Rechy's memoir.

I've read *perhaps* a slight majority of John Rechy's novels over the years. Usually in reprint; and far more often than bought, safely borrowed from some library or other while going on trying to survive my own crazy damn life, let alone make sense of it all.

Yes, Gore Vidal said something rather nice about him. Good for him. I love Vidal. But I can't pretend to have read him like I have read Rechy.

Rechy's fiction *connected* with me in a way that I could never *quite* pinpoint, besides having come from the same place he came from, and besides having lived a life bearing some passing resemblance to a similarity with the guys he described in his always seemingly episodic and fragmentary novels, which may (or may not) have been just so semi-autobiographical.

"City of Night" I hardly need mention -- after all, it was *the* seminal gay-written novel about gay life -- although it definitely dates from an era predating my own, with sexual roles rigidly predetermined.

"Rushes" made me view the world of the gay bars critically, *long* before I got hired as doorman at Foxes by the very bartender who wound up leaving his job of over a decade after selling me 13 martinis in a single night.

"This Day's Death" I know was one of his own least favourite works, but just the details of El Paso ("I know that very cottonwood") made my life in El Paso worth living at the time.

"The Sexual Outlaw" impressed me with the clear movement within the narrator's perspective from "accepting victim" to "outraged advocate", and even "agitator".

"Numbers" -- well, I leave that to your imagination.

Rechy's memoir is, I believe, perhaps his most important work to date.

For his semi-fictionalized characters you almost never know what they are really feeling or thinking. If you read *very* carefully you get a *sense* of it, but *never* more than *just* a sense. Furiously as he may have written at whatever time, his leading protagonists remain somewhat ghostly figures, and it's left to you to figure out how much, and what, may be real, and what may be fiction. A risky but courageous stance on his part, which appears to have simultaneously protected his sources and opened him to decades of utterly vitriolic criticism on false charges of having "made it all up".

His memoir (and how many *men* write "memoirs", as opposed to "autobiographies"?) provides all the subtext, all the backstory, all the footnotes that you *never* got reading his novels. Or at least, just enough, that you *can* check him out.

He speaks in no uncertain tones of absolutely real places -- and far more importantly -- absolutely real people.

In fact, two persons that I knew in person as a child, and whom both of my parents knew far better than me, are named, specifically, in his memoir.

Gawd help me the day I call my mother and my aunt to say "I just saw so-and-so's name in a book by John Rechy". But there you have it.

A third person whom a freind of mine (I don't have many) lived with for a brief spell many years later is also named.

I've checked his facts, by now, with multiple sources.

John Rechy's absolutely, positively not lying.

His story, as he tell it here, appears to be completely true.

Long live John Rechy.

The book is entitled -- uncharacteristically awkwardly, but also appropriately -- "About My Life and the Kept Woman".

I highly recommend it.

As to the lesson that I take away from the book, it has to do with Marisa Guzman's long-forgotten statement, which I've only shared with one person through private email.

If you want to know what it is, then you'll just have to read the book.

I *very* highly recommend it.

(You might not "get it" if you're not a fag -- be warned.)