In the City

1994's City of God, by Gil Cuadros, examines the sexual exploits of a gay Chicano (a thinly veiled version of the author) living with AIDS in contemporary Los Angeles. The book recalls John Rechy's 1963 City of Night, the searing and visceral account of an unnamed male hustler moving through cities of the postwar US. Like Rechy, Cuadros's success in achieving his authorial aim comes from his refusal to victimize his protagonist, despite the fact that he is afflicted with a life-threatening illness. These books offer us a compelling look into the real, lived experiences of gay men of color existing on—yet not embracing—religious, cultural, sexual, racial, and geographic borders.

In the pre-AIDS decade of Rechy's novel, the hustling "youngman's" trysts and exploits present opportunities for sexual liberation and allow for the construction of an identity that rejects victimization and guilt. Despite the specter of AIDS present in Cuadros's book, we witness the same lack of self-pity on the part of the character. What makes these two texts seminal, then, is the way in which they challenge and complicate notions of queer Chicano identity. They speak not just to the experiences of queer Chicanos in a brutally honest way, but transcend the label of "homosexuality" and all other heteronormative constructs.

City of Night was a bestseller when it was first published in 1963. John Rechy, born of Scottish and Mexican decent, gives his "sexual outlaw" a bleak beginning marked by poverty and abuse. His is a world of harsh contradictions, where the desert landscape of El Paso is beautiful as it is brutal, where sin and salvation remain inexorably linked:

Then I thought of El Paso as the coldest place in the world. We had an old iron stove with a round belly which heated up the whole house; and when we opened the small door to feed it more coal or wood, the glowing pieces inside created a miniature of Hell….

It is this blurred and undefined landscape where "seeds of the restlessness" first take root. It is here that Rechy's protagonist, haunted by the memories of his abusive father, his strident Catholic upbringing, and the death of his beloved dog, Winnie, flees to the cities of postwar America after a stint in the military.

He falls in with the gay subculture of the 1960s, moving from city to city, a hustling drifter, where he falls in with a cast of colorful characters—drag queens, johns, former actors, closeted police officers. The cities offer a refuge, an escape, a chance for anonymity while simultaneously quenching the attention and intimacy the "youngman" thirsts for: "I had rented a room in a hotel on Hope Street—on the fringes of that world, but still outside of it."

The multi-dimensionality Rechy infuses this character with is the reason for the youngman's unwillingness to reject any feelings of pity or remorse, either intrinsic or external. The youngman embraces the ambivalence that his position on the "fringes" of society offers. For him, there lies power in this ambiguity, power in the rejection of the norms of the greater society and the Catholic and macho Mexican American standards of his upbringing. This refusal to submit to the prescribed notions of a what a person of his class, race, and sexuality must adhere to provides a line of escape from the constant cycle of shame, guilt, and remorse so many other queer protagonists of color are trapped in. Instead, Rechy's youngman revels in the chaos, invites it in:

For me then there followed a period of untrammeled anarchy as I felt my life stretching towards some kind of symbolic night, as the numbers of the people I went with multiplied daily.

The "untrammeled anarchy," and the refusal of Rechy's youngman to fall into the familiar trappings of victimhood is echoed in Gil Cuadros's City of God. Published just two years...