Hiding in John Rechy’s Closet

Abstract

John Rechy is not interested in representation. Yet Rechy’s refusal to engage with identity using the terms offered to ethnic and queer writers has puzzled critics of his work. This article contends with John Rechy’s evasive novel, City of Night (1963), to reconsider Rechy’s attachment to refusal as a formal and political project that confounds any effort to portray a stable transparent minority subject. Through the novel’s rejection of disclosure and recognition, City of Night moves against forms of political stability (normative coupling, categorical identification, and property ownership) to feature ephemeral spaces in which minoritized people gather and shift around at the very moment the US state is restricting and criminalizing Mexican movement and sedimenting heteronormativity into law. By attending to evasion and refusal, I push the boundaries of Rechy criticism that have found City of Night devoid of politics or attachments to ethnic identity. Rather, I argue that the novel moves against individuation to offer ephemeral moments of entanglement with queer racialized Others through the composite form and figure of the “outsider.” Located in the unincorporated mass or crowd, City of Night’s attachment to the “outsider” thinks across difference to reveal the ways racialization underpins the policing of movement, heteronormativity, and citizenship in the mid-twentieth century. Ultimately, Rechy’s aesthetics of refusal registers the under-examined affinities between migrant, laborer, queer, and brown at the very moment the United States sought to restrict how we think about identity and politics in public.