John Rechy > Quotes

“Gay men should not adopt the sophomoric model of heterosexual dating; gay men should always have sex first.”
― John Rechy

“Just the absence of loneliness. Thats love enough.”
― John Rechy

“I read many books, I saw many, many movies. I watched other lives, only through a window.”
― John Rechy, City of Night

“Southern California, which is shaped somewhat like a coffin, is a giant sanatorium with flowers where people come to be cured of life itself in whatever way .... This is the last stop before the sun gives up and sinks into the black, black ocean, and night - usually starless here - comes down.”
― John Rechy

“Maybe I could love you. But I wont. The grinding streets awaited me.”
― John Rechy, City of Night

“And the fierce wind is an echo of angry childhood and of a very scared boy looking out the window—remembering my dead dog outside by the wounded house as the gray Texas dust gradually covered her up—and thinking: It isnt fair! Why cant dogs go to Heaven?”
― John Rechy, City of Night

“And the next moment the fierce wind comes screaming, whirling the needle-pointed dust, stifling all hope. And you know then that what has not happened will never happen. That hope is an end within itself. And the fierce wind is an echo of angry childhood and of a very scared boy looking out the window—remembering my dead dog outside by the wounded house as the gray Texas dust gradually covered her up—and thinking: It isnt fair! Why cant dogs go to Heaven?”
― John Rechy, City of Night

“Isnt it possible that wanting to be wanted … or ‘loved’ … could be as much an aspect of what you call ‘love’ as actually loving back?” I said. “I mean, in choosing someone to ‘love’ you—to be loved by—while that other person chooses you to ‘love’—doesnt one complete the need of the other?”
― John Rechy, City of Night

“I think the camouflage of fiction allows more authenticity – you know, acknowledging that it is a ‘fiction’, a terrific lie, and that you want it to be believed.”
― John Rechy, After the Blue Hour

“During the Mardi Gras carnival in New Orleans, drunk and drugged and sleepless for sex-driven nights and days, I saw leering clowns on gaudy floats tossing cheap necklaces to grasping hands that clutched and grabbed and tore them, spilling beads; and revelers crawled on littered streets, wrestling for them, bleeding for them on sidewalks; and beads fell on spattered blood like dirty tears—and I saw costumed revelers turn into angels, angels into demons, demons into clowning angels; and in a flashing moment the night split open into a deeper, darker chasm out of which soared demonic clowning angels laughing.”
― John Rechy, After the Blue Hour

“The invitation to rot obliviously, to die without feeling it, to grow old looking young, is everywhere in this glorious, sunny, multi-colored city.”
― John Rechy

“How erotic Texas must be!” she said.
I was sure she had meant “exotic,” but I followed through: “Maybe, if you find cactus and deserts erotic, sensual.”
― John Rechy, After the Blue Hour

“Did those “new gays” spinning about like giddy tops in discos care to know that dancing with someone of the same sex was punishable as “lewd conduct” then? Still, a club in Topanga Canyon boasted a system of warning lights. When they flashed, lesbians and gay men shifted—what a grand adventure!—and danced with each other, laughing at the officers’ disappointed faces! How much pleasure—and camaraderie, yes, real kinship—had managed to exist in exile. Did those arrogant young people know that, only years ago, you could be sentenced to life in prison for consensual sex with another man? A friend of his destroyed by shock therapy decreed by the courts. Another friend sobbing on the telephone before he slashed his wrists— Thomas's hands on his steering wheel had clenched in anger, anger he had felt then, anger he felt now. And all those pressures attempted to deplete you, and disallow— “—the yearnings of the heart,” he said aloud. Yet he and others of his generation had lived through those barbaric times—and survived—those who had survived—with style. Faced with those same outrages, what would these “new gays” have done? “Exactly as we did,” he answered himself. The wind had resurged, sweeping sheaths of dust across the City, pitching tumbleweeds from the desert into the streets, where they shattered, splintering into fragments that joined others and swept away. Now, they said, everything was fine, no more battles to fight. Oh, really? What about arrests that continued, muggings, bashings, murder, and hatred still spewing from pulpits, political platforms, and nightly from the mouths of so-called comedians? Didn't the “new gays” know—care!—that entrenched “sodomy” laws still existed, dormant, ready to spring on them, send them to prison? How could they think they had escaped the tensions when those pressures were part of the legacy of being gay? Didn't they see that they remained—as his generation and generations before his had been—the most openly despised? And where, today, was the kinship of exile?”
― John Rechy, The Coming of the Night

“Because somewhere in that plain of childhood time must have been planted the seeds of the restlessness.”
― John Rechy, City of Night

“Memory is too unreliable to be ‘truthful’.”
― John Rechy, After the Blue Hour

“It's that magnificent interlude in New York between winter and spring, when you feel the warmth stirring, and you remember that the dreadful naked trees will inevitably sprout tiny green buds, soon. Everyone rushes into the parks, the streets--and you even forget that, very soon , summer will come scorchingly, dropping from the sky like a blanket of steam...”
― John Rechy, City of Night

“Miss Destiny said, “there is a God, and He is one hell of a joker. Just—look—” and she indicates her lovely green satin dress and then waves her hand over the entire room. “Trapped! . . . But one day, in the most lavish drag youve evuh seen—heels! and gown! and beads! and spangled earrings!—Im going to storm heaven and protest! Here I am!!!!! I’ll yell—and I’ll shake my beads at Him. . . . And God will cringe!”
― John Rechy, City of Night

“Because it’s getting to be the blue hour, and that’s the time when everything is revealed.”
― John Rechy, After the Blue Hour

“All true? I think autobiographers are big liars.”
― John Rechy, After the Blue Hour

“From the street, I looked up into the apartment buildings, into the naked windows of the tiny cubicle-rooms. More haggard faces peering blankly; skinny, maimed bodies of uncaring women in slips; men without shirts. All have the same look: the look of nolonger-questioning, resigned doom. The world on its knees. …”
― John Rechy, City of Night

“Hoods, hobos, hustlers, homosexuals. Hunting.”
― John Rechy

“It's possible to hate the filthy world and still love it with an abstract pitying love.”
― John Rechy, City of Night

“It’s sad—isn’t it?—that people dont have wings too.”
― John Rechy, City of Night

“People die when they see life at last without Illusions. For some, it takes many, many years; for others, much less. And so each of us commits suicide: when we will our own deaths: That is the only Death.”
― John Rechy, City of Night

“even the heart rebels-finally against its own anarchy. And that's the most powerful rebellion.”
― John Rechy, City of Night

“The quavering, sensual voice of Elvis Presley is coming from the juke-box in lonesome, sad, sustained, orgasmic moans: The bell-hop’s tears keep flowing The desk clerk’s dressed in black. …”
― John Rechy, City of Night

“And now, it seems, they are all here: the handsome masculine ones desired alike by men and women; the gushing swishes, hands aflutter like wings; the few stray women secure among the men who will idolize them but not love them; and as in any group of homosexuals and those lured for whatever reason to them, there is here a mood of superficial good humor, of euphoria bordering on hysteria. So”
― John Rechy, City of Night

“And I see: Dominating the skyline, at the top of a tall building, a giant searchlight scanning the city. It glides eerily, swirls over the black water. It floats, soars above the skyline, encircles the nightcity. And crazily excited I wonder suddenly if that spotlight swirling nightly is not trying somehow to embrace it all—to embrace that fusion of savage contradictions within this legend called America And I know what it is I have searched beyond Neil’s immediate world of sought pain—something momentarily lost—something found again in the park, the fugitive rooms, the derelict jungles: the world of uninvited, unasked-for pain … found now, liberatingly, even in the memory of Neil himself. And I could think in that moment, for the first time really: It’s possible to hate the filthy world and still love it with an abstract pitying love.”
― John Rechy, City of Night

“The Ethereal Angels—these are the artists, the poets, the dancers. .”
― John Rechy, City of Night

“You can rot here without feeling it.”
― John Rechy