SOURCE: "Religious Alienation and 'Homosexual Consciousness' in City of Night and Go Tell It on the Mountain," in College English, Vol. 36, No. 3, November, 1974, pp. 369-80.

[In the following essay, Giles compares Rechy's City of Night with James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, arguing that Rechy's work has greater significance because it emphasizes homosexuality over ethnicity.]

When it appeared in 1963, John Rechy's City of Night received much critical acclaim; and it has continued to be regarded as an "underground classic." However, much of the praise for the novel has carried an implication of artlessness—too often critics have discussed it in terminology that would restrict it to the level of "reporting." It is obvious that a part of City of Night's initial impact was due to its detailed account of a "side of life" largely excluded from American letters. Such a frank, even brutal narrative of homosexual hustling was new and unprecedented. In addition, Rechy's personal image has encouraged a tendency to view the novel as sensational "reporting." Rechy is half-Chicano, half-Anglo; he was born into poverty in El Paso; he has been a hustler; he is a devotee of the beautiful body. He, like the unnamed main character in City of Night, has had a personal vision of nihilistic horror during Mardi Gras.

It is not surprising that critics often discuss Rechy's first book as if it were simply autobiography disguised as fiction, but it is a vast oversimplification to do so. Like Thomas Wolfe, whom he greatly admires, Rechy is an artist and not a reporter. City of Night is built around a complex, definable structure. The device of shifting between "subjective" chapters focusing upon the central character and "objective" chapters concerned with persons met by the narrator-hustler is comparable to the structure of The Grapes of Wrath and of much of Dos Passos' writing. It is interesting that Rechy admires Steinbeck and Dos Passos and that they too have suffered from critics who want to label them as social commentators rather than artists. The key to the art of City of Night is the relationship between the "subjective" and the "objective" chapters. A war is raging in the should of the central character, and its resolution is made possible by his interaction with the "minor" characters who appear throughout. Probably a major factor in the failure of most critics to comprehend this structure is the aesthetic completeness of the "objective" chapters. The Miss Destiny and Sylvia chapters, for instance, work so successfully as short stories that it is possible to miss their importance to the main character's spiritual struggle.

The organizing motif of the novel is the "confession," and each "objective" chapter should be seen as essentially a confession of pain and suffering. It is crucial that these confessions of personal horror are spontaneously delivered to the central character, because his reaction to them is the real thematic basis of City of Night.

When he leaves El Paso, he believes that he has denied virtually everything—Catholicism, any ultimate hope for personal "salvation," self-pity, and even compassion for others. The brutality of death has so horrified him that it alone seems a reality worthy of confrontation. It is almost inevitable that he adopt the hustler role because it allows him to receive tribute to the beauty of his body without the necessity of any reciprocation. He is determined to give nothing, to receive everything. By the end of the novel, he has come to a kind of epiphany—a spiritual realization that he cannot deny his compassion for others. This internal shift comes about gradually and only after a great deal of pain.

Having been intrigued for some time by the highly complex art of City of Night (as well as Numbers and This Day's Death, I asked in 1971 for an interview with Rechy. He granted my request, although he did not customarily do interviews, largely because of an intelligent and calm review of This Day's Death which my wife had written for a Texas periodical. Wanda Giles and I flew to El Paso in January, 1972; and, because Rechy is an extremely kind man, we were rewarded with not only the interview, but a two-day talk with him and several drives through El Paso and Juarez and a visit with a writer friend of Rechy whom we had always admired. (Interview Published in Chicago Review, 25 [Summer, 1973], 19-31).

The result of the experience was a seemingly contradictory one—it made me more aware than ever of the strong autobiographical element in City of Night, and it heightened my appreciation of the artistic complexity of the novel's structure. Such a result was possible largely because Rechy is equally eloquent in discussing his past (most especially the brutal and painful times) and his art.

II

There is a statue of Christ on a mountain (Cristo Rey) outside El Paso, and as Rechy, Wanda, and I stood on the road below it, John talked:

I used to go up there, right to the foot of that statue when I was a kid. It's not safe any more, you can get robbed now, but when I was a kid you could go, all the way up. Christ, religion, you know are so fucking important in a Chicano kid's life….

Religion, especially Catholicism, is extremely important in City of Night. The church in the novel is a destructive force which imposes unnatural restraints and a false concept of "sin" upon man and lies to him about immortality. Catholicism attempts to repress sexuality except for the purpose of procreation. Rechy views such a teaching as unforgivable on two levels. Sex, the most powerful force in life, should not be seen as something existing merely to serve another purpose. Moreover, children born to the destitute are doomed to lives of hunger and suffering.

A critical early scene in City of Night involves the narrator's seduction of a girl "up the mountain of Cristo Rey, dominated at the top by the coarse, well-surrounded statue of a primitive-faced Christ." This introduction to sex is anything but a joyous experience for the narrator ("And it was somewhere about that time that the narcissistic pattern of my life began.") In fact, intercourse with the girl beneath the "primitive" Christ serves primarily to isolate sex as the focal point of the narrator's rebellion against his repressive and suffocating childhood. Two personalities epitomize the polarities of the narrator's experience: his father, who in paranoia over a shattered musical career lashes out in hatred at everyone around him, then later approaches them with a warped, pathetic overture of "love"; and his mother, who offers a "blind carnivorous love" which is ultimately more damaging than the father's hatred. The father's failures as a musician, and most significantly as a man, are responsible for the poverty and the horror of the narrator's childhood. He causes a child to be brought into the world, offers him nothing approaching love or understanding, attempts to stab him with a butcher knife, and then in grotesque remorse takes the child on his knee in a terrifying ritual of "affection." Thus, he represents the world as the child sees it; he is reality—destitute, self-pitying, and hating.

The mother's "carnivorous love" is even more to be feared. She gives herself sexually to the husband, and then attempts to protect her children from the horror into which they are born. Repeatedly giving her body to the hate-filled musician, she attempts to keep her soul untouched. She wants to envelop her children in that undefiled soul so that they will not see the danger so relentlessly threatening them. It is as if each child she brings into the world represents another opportunity to triumph vicariously over the poverty and pain of her life. In addition, she is giving another soul to that church she loves so much (her room is filled with Madonnas).

The "protection" she forces upon her children is more insidious than the father's open hatred precisely because it is based upon a lie. Poverty is a constant in the children's lives; and reality sometimes strikes with the deadly, unmistakable immediacy of a butcher knife. Thus it is suicidal to hide, and the mother is attempting to send her children defenseless and completely vulnerable into the horror personified by their father. Moreover, the church itself is based upon an unforgiveable lie—the denial of death. While the mother accepts the immortality of the soul as a doctrine so self-evident that questions about it are absurd, the narrator bitterly and painfully rejects any such belief. The death and subsequent decay of his dog, Winnie, are the catalyst for his repudiation of the mother's faith. The dog dies, is buried, and is then uncovered by a Texas windstorm. During the animal's illness the mother says: "Dogs don't go to Heaven, they haven't got souls … the body just disappears, becomes dirt." When the child sees the decayed body, he acknowledges much more than she intended: "There was no soul, the body would rot, and there would be Nothing left of Winnie." Or of any man or woman. The soul is a lie, immortality is a lie; death and nothingness are the only truths.

I suggested to John that either I didn't understand the Winnie incident, or that it was not sufficient to carry such a heavy symbolic load. He answered that the episode was real. He did have a dog named Winnie, it did die, was uncovered by the West Texas wind, and he did see the rotting carcass; and he did react in the manner described in the novel: "I knew then that all the crap about the immortal soul was a lie, man. That there is no salvation, and that all anyone does is attempt to find a substitute for salvation, and there isn't any. By the way, that's a phrase that will appear in every one of my books: no substitute for salvation."

The maternal "protection" must be spurned. Reality must not only be confronted, but defied. A meaningless act of sex under the very eyes of Christ is the narrator's initial movement away from his mother's "carnivorous love." "Dry lust" performed on a desolate landscape beneath a "dead god." The narrator embraces what his mother and her church would define as "sin" in order to confront reality. There is no pleasure in the experience partly because that was never its purpose. In addition, while it begins his rejection of his mother and her church, it is not nearly sufficient as a rebellion against the father and the world he personifies. "The narcissistic pattern" of his life begins here because the narrator must exact homage from the reality that has always treated him viciously and will ultimately kill him. Before he is a decaying corpse, his personal beauty must be celebrated, again and again. He cannot give (in the brutality of his childhood, he has given too much already), but he must receive. People must perpetually recognize and desire the beauty of his body.

Thus begins his life as a homosexual hustler. The narrator has his first homosexual experience in a bus station in Dallas, but hustling inevitably will be "escape" from the moment that "the narcissistic pattern" began. Hustling offers the kind of gratification he demands: money paid by strangers for the privilege of his body, no necessity for any responsiveness on his part, and innumerable anonymous "contacts." The pattern of the novel takes the form then of a quest which can never end except in death. The narrator's odyssey from El Paso to New York to Los Angeles to Chicago and, finally, to New Orleans represents his defiance of that ugliness and death personified by his father. Death will, of course, ultimately triumph and his body decay; but, before that, he will have exacted tribute for his transitory beauty.

He is determined to be faithful to the code of the hustler—to be passive, to give nothing except his body. But he can never totally succeed. Deny it as he might, the narrator possesses a compassion so strong that nothing can finally destroy it—not even himself. Despite the detached and unresponsive manner in which he engages in sex, he hears confessions from the other characters. There is something in him which occasions sudden outpourings of grief and pain from others—the recitals of what his mother's church would call "sins," but which he recognizes instead as statements of desperate combat with the same reality he is defying. For most of the book, he is puzzled by, and ashamed of, this compassion. In New York, when Pete and "the Professor" suddenly and unpredictably ask for a commitment of feeling from the narrator, he retreats. The retreat is understood as an inevitability by all involved—Pete and the central character mutually shun each other, and "the Professor" knows that he has lost his most recent "angel." Hustlers give no emotion: they take money. (John said that one early reviewer of City of Night was disappointed with the novel "'because it failed to show the total homosexual experience.' I never meant it to, of course. It is a book about hustling, one segment of the homosexual world. Can you imagine anyone asking a book to show the total heterosexual experience?") Still, the narrator cannot deny that something in him encourages self-revelation from others.

The journey to California is, in part, an attempt to become the "total hustler" and to suppress this compassion. Geographical distance doesn't change anything that easily, of course. Miss Destiny tells him her personal nightmare:

Oh, God!… Sometimes when Im very high and sitting maybe at the 1-2-3, I imagine that an angel suddenly appears and stands on the balcony where the band is playing—and the angel says, "All right, boys and girls, this is it, the world is ending, and Heaven or Hell will be to spend eternity just as you are now, in the same place, among the same people—Forever!" And hearing this, Im terrified and I know suddenly what that means—and I start to run but I cant run fast enough for the evil angel, he sees me and stops me and Im Caught….

Rechy has read No Exit and acknowledges Sartre as an influence. What is most important in Miss Destiny's nightmare, however, is her negative vision of "angels" and "Heaven." "Angels" to her are as "evil" as his mother's church is to the narrator. Only "the Professor's" mortal "angels" are positive. Next it is Chuck who confides in the narrator—he talks about his dream of "escape" to a frontier. The narrator knows only too well the reality of Chuck's fantasized west.

But the main character continues to struggle against his compassion—one can scarcely be a priest and a complete hustler at the same time. He wins an initial victory in Los Angeles when, after much hesitation, he is able to rob a "score" who virtually begs to be robbed. However, San Francisco's sado-masochistic community is the setting for his ultimate attempt to destroy his decency. Borrowing terminology from his mother, he describes his abortive journey into the s-m community as "a suicide of the soul." The Neil chapter represents the novel's turning point, for it is with the masochist Neil that the central character comes the closest to repudiating all feeling and compassion. For a while, Neil's weakness affects the narrator just as they both wish it to—it stimulates anger and the desire to inflict pain. But only for a while, because the narrator ultimately must leave Neil's world. The departure cannot be delayed after Neil, suddenly, unaccountably, confesses to the narrator. The masochist's story of a hated, brutal father parallels the "youngman's" life and, of course, he can only walk out of Neil's apartment in helpless, bewildered pity.

After the encounter with Neil, the narrator no longer wants to run from his "priestly" side. Ironically, Neil represented the one truly "liberating" experience in his life. After Neil, he can no longer deny a bond with humanity and a concern for the pains of all the frightened, lonely people in all "the cities of night." Neil, too, had had a father who failed him brutally. Everyone is united in suffering:

And I know what it is I have searched beyond Neil's immediate world of sought pain—something momentarily lost—something found again in the park, the fugitive rooms, the derelict jungles: the world of uninvited, unasked-for pain … found now, liberatingly, even in the memory of Neil himself.

And I could think in that moment, for the first time really:

It's possible to hate the filthy world and still love it with an abstract pitying love.

He is still a hustler, but, in non-sexual moments, he now wants to hear the "confessions" of others if doing so will ease their pain. In New Orleans he encourages Sylvia to admit having denied her homosexual son; and he comforts the dying drag queen Kathy in every way he can. The world is still "ugly," but the people in it are to be "pitied," and even "loved" (if only "abstractly") rather than despised. There is much left to be repudiated—in effect, the faceless, all-powerful society which has labelled some people as "criminals" or "diseased" simply because their sexual appetites fall outside the accepted "norm." Sylvia was once a part of that society, and she destroyed her son by her acceptance of its vicious intolerance. She has been doing penance for the only real "sin" (denying another's human worth) ever since:

God damn it—I don't give a damn! Either in makeup, either like a queen—in the highest, brightest screaming drag—with sequins and beads—…. Either like that—or hustling a score, trying to prove with another man, because of my … words still ringing in his ears—trying that way to prove that I was right, that he is a man…. Even—… even if he has to prove it by finding another man who will pay him for his … masculinity—…. Even with a bloody gash on his head, proving it by violence. That way … or with another youngman, his—lover—…. Any way! Any shape! I don't give a damn!…. It's just that—God damn it!—I want to see him—if only once more—just once—to tell him—to tell him Im sorry.

When Mardi Gras explodes, the narrator is confronted with an intense vision of horror that almost destroys him. Mardi Gras is a "celebration" which allows homosexuals (even the drag queen) to come out from hiding without fear of legal reprisals; however, they pay a perhaps more degrading penalty. The "tourists" come to view "the gay world" in precisely the spirit in which they would go to a freak show. The queens, always desperate for attention, get it by posing grotesquely for the flashing cameras of Des Moines, Birmingham, and Tulsa ("Miss Ange, in Scarlett O'Hara plantation tones, says to the man taking pictures: 'Now me! Take My picture!'… Muttering 'bitch,' the other queens glare at Miss Ange as she poses in her billowing ballgown—as if she has just returned, triumphantly, to Tara.")

The narrator attempts to drown his vision of the chaotic, dehumanizing nightmare in an orgy of anonymous sex. The attempt fails, and he is reminded of the inevitability of death and decay more strongly than at any time since his childhood:

A band of red-dressed men and women in black-tentacled masks dance prematurely in the maddened street—red like flashing rubies crushed together, angry flames burning insanely bright before turning into smoke. Redly…. Roses pressed against each other in screaming shapes of red, red shrieking red. And like a flock of startled red-winged bats, the group disbands in separate scarlet bodies caracoling along the streets to join other screaming groups.

I asked John if it was accidental that this paragraph reminded me of "The Masque of the Red Death." He said that it wasn't: "Of course I'm influenced by Poe, man. Always, since a kid. Poe was into what I'm into—death and what it is, how you deal with it. I meant the language of that paragraph to remind the reader of "The Masque of the Red Death." Do you know any American writer more preoccupied with death than Poe and I?"

Poe has a subtle, but real, importance for American homosexual writers. His pale, emaciated, lifeless heroines such as Ligeia and Madeline Usher are implicit repudiations of female sexuality. Poe could only write about heterosexual relationships in a prevailing atmosphere of death and decay. Because of the time in which he wrote, he dared not treat homosexuality openly; nevertheless, it would not be a too farfetched reading of "The Fall of the House of Usher" to argue that Poe's emphasis upon Roderick's several "abnormalities" and inability to continue the family line has homosexual overtones.

In Rechy's novel Mardi Gras soon becomes a ceremony of dehumanization and death. Kathy, the beautiful, taunts a tourist and then abruptly lifts her dress to reveal her male sex organs. Her act is a challenge: she knows that the man wishes to see a freak, and she is determined to be a stunningly beautiful one. Later, the narrator sees her smiling and asks why: "'Because,'… 'I'm going to die.'"

The narrator, more vulnerable to such horror since his experience with Neil, attempts to flee from such reality by giving and accepting a love that is not "abstract" and "passionless." With Jeremy, he tries very hard to "give." But, if he can never totally suppress his "priestly" self, he cannot deny his hustler identity either. Ultimately, Jeremy represents something too close to what his mother had offered—an unreal and suffocating "protection." Ironically, after leaving Jeremy and passing out in the hell of Mardi Gras, the narrator wakes up in the cold light of dawn and turns for one last time to his mother's faith. He calls four Catholic churches (one named "The Church of Eternal Succor") and is offered no support ("You must be drunk" "Call back when we are open"). Finally one young priest says simply, "I know…. Yes, I know!" Since the structure of City of Night is much more complex than is usually recognized, it is easy to miss the point that this Catholic indifference underscores the necessity of the narrator's leaving Jeremy. There is finally no real protection—brutality, viciousness, and death cannot be escaped.

Knowing this now in a way he has never really known it before, the narrator returns "home" to El Paso. His quest has been, in part, a success: he has exacted much homage to his physical beauty, and he has confronted that which he set out to challenge. The struggle, however, has been at a cost he could never have anticipated before his meeting with Neil:

And I was experiencing that only Death, which is the symbolic death of the soul. It's the death of the soul, not of the body—it's what creates ghosts, and in those moments I felt myself becoming a ghost, drained of all that makes this journey to achieve some kind of salvation bearable under this universal sentence of death.

When he first left El Paso, he was attempting a "suicide of the soul"; but then he discovered from "the Professor," Miss Destiny, "Someone" in Santa Monica, Sylvia, and most importantly from Neil, that there is a worse horror than the decaying physical body. These people have all, in their own ways, taught him that there is something that he will call "sin"—the humiliation and destruction of others because they are different. He has seen in Mardi Gras evidence that he lives in a country that is truly dead—void of compassion, and dedicated to mocking those it labels grotesque.

So he returns "home" to El Paso, to his mother. But it will only be for a short time because inevitably "I'll leave this city again." The next time he journeys forth it will be as a hustler. With "scores" he will play the role—unresponsive, distant. At other times, however, he will not deny his "priestly side"—he will listen to "confessions" of pain and loss. His life will never be totally "narcissistic" again—it cannot be after the experience with Neil. With Neil he came close to what truly would have been a "suicide of the soul," but he drew back. Never again will he even approach such a spiritual self-destruction. Thus the novel ends with a protest against death, and against the suffering that overwhelms so many people before their bodies are "rotting" in the grave: "It isn't fair! Why can't dogs go to heaven?"

III

John Rechy is an amazing mixture of vanity ("As a rule, I always brag on myself at least once when I talk to someone. Otherwise, it wouldn't seem like me."), painful sensitivity, gentleness and humor. His sense of humor is particularly surprising to someone who meets him after reading the novels; but it is irreverently and unpredictably there. When he took Wanda and me to the El Paso airport, we turned to say good-bye. He suddenly reached out and touched each of us on the shoulder, and I realized then how carefully, even elaborately, he had avoided any physical contact with either of us before. We are heterosexuals, Anglo-Saxons; our backgrounds are Protestant; and we come from an academic world that has been no more understanding of John or his writing than any other segment of society. He did not know whether we might misinterpret even accidental contact and visibly recoil. He did not want to risk the embarrassment to us or the pain to himself. I understood, then, something of what his life had been. ("You can't know, Jim, the crap of being a Chicano in all the ugly little Texas towns where all they know, or have over known, is hate!") and how much trust, gentleness, and friendship was offered in that light and only touch.

IV

While John Rechy is, of course, correct in his assertion that City of Night was never meant to be "the complete homosexual novel," one sees an extraordinary number of parallels between it and the work of other homosexual novelists. The frustration of human emotion and compassion by a repressive social order permeates the works of Carson McCullers (for instance, the military mentality combines with the fundamentalistic south in Reflections in a Golden Eye to produce a grotesquely crippling world). A male child growing up either in a world dominated by a threatening father figure or in one totally devoid of adult masculine models is a recurring motif in homosexual literature (it is interesting that Truman Capote, who largely backs away from overt discussion of homosexuality in such books as Other Voices, Other Rooms and A Christmas Memory, consistently writes about a male child in a world largely populated by adult women). However, the American writer who most resembles Rechy in certain vital ways is James Baldwin.

Baldwin, like Rechy, belongs to two "minority groups." He is gay and black; Rechy is gay and Chicano. In our interview, Rechy talked about his sense of identification with Baldwin and his belief that he and the author of Go Tell It on the Mountain shared a unique consciousness resulting from their status as members of the two "rejected" groups.

It is an interesting fact, however, that neither writer often unites ethnic and homosexual protest in his fiction. Except in the first section of City of Night, Chicano identity is not stressed in Rechy's fiction. He does publish nonfiction essays frequently in such journals as The Texas Observer, essays centered around unmistakable Chicano pride. Baldwin really attempted only once to bring gay and black consciousness together in fiction; but Another Country was attacked viciously by black spokesmen such as Eldridge Cleaver for this precise reason. His most overtly homosexual novel, Giovanni's Room, discards the black identity theme completely. As gay spokesmen, both Rechy and Baldwin face various pressures from their ethnic groups. The "macho" aspect of the Chicano movement mitigates against Rechy's homosexual fiction as a vehicle for "brown pride"; and the attacks upon Baldwin's homosexuality by Amiri Imamu Baraka and Don L. Lee as well as by Cleaver illustrate the hostility of black militancy to gay consciousness. Increasingly Baldwin has chosen to move in a different direction than Rechy's. He has dramatically played down the homosexual content of his fiction.

The early (and the best) Baldwin, however, did not underplay the homosexual theme in favor of a militant blackness. Go Tell It On The Mountain, a beautifully subtle novel, rests upon most of the major themes found in the first section of City of Night. John Grimes, like the main character in Rechy's work, is threatened by a religion that labels sex as evil except in marriage and by a father so warped by self-hate that he lashes out at the souls of everyone around him. Perhaps the most important stylistic device in Baldwin's novel is the constant repetition of such phrases as "the natural man" and "the old Adam." Gabriel and the Church of the Fire Baptized use these terms negatively in condemnation of man's sexual nature. They see "the natural man" as a part of human nature that is inherently "sinful" and which consequently must be repressed. Gabriel, who has been most unsuccessful in repressing his own "old Adam," transfers his guilt to his second wife, Elizabeth, and her illegitimate son, John.

John then grows up in a world much like that of the child in City of Night—a hating father, a mother who offers inadequate protection, and a church that preaches the truly "unnatural" repression of all sexual desire. Rechy's southwestern Catholic church and Baldwin's northern Protestant "temple" produce parallel effects upon their minority members: by preaching an "unnatural" repression and distrust of sex, they reinforce the feelings of inferiority induced in Chicanos and blacks by the dominant racist society. More important, however, they force the sexually healthy youth of their church to "go underground" with their sexual desires.

In a last desperate effort to gain his father's love, John undergoes a "conversion." But, significantly, while he thrashes around upon the floor speaking in tongues, he is thinking about Gabriel's hypocrisy and brutality. When the "conversion" results only in further rejection by his father, John knows that he must find some other salvation than that offered either by the church or by Gabriel.

He turns then to the older boy Elisha in what is clearly a subconscious homosexual yearning. Elisha doesn't understand when John asks him to "pray for me," and the desperate youth pleads again, "'No, pray for me.'" Elisha is still unaware of what John is asking (John, of course, does not yet fully realize it either) and abandons the young boy to the threatening presence of Gabriel. This final scene between John and Elisha is comparable, in a subtle way, to the "confession scenes" in City of Night. Baldwin has made clear the real, if unrealized, nature of the John-Elisha attraction in a sensual wrestling match early in the novel. In fact, the John-Elisha theme is basic to the homosexual theme in Go Tell It on the Mountain. Earlier in the novel Elisha has been humiliated in front of the church because he is suspected of having a sexual interest in a female member of the congregation. The affair has a strong effect on Elisha. When telling John about the dangers of "the old Adam," he accuses the young boy of still thinking about girls. The novel opens by stressing John's guilt over the "sin" of masturbation. No homosexual attraction is ever admitted, or perhaps ever realized by, either John or Elisha; however, the wrestling match, written with an undeniable overtone of sexual attraction, makes it clear that, even if subconsciously, this is a key ingredient in their relationship. The wrestling match has long been a significant device for underscoring covert homosexual attraction (e.g. Lawrence's Women in Love).

John's plea to Elisha at the end to "pray for me" is both a subconscious affirmation of the young boy's physical, not spiritual, love for his older brother in the church, and a "confession" that the religious salvation which he seems to have just won is already doomed. Gabriel has already made it clear that no love will come to John from him, and love is, above all, what the boy needs. His earlier masturbation is evidence that such love cannot long remain "abstract" and "spiritual."

Even though it is much less overt. Go Tell It on the Mountain parallels City of Night in several ways: it weds the theme of homosexuality to the theme of an oppressive religion which attacks and even tries to deny human love and sexuality. Both novels contain hate-ridden father figures. John's final words to Elisha are comparable to the "confessions" that give Rechy's book its meaning. Both novels end with a denial of the religion ("Dogs don't go to heaven") and a yearning for meaningful human contact, and both are clearly autobiographical.

Perhaps one reason for Baldwin's comparatively covert development of the homosexuality theme has nothing to do with pressure from the black power movement. As he revealed in an early essay about André Gide, Baldwin has simply never been as comfortable with his homosexuality as Rechy.

In "The Male Prison," contained in the 1961 collection of essays Nobody Knows My Name, Baldwin attempts to come to grips with his feelings about André Gide. Baldwin admits to an initial "dislike" of Gide largely because of the Frenchman's "Protestantism" and his homosexuality. Initially, it was Gide's blunt honesty about this homosexuality that made Baldwin uncomfortable:

And his homosexuality, I felt, was his own affair which he ought to have kept hidden from us, or, if he needed to be so explicit, he ought at least to have managed to be a little more scientific…. He ought to have leaned less heavily on the examples of dead, great men, of vanished cultures, and he ought to have known that the examples provided by natural history do not go far toward illuminating the physical, psychological and moral complexities faced by men.

In comparison, Rechy talks proudly about the great tradition of homosexual art produced by many "dead, great men." While admitting that someone needs to "assess" Gide's work, Baldwin pleads that he is not the one because "I confess that a great deal of what I felt concerning his work I still feel." What he "still feels" can be surmised from the rest of the essay. Gide loved his Madeleine as "an ideal," Baldwin writes, and not as a woman. Madeleine became then the personification of the writer's heaven and hell. The idealization of her brought Gide close to heaven, but his failure to love her as a woman produced a hell for both of them—a safe hell for Gide because it allowed him "to feel guilty about her instead of the boys on the Piazza d'Espagne."

There was dishonesty involved here, Baldwin feels, but a dishonesty that was necessary for Gide's sanity:

The really horrible thing about the phenomenon of present-day homosexuality, the horrible thing which lies curled like a worm at the heart of Gide's trouble and his work and the reason that he so clung to Madeleine, is that today's unlucky deviate can only save himself by the most tremendous exertion of all his forces from falling into an underworld in which he never meets either men or women, where it is impossible to have either a lover or a friend, where the possibility of genuine human involvement has altogether ceased. When this possibility has ceased, so has the possibility of growth.

City of Night and John Rechy give the lie to this argument. For it is precisely this "underworld" that Rechy's central character, who would never call himself an "unlucky deviate," seeks out; and he discovers initially, in spite of himself, that he cannot escape "genuine human involvement there," with the result that he "grows" through compassion and love for all the lonely people in all the "cities of night." He even comes to "love" the world, if only "abstractly" and "pityingly," because of the way in which people defined by "normal society" as "neither men nor women" endure their pain. Later in the essay Baldwin writes:

Madeleine kept open for him [Gide] a kind of door of hope, of possibility, the possibility of entering into communion with another sex. This door, which is the door to life and air and freedom from the tyranny of one's own personality, must be kept open….

Rechy's central character needs no such door because he escapes "the tyranny of his own personality" through simple acceptance of, and compassion for, others.

Ironically, Baldwin's work exhibits much of the discomfort with his own homosexuality that he attributes to Gide. Rechy has long since transcended such discomfort (he would never write an essay like "The Male Prison"). In relation to the rest of American homosexual writing, Rechy is most comparable to Genet in Europe—the man who has found a kind of sainthood through immersion in what "normal society" defines as "criminality."

Still, in Go Tell It on the Mountain, Baldwin produced a major homosexual novel. Like City of Night, it focuses upon the role of a dehumanizing religion in the development of a gay consciousness. Like City of Night, it utilizes certain aspects of that religion (the confessional, the conversion) as artistic devices in the novel. Thus, despite largely following the path of black pride instead of gay consciousness in his later writing, Baldwin made a significant early contribution to homosexual fiction. John Rechy's contribution is both more overt and more important because, in fiction, he has decided to emphasize his homosexuality instead of his ethnic identity.