1959 novel City of Night, which I had picked up in London back in July. I thought I had read this one before, but I think my head confused it with his later Coming of the Night (which is in my TBR pile now.) 

Te story concerns a nameless hustler from El Paso, as he passes through several big cities and his idea that all of them exist as part of a bigger city where it's always night, where people like him can hustle marks for money. While one gets the rather distinct impression our narrator is a cypher for the author, and most of the stories are just renamed people he encountered in his travels, the afterward does mention that many of the people in here are amalgams of people he did know, and a really nice thought about how every reader helps keep those folks alive. 

There's honestly not much of a plot here, we get tales of the narrators exploits mixed in with vignettes about friends and foes he meets along the way, and portraits of the gay world as it stood towards the end of the 1950s. We get probably the most explicit sense of his journey towards the end in New Orleans during Mardi Gras as a guy who he winds up with for most of the actual party confronts the narrator about his life, and what he wants from it, even as the narrator struggles to maintain the mask he wears as the butch number who is only interested in money. I mean, the overall theme that everyone is wearing a mask in relation to what it is the actually want is interesting, particularly in this day and age where we tend to look at our queer antecedents as being more fundamentally honest in their rather more gender bending ways. Honestly, what comes through here is the idea that all the ways we exress our inner me is a mask to cover our true emotional needs. 

Mind you, this isn't true for all characters in here, or more to the point, they express themselves and then add a layer over it. Like Trudi and her beads, which are the fates rattling their beads to bring people down. Or Miss Destiny, who actually uses language that would not be unheard of today about how G-d gave her the wrong equipment. (It's one of the few cases in here you could point a finger at and say that she would be trans under current definitions. Many of the queens running around in this narrative could fall under several categories, and it's always going to be a mystery where they would fall under today's labels. Something else in here that amused and saddened me was the couples who weren't scores or youngmen, who basically just wanted a relationship with another man, preferably without a transaction involved. 

This book also speaks to the narrative I ran deep into back in the 1990s about the people of the streets and the secret world most of us don't look at. It's depressing, and frankly post 1980, it gets even worse. But it's still there. 

Well worth reading to get a sense of the other side of the vaunted Family Values era.