are to be found the charm and fascination of this book. These sketches are almost invariably brilliant, and so poignantly, tenderly, and yet brutally drawn that I defy anyone not to be moved by them. Skipper, Chuck, Pete, the Professor, the mad queens, Darlin Dolly Dane and Miss Destiny, of whom Chuck says: "You gotta admire those dam queens like Darlin Dolly and them. They sure have got guts. They live the way they gotto live." All are extremes, and are no doubt to a degree composites as "typical types" must always be, but each one emerges as a masterful creation.

To the heterosexual community this book will appear to be (and this is no doubt unfortunate) a revelation of the homosexual world. But the world of the City of Night is no more the homosexual world than Pershing Square is Los Angeles or the Bowery is New York City. In a very real sense it is not the homosexual world at all. Oddly enough the true homosexuals, or, as the narrator would describe them, the mutually, desiring, mutually satisfying, and self accepting males are almost totally absent from its pages. Content to live side by side with and to accept on their own terms hustlers and whores, pimps and panderers, bums and panhandlers, alcoholics and drug addicts, the hustlers studiously avoid the homosexuals partly because as free competition they are an economic threat, and, more importantly, because they are a threat to the hustlers' most cherished possession their own maculinity. This book is to a far greater degree the story of degenerate heterosexuals than it is of homosexuals.

The theme of this novel, if indeed there is one, is to be found in the narrator's, desperate and unsuccessful flight from the recognition of the fact that he does what he does because he is a faggot too. It is incredible, but, true, that by some trick of rationalization

the hustler is able to believe that so long as he gets money for what he does, or so long as he does not provide a receptacle, or, perhaps more importantly, allow himself to display enjoyment or affection that he is in no sense a homosexual. Somehow he is able to ignore the fact that in playing a completely passive role he is being far more feminine than those who have the guts to go after what they want. How, too, can he justify the involuntary response which makes it possible for him to do whatever he does do? We could wish that Rechy had chosen to explore the psychological aspects of this question, and had he done so he might have written a truly significant novel, but he neither explores nor explains, he but observes and reports. This he does magnificently.

Many readers will be annoyed by Mr. Rechy's style. There are many affectations, contractions without apostrophes, unnecessary capitals, shifting tenses, and runtogetherwords. But in the end he creates poetic prose, which is strong, forceful, evocative, and so admirably suited to the theme. that one quickly ceases to be aware of the eccentricities of his style. It is obvious that Rechy is a skilled writer and that he writes as he does because it suits his purpose to do so. While Mr. Rechy does not hesitate to use the words he must use, he does so so naturally and so fittingly that one is never conscious of obscenity or made to feel that he is wallowing in filth.

There is no pornography in this book or at least it can be only an extremely salacious mind which finds it. Since this is a very unattractive world which Mr. Rechy describes, a world characterized by loneliness, bitterness, frustration, disillusionment, and desperation, City of Night will have no difficulty, despite its unusual subject, in being considered a very moral book indeed.

Marcel Martin

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