Books: All the Sad Youngmen

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CITY OF NIGHT (410 pp.)-John Rechy-Grove ($5.95).

The homosexual is a contemporary cocktail-party commonplace-so much so that the phrase "He's one, you know" earns points only when it is applied to third basemen, racing drivers, and Government officials of Cabinet rank. It is tacitly conceded that serious plays must be about homosexuality unless they are about racial prejudice, that all bachelors are suspect, and men with wives and children are fooling no one either. Nobody admits to loving his mother.

Below this level of fascinated chatter is a world that the conventionally sophisticated prefer not to know. The difference is the same as between reading about leprosy in a Graham Greene novel and actually seeing a man who has no nose. John Rechy, a young (29) Texan, has written a book about homosexuality that offers a report of the male prostitute's world. Cast as a confession, it is not a novel except in form; what value it has depends on its truthfulness as eyewitness reportage. It has been wildly heralded. James Baldwin: "Rechy is the most arresting young writer I've read in a very long time." Herbert Gold: "One of the most remarkable novels to appear in years."

Intentionally or not, the author has fitted his prose to his subject; the writing is foppish, runs to such Evergreen Review cliches as "this is clip street, hustle street-frenzied-nightactivity street." Despite such mannerisms, Rechy shows with something like objectivity the curious life of the homosexual "youngmen." There are the "queens"-men who use girls' names, feminine makeup and clothes ("drag"). There are the "stud hustlers"-male prostitutes. And the "scores"-the men who buy the favors of the stud hustlers.

The hustlers are the oddest of the lot.

They do not consider themselves homosexuals because they use sex (as they believe) only to get money. Secretly they fear going over the line, and they are contemptuous of "fairies"-young-men who give sex instead of selling it.

Some scores dwell in distant reaches of aberration that make mere sodomy seem like sound mental health. Among them are the masochists: those who like to be beaten or stepped on, and those who like to be robbed. There are fetishists who like shoes, and men who dress youngmen up in costumes. There is even one whose pitiful quirk it is to prepare and serve home-cooked meals to naked youngmen.

Rechy's hero is a stud hustler who roams this world familiarly in Manhattan's Times Square and Greenwich Village, in Los Angeles' Pershing Square, and in the French Quarter in New Orleans (Mardi gras is Queersville, of course, because queens can wear their highest drag). It is a dreary world where the aberrant have made, and live by, their own conventions. Perhaps the dreariest part of it is not that so much of its business is transacted in the men's rooms of subway stations. It is that the homosexuals Rechy writes about are, for every moment of their lives, wholly obsessed and ruled by sex.