The Sexual Outlaw: A Documentary represents John Rechy's most overtly political novel. Although this is not a terribly interesting fact in and of itself, the text (first published in 1977) does represent for gay liberation an early and aggressive assertion of the lessons learned from the women's movement: the personal is political. Asserting this view, the book simultaneously complicates it by revealing the potentially contradictory politics of personal liberation.

The novel concerns itself with the actions of a socially marginal but sexually liberated figure as he moves through the decaying urban landscape of our postindustrial age. The protagonist—a semicomposite, semiautobiographical character named Jim—engages in a weakened "sex hunt" in and around the environs of a pre-AIDS Los Angeles sometime around the mid-1970s. Jim stands as a pastless and sexually tireless everyman who forms the moral and ethical center of the novel. He represents the image of male sexuality common to almost all of Rechy's other novels: the hustling homosexual whose actions not only address his own sexual desire, but represent a challenge to the rigid oppression of heterosexual society. Restlessly wandering the peripheries of society, the male hustler becomes for Rechy a sexual shock troop meant to disrupt and sabotage the heterosexual world. The male hustler forms a disruptive and liberating force against the repressive and rigid social order, against its narrowly defined heterosexual identity, against the social complacency and passivity that this identity engenders. His promiscuity challenges the unexamined pieties and platitudes of the repressive heterosocial world.

The Sexual Outlaw thus offers a topology of homosexual masculinity, one that ostensibly maps practices of liberation and self-empowerment for a new, postrepressive age. The narrative posits an image of the homosexual hustler as a matrix of social disruption, agent and agitator for a "minority" cause, model of sexual animal cum revolutionary hero.

Rechy's representation of male identity as sexual outlaw emerges out of the contradictions rife within heterosocial order. The actions of the hustler—ostensibly liberating sexual practices comprised of public, anonymous sex antithetical to monogamy—position the outlaw in a tentative and limited relationship to the rest of society. The anonymity with which he performs his acts of sexual rebellion, the deserted urban terrain he claims as his own geography, serve to reinscribe the marginalization of the sexual outlaw. This marginalization is manifested most clearly by the silent codes which the hustler uses to communicate. Indeed, were it not for Rechy's text, the world it describes would remain a demimonde beyond the horizon of heterosocial vision.

More significantly, the novel reveals how the hustler can never fully reject society's repressions, contradictions, and hypocrisies. Beyond the reassertion of the homosexual as marginal, the sexual outlaw in Rechy's work embodies many of the contradictions and failures that characterize heterosociety. Conflicting modes of sociosexual organization—liberated revolutionary, entrapped sexual invert—come within the text to comprise the protagonist's identity. The homosexual hustler is constituted by the very repressive and delimiting social practices against which his own acts of erotic liberation battle. Homosexual and heterosexual practices meet in the outlaw to form an irresolvable tension. The tension becomes particularly tangible at those points where the narrative shows the hustler's sexual choreography to mirror the straight world's preoccupation with dominance and submission. Jim is compelled to power, selling his alluring body. Proving his worth by demanding money for sex, he places himself within both erotic and capital economies based in heterosocial order.

In textualizing the sexual outlaw, The Sexual Outlaw comes to embody numerous tensions that disrupt the semantic and semiotic order of the text. The novel valorizes a field of sexual play that seeks to trigger a form of revolt and liberation. The physical elements of this sexual play—symbolically charged clothing, actions, signals, looks—form the "silent" language of an erotic discourse that, textualized in Rechy's novel, seeks to overthrow the repressive discourses of identity imposed by heterosocial order. The "voicing" of a "silent" discourse marks one level of tension at work in The Sexual Outlaw. A second tension emerges at the discursive level where the homoerotic within Rechy's text, by inverting notions of heterosocial identity, unwittingly submits to them as well. Rechy's narrative seeks to construct a resistant discourse of homosexual liberation, to create, if you will, a heroic homotextuality. This homotextuality reveals the contradictions inherent both in the heterosocial world against which it speaks and in the homorevolutionary activity it champions. However, a fruitful analysis of this text cannot simply lay bare the novel's ideological enslavement to heterosocial order. While its homotextuality reinscribes elements of heterosocial order, the novel simultaneously disrupts narrative order by placing irresolvable contradictions in play. By evoking the binary structure that bolsters heterosocial order, The Sexual Outlaw not only inverts that binary structure but—by revealing its contradictions, contributes to its destruction.

I. The Split Narrative

The breakdown of binaries begins with the bifurcated structure of the novel. The Sexual Outlaw oscillates between neatly separated passages of realistic description and essayistic meditations. The descriptive passages offer in (porno) graphic detail an account of the novel's "outlaw" world. Their position as social outsider allows homosexual hustlers a critical perspective on the repressive and conformist practices of heterosocial order. Homosexuality, as defined by this order, is stigmatized, persecuted, labelled a "deviate practice." Against these negative constructions of homosexuality, the descriptive narrative represents the revolutionary function of the sexual outlaw.

The subtitle of the book, a documentary, underscores the function of the narrative as critical exposé. The work explores the sexual activities of a marginal group whose actions question and undermine heterosocial practices, practices that repressively define sexual identity in the service of social organization. Sexual outlaws disrupt and destroy the operations of the heterosocial world by questioning the monological bases of its order: monogamy, reproduction, duality, stability, closure. The incessant repetition of almost identical sexual encounters detailed by these descriptive passages suggests the potentially endless lack of closure inherent in the hustler's movement from one sexual partner to another.

These (porno) graphic passages alternate with meditative "essays" that form the other half of the novel's bifurcated structure. These essays range through time and place and incorporate many different narrative forms and diverse public discourses. Part interview, part public speech, part movie montage, part meditation on gay culture, part reminiscence, these sections are mediated through and unified by an authorial voice. This voice draws together the various heterosocial voices that comment on and react to homosexuality: newspaper clippings about police harassment of gays, reports by religious and psychiatric organizations on homosexuality as evidence of moral or psychic transgression, real and imaginary audience reaction to the narrator's speeches about the gay world. These sections articulate a number of social attitudes toward homosexuality. The social discourses, then, serve as a multivocalic commentary on the outlaw's liberating practice of endless desire described in the erotic section. Rechy notes in the introduction that he, indeed, wrote the descriptive passages first, later inserting the essays at points he had marked in the manuscript. The descriptive sections serve as the erotic "center" that the "marginal" meditative passages and their evocation of social discourses critique and amplify.

One process of inversion emerges as the novel reverses sociocultural reality. Homotextuality—the discourse of homosexual liberation—is inscribed as the center of the narrative structure. The historical "center"—heterosocial order evoked by the meditative sections—becomes the novelistic "margin" whereas the homosexual Other forms the narrative core of The Sexual Outlaw. Thus two asymmetrical regions come to define the novel: a unitary, closed, "silent" homosexual discourse sliced through by a multiplicitous, open, "voiced" social discourse.

M. M. Bakhtin's (1981) formalist model of novelistic discourse is illustrative here. He argues that a "unitary language" (monoglossia) is a system of linguistic norms that struggles to overcome the multiplicity of meaning (heteroglossia) linguistic utterances evoke. This monoglossic system is "conceived as ideologically saturated, language as a world view, even as a concrete opinion, insuring a maximum of mutual understanding in all spheres of ideological life." The erotic passages in Rechy's narrative are written both as a documentary description of a particular sexual world and as an "ideologically saturated" world view that informs the novel's polemic. The meditative passages, by contrast, incorporate voices questioning both the revolutionary potential of the sexual outlaw as well as the society seeking to persecute him.

The unitary erotic relies on the multiplicitous heterosocial in order to find a "public" voice. Without the meditative and reflective social narrative, the erotic discourse of the male hustler would remain enclosed within a descriptive but isolated narrative. One unfamiliar with the critical and rebellious intent of the sexual outlaw—indeed, one would suspect, the majority of Rechy's reading audience—would remain wholly "outside" the narrative able to perceive only repetitive and (porno) graphic descriptions of homosexual intercourse. The rebellious note would remain unheard by those uninitiated in the hustlers' "silent" language—the elaborate choreography of clothes and signals and movements carefully detailed in the descriptive passages. The presence of the social narrative within the novel as commentary on and explanation of the erotic narrative positions both the homorevolutionary and the heterosocial arenas in a mutually reliant discursive relationship.

The narrative structure thus evokes the compromised position of the sexual outlaw as standing both within and without various social orders. The narrator, by contrast, wants to position the hustler fully outside the systems of heterosocial control. His is a tenuous, doubly marginalized position: "Existing on the fringes of the gay world, male hustlers have always been dual outsiders, outlaws from the main society, and outcasts within the main gay world of hostile non-payers and non-sellers. Desired abundantly, and envied, they are nonetheless the least cared about." This position of double marginality affords the narrative of The Sexual Outlaw a unique and powerful critical position. In order for this position of power to be made manifest, however, the silent and hidden erotic discourse must be made public through the multivocalic narrative. Hence, whereas a strict structural separation exists between the public voices of the essays and the erotic discourse of the descriptive passages, each simultaneously reflects upon and filters the contents of the other through its own lens. The revolutionary and the repressive within The Sexual Outlaw become not merely inversions, negative evocations of the other. They are fully reliant and dynamic players in the homotextuality of the novel, the articulation of a male homosexual revolutionary identity.

The sense of slippage exemplified by a homorevolutionary identity attempting to stand fully outside a heterosocial order comes to the fore as the narrative emphasizes its use of realist techniques. The erotic passages evoke a literary realism, an attempt to represent a specific reality as it is lived. Rechy notes in his 1984 preface to the book that he conceived of his work as a "prose documentary." The attempt at cinema verité is evident in the stark ("black-and-white" Rechy calls it) imagery used to describe the sex-hunt undertaken by Jim. Rechy explains that in these sections he "wanted to create characters, including the protagonist, who might be defined 'fully'—by inference—only through their sexual journeys." These sections of the novel describe a movement through a sexual "underworld" marked by its repetitious cycle of desire, pursuit, contact, fulfillment, and renewed desire.

The episodic quality of these descriptions stands for narrative development. "Although there is a protagonist whom the book follows intimately, minute by recorded minute for a full weekend, there is no strict plot," remarks Rechy. A rigidly structured sequence of erotic description replaces a sense of narrative development based upon the dynamic growth and change of the protagonist. With the exception of a few flashbacks (passages unambiguously marked "FLASHBACK" in the text), the sex scenes in the novel form a strictly chronological sequence. The passage of time marked rigorously throughout these portions of the narrative inform the reader if a particular action occurs at 6:22 P.M. or 3:07 A.M. Time becomes the principal mode of organization and lends a controlling structure to the otherwise repetitive present-tense descriptions of sodomy, fellatio, and mutual masturbation. As one scene follows another, the narrative enforces a strict temporal order. It does not, however, truly evoke a realist narrative.

The sexual descriptions, realistic as they may seem, do not move simply toward documentary expression. They form a discourse marked by unresolved desires, allowing the reader to trace strata of contradictions and conflicts. Rechy's narrative as an account in the late 1970s of a post-sexual revolution, post-gay liberation, postmodern, post-1960s social world helps locate the complexities involved in social change and political revolution. One formal constellation of this complexity—and the point at which the realist aesthetic of the novel slips into a hyperrealism—develops at the level of character psychology.

As Rechy explains in his introduction, the characters that people Jim's rebellious sexual journey are fully defined by that journey. The bourgeois individual disappears, and the male hustler stands as a figure fully traversed by social discourses—the historical, social, and moral strictures used by heterosocial order to define the individual and against which the hustler stands. While he revels in the sexual urgency of his actions, the identity of the hustler is based on the delimiting social and historical orders he resists. His is a libidinal utopia found at the margins but also, dialectically, composed of the central discursive trajectories of society's order. He stands at a point where not just the sense of the inside and the outside of individual identity blur, but where the limits of political and sexual constituencies disappear. The hustler within an ostensibly realist narrative becomes a figure fully comprised of language. The novel thus does not sustain the illusion of a realistic discourse. Fully defined by his sexual journey, the hustler represents not a rounded individual but a hyperreal figure where the contradictions of the social world come to the fore.

The gay cruising world becomes a mirror of heterosexual norms. Jim hustles for money by playing the ultra-masculine street-tough: "He's wearing Levi's and cowboy boots, no shirt. Sunglasses." Making sexual connections for money, "he will most often pretend to be 'straight'—uncomfortably rationalizing the subterfuge by reminding himself that those attracted to him will usually—though certainly not always—want him to be that, like the others of his breed." As top man, Jim assumes the role of the quintessential heterosexual male, appropriating the image and exaggerating it as if in a funhouse mirror. Often bodybuilders (like the narrator, the author, and the fictional Jim) and male hustlers assume both the physique and the costume—Levi's, boots, sleeveless shirts—of macho masculinity. The hustler appropriates and reflects back to masculine society a version of its own (ideal) sexual self-image.

The ultra-feminine transvestites and transsexuals represent the binary opposite to the ultra-masculine male-hustlers: "At Highland and Hollywood, the queens, awesome, defiant Amazons, are assuming their stations. The white queens are bleached and pale, the black ones shiny and purple. Extravagant in short skirts, bouffant hairdos, luminous unreal mouths and eyes. The transsexuals are haughty in their new credentials." Both the queens and the hustlers assume exaggerated versions of the sexual roles circumscribed by heterosocial order. The contradictions of the gay street world are magnifications of the contradictions running through this order. A problem with the straight world, the narrative argues, is that it denies a dialectic between the masculine and feminine principles of human identity. This denial forms one basis for the split in the outlaw world Rechy's novel serves to describe.

The meditative sections of the novel criticize writers who ceaselessly flaunt their masculinity, calling them "screaming heterosexuals" and "male impersonators." The narrative seeks to redress and subvert the sense of machismo and homophobia found in the works of Ernest Hemingway, the "hairy godfather of heterosexual writers," and the sexual anxiety and violence invoked by the "Tarzan-howling" Norman Mailer. The narrator suggests that the writers who have created the most fulfilling work—Shakespeare, Joyce, Lawrence, Proust, Genet, Burroughs—are those artists who most fully accept and integrate the "female grace" and the "male strength" of their psyches. Which is to say that the narrator values those writers who seem to challenge most successfully the binary construction of "feminine" and "masculine."

One would be terribly hard pressed, however, to find some "female grace" evident in either the graphic descriptions of the erotic narrative or the outraged authorial voice of the social narrative. Instead, the novel celebrates the power the hustler exerts over his small domain: "There is a terrific, terrible excitement in getting paid by another man for sex. A great psychological release, a feeling that this is where real sexual power lies—not only to be desired by one's own sex but to be paid for being desired, and if one chooses that strict role, not to reciprocate in those encounters, a feeling of emotional detachment as freedom—these are some of the lures…." The narrative valorizes an image of traditional heterosexual masculinity and attitudes toward sex that involve control, detachment, freedom.

This power, ironically, often leads Jim into a position of impotence. Though excited, he will not reciprocate a sexual act unless his partner is extremely handsome. Neither will he ever initiate a sexual act: "Two beautiful male bodies lie side by side naked…. Used to being pursued, each waits for the other to advance first…. Looking away from each other, both dress hurriedly, each cut deeply by regret they did not connect"; "Jim wants the man to blow him first, and the man wants Jim to do it first. They separate quickly." Jim's quest for power traps him in impotence, just as his domination over sexual partners leads him to a reliance upon another partner in order to affirm his power. He must be pursued as an object of desire. Repeatedly, the narrative makes evident the conflicted position of the sexual outlaw who, attempting to escape the repression and boundaries of the heterosocial world, runs again and again straight into its contradictions.

Although the narrative attempts to position the male hustler as a doubly marginal figure, it reveals him to stand both within and without heterosocial systems. His inversion of heterosexual roles is at once subversive and critical as well as imitative and conformist. The revolutionary intent of both the novel and its protagonist becomes defused as the hustler is shown to assume a reactive and thus dependent position to the center.

The interplay between silence and voice underscores this sense of dependence. The language of the hustling world—"spoken" through posture, costume, and look—represents a form of "silent" language. After his early encounters by the pier, on the beach, in the restroom, Jim realizes he has "spoken not a word to anyone today. Not one." Most of the communication described in the narrative occurs through the use of gesture ("from behind blue-tinted sunglasses, he surveys those gathered here, intercepts looks—but he moves along the sand toward the ocean"), through sexual position ("swiftly turning his body around, torso bending forward, back to Jim, the naked young man parts his own buttocks"), or through clothing ("men lie singly in that parabola of sand—the more committed in brief bikinis, or almost naked—genitals sheltered only by bunched trunks"). The silence, along with its suggestion of near religious commitment and sacrifice—a vow of silence—stands in contradistinction to the form the novel assumes as a publicly "voiced" disclosure of the "silent" homorevolutionary world.

The silence essential to Rechy's homosexual discourse stands in contrast to and is only made manifest by the public voices of the socially discursive sections. Which is to say, the (silent) homosexual discourse only exists in Rechy's narrative when made present by the (voiced) public language of various other discourses—a novelistic discourse, a documentary discourse, a journalistic discourse, a media discourse. The form the novel takes betrays its vision of homosexuality as a singular and impenetrable margin. The bifurcated narrative articulates a homosexual/political practice dependent upon the very social strictures against and apart from which the novel's sense of a (true) homorevolutionary identity seeks to exist.

II. Marginal Masculine Identity

The Sexual Outlaw does not just represent a story of failed rebellion. Rather, the text betrays an incessant doubling whereby the discourses of liberation and repression are ever revealing the duplicity of the other. In his studied macho posturing, in his overt strategizing for domination and power, Jim plays out a heightened image of male heterosocial dominance. Simultaneously, the narrative finds in the male hustling arena a passive-aggressive role traditionally ascribed to women within male-dominated society. Working-out incessantly in order to be desirable, passively attracting the attention of others, Jim stands as the physical manifestation of idealized manliness. He behaves, however, by a code associated with a most prim and passive form of female behavior. He must always be the object of the chase. He must never initiate contact with another man. He must always allow the other to call his attention first: "Jim sees an obvious bodybuilder. The attraction and the competition are instantly stirred. Jim is prepared to ignore the other. But the other pauses. Jim looks back. With a nod, the other invites Jim into his cubicle." Jim positions himself as the center of attention, an object of worship, the focus of desire.

Pushed by the pressures of heterosocial order to remain marginal, the hustlers lay claim to abandoned public spaces as their geosexual terrain. The discourses of the heterosocial mark this rebellious claim to geographical space as much as it marks the construction of the homorevolutionary self. The sexual outlaw plays within a field bounded by the unmerciful laws behind a form of social darwinism. The struggle to survive in the heterosocial arena is carried over into the homoerotic realm of supposed liberation. Those who are old or ugly do not survive in the game of the sex hunt: "In the shadows an unattractive man is jerking off; everyone walks by, ignoring him"; "an unattractive loose-fleshed old man lies there naked, his hand on his spent groin. Abandoned and desperate and alone—one of the many lingering, ubiquitous, wasted, judging ghosts in the gay world. Jim avoids him"; "beyond the cave of the tunnel he passes a forlom old man, waiting, alone, ignored, wasted; waiting for anybody." These lonely images stand at the fringe of the outlaw arena, denied the right to play the hunt due to their advanced age and degenerating physical appearance. The irony of Rechy's use of the term "gay world" becomes uncomfortably apparent.

The narrative thus explores the problems engendered by a practice of complicitous rebellion, one simultaneously revolutionary and restrictive. The narrative voice speaks of a sexual revolution embodied by the spirit and actions of the sexual outlaws:

What kind of revolution is it that ends when one looks old, at least for most? What kind of revolution is it in which some of the revolutionaries must look beautiful? What kind of revolution is it in which the revolutionaries slaughter each other, in the sexual arenas and in the ritual of S & M?

We're fighting on two fronts—one on the streets, the other inside.

The "outside" street fight of the sexual guerrillas, amid the broken buildings of the urban wasteland and the open terrain of beach and park, stands at the point where the repressive propriety of heterosocial order proves impotent. The hustling choreography continues despite repeated repressive measures taken by the police and other state authorities. The "inside" fight, the moral imperative to overcome personal prejudice and self-hatred, occurs within a discussion of homosexual identity. The narrative suggests that an idealized vision of youth and beauty informs and infuses notions of identity and desirability. Other outlaws reject individuals unfortunate enough to be old or unappealing, and this in turn can lead to a terrible self-hatred:

Jim faces a drunkenly swaying youngman. Not particularly attractive, the type he would not reciprocate with. Depression crowds the youngman's thin face. Jim doesn't recognize him even vaguely…. "You make yourself available," the drunken voice goes on tearing at the silence of the paused choreography. The shadows do not move, the spell locked. "You walk around showing off your body. You didn't even touch me, just wanted me to lick your body. Well, I have a body too!"

The confrontation violates the hustler choreography, disturbs the "stirless dark silence," and assaults the "rigid silence" of the hunt. The moment allows the text to examine the cost of the hustler's identity: "In an unwelcome moment the ugly carnage of the sex-hunt gapes at Jim—his part in it." The sex hunt exacts a demanding toll, and the narrative suggests that the erotic discourse of liberation to which the sexual outlaw lays claim carries with it a repressive charge as well. The contradictions of his simultaneously revolutionary and repressive intent inextricably bind the identity of the sex hunter and the resistant intent of the novel. The Sexual Outlaw functions as a complicitous critique. It examines the repressive function of heterosocial order and signals the inextricable connection between that order and the homorevolutionary outlaw. In addition, it scrutinizes those repressive practices that to some degree are independent of heterosocial order. The emancipatory outlaw function described by the narrative—the homotextuality—reveals the homosexual hustler occupying a complex marginal space, one simultaneously reliant upon and resistant to central discourses of sexual identity, one implicated in a dual movement of liberation and self-repression.

Rechy's novel thus raises the specter of a complicated and compromised resistant identity. The narrative's bifurcated structure and construction of interpenetrating heterosexual and homosexual social practices mark the contradictions the text finds inscribed in the protagonist's identity. Moreover, the text suggests that repressive practices in the gay world are at moments more than manifestations of a contradictory heterosocial order. The novel thus allows one to move away from the scrutiny of textual form and individual identity toward the exploration of a complex and resistant group identity marked by a sense of conflict and capitulation, resistance and repression.

The sections of social commentary throughout the text—the "public" half of the split narrative—indicate that North American gays in the late 1970s have come to assume a "minority" consciousness. Group identity, predicated upon notions of solidarity as a stand against the oppressive attitude of the majority society, can bolster self-esteem and self-identity while simultaneously silencing critical voices. As the narrator notes: "For a gay person to criticize any aspect of the gay world is to expose himself to howls of wrath and betrayal." Yet a process of critique, of a "deterritorialization" of social order, characterizes Rechy's vision of an outlaw world. The narrative thus offers insight into what one critical construction of a marginal masculine identity may look like.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari discuss deterritorialization and reterritorialization as connected processes of group consciousness. To "territorialize" is to stratify, organize, signify, attribute—to fix identity. Against this, "deterritorializations" signify those points that traverse a fixed identity. This can only be met with a move toward reterritorialization, the configuration of a new order. The critical work of these French critics suggests an endless interrelation between liberating and oppressive movements. Even if identity is questioned and social stratification dissolved, "there is still a danger that you will re-encounter organizations that restratify everything, formations that restore power to a signifier, attributions that reconstitute a subject." The Sexual Outlaw thus serves to document how the deterritorializing activity of public homosexuality ruptures society's territorializations of sexual identity, of criminality, of sin. Even within this experience of rupture, however, movements toward new stratifications emerge: the opposition of homosexuality to racial and ethnic identity, the primary valuation of beauty and youth, the retreat into the closet from which a safe and pragmatic homosexuality can be practiced.

The revolutionary impulse of the sexual outlaw leads toward a "reterritorialization" of identity: stratified, ossified, segmented. Rechy's work explores the tension between the revolutionary impulse of its male subject and the internal and external forces that seek to contain any sense of rupture. The erotic sections are episodic and repetitious, presented as "lines of flight" away from the strictures of correctness articulated by the social discourse of the novel. Simultaneously, an irreducible tension emerges between the sense of flight and liberation suggested by the erotic discourse and the isolation and stratification its form implies: only sexuality informs these erotic sections and every other object—food and clothes and all physical movement—becomes subordinated to its drive.

The erotic discourse deterritorializes the well-defined moral and legal segments invoked in the social discourses of the novel. This discourse also reterritorializes the significance of eroticism—sexual outlawry is and must always be disruptive. The narrative offers no image of the "perverse" in the sense Barthes (1985) speaks of perversion as "the search for a pleasure that is not made profitable by a social end, a benefit to the species…. It's on the order of bliss that exerts itself for nothing. The theme of expenditure." Jim's eroticism is all-consuming, charging his clothes, food, and gesture with an eroticism itself equivalent with social rupture—a revolutionary and liberating benefit "to the species." Rechy's text thus foregrounds the theme of (capital) exchange rather than (perverse) expenditure.

The erotic discourse, in consuming and so assigning significance, silences all that is not of use to the aleatory movement of sexual outlawry. Thus Jim's ethnic background becomes subordinated to his homosexual identity:

Jim—he calls himself that sometimes, sometimes Jerry, sometimes John—removes the bikini, lies boldly naked on the sand. Because of a mixture of Anglo and Latin bloods, his skin quickly converts the sun's rays into a tan; the tan turns his eyes bluer; long-lashed eyes which almost compromise the rugged good looks of his face, framed by dark hair. The sun licks the sweat from his body.

The erotic narrative subordinates any sense of ethnic or racial identity to the erotic, the physical, the homosexual. Rechy, a Chicano, writes a narrative that makes hidden any connection to a nonsexual self. Indeed, the long lashes of his eyes "almost compromise" the protagonist's good looks. As constructed by the narrative, the racial self even threatens the sexual self. In addition, the protagonist's own name—sometimes Jim, sometimes Jerry, sometimes John—has no significatory power against the segmented and wholly consuming identity of homosexual hunter.

Yet, for all this, the narrative evokes various strata of homosexual identity. Homosexual groups in the narrative function as sects with their own secret rites and rituals. In this vein, homosexuality is still tied to "the values and systems of interaction of the dominant sexuality. Its dependence upon heterosexual norms can be seen in its policy of secrecy, of concealment—due partly to the repression and partly to the sense of shame which still prevails in the 'respectable' circles." The landscape Jim traverses in his journey is dotted with the glitter bars, the leather bars, the costume bars representing enclosed domains of concealed rituals of contact. Jim himself usually remains at the periphery of these bars, moving through the alleyways or parking lots outside. He attempts to be truly marginal, an outlaw/existentialist/romantic hero walking on the fringe of the already socially marginal. When Jim does enter these bars, he feels himself surrounded by churning bodies and bare torsos, a charade of ramrod poses that cause him to leave for the ostensibly liberating streets, beach fronts, and hiking trails—the open and more dangerous world of an indifferent rural/urban landscape.

The social narrative examines a group who contest the grip of heterosocial power on their lives. They represent a militant homosexuality that demands its right to exist as a valid sexual, social, and moral entity. As a result, a sense of group identification begins to emerge through the text. The narrator speaks about the Hollywood Gay Parade: "There was plenty of dignity, and, embarrassing to admit—man—I felt the itchy sentiment that signals real pride. Here you are, and here they are, and here we are. I remember Ma Joad's proud speech of the Okies' eventual triumph in 'defeat.' We keep coming, she said, because we're the people." This passage reveals the easy sentimentality and reliance upon cliché "hip" diction that often plague Rechy's writing. This passage compounds these problems by referring to the sentimental movie version of Steinbeck's already sentimental "proletarian" novel The Grapes of Wrath. Nevertheless, the passage reveals a strain of resistance manifesting itself as minority group identity. The homosexual forms a margin of opposition challenging the authority of heterosexual power. A movement away from gays having to explain themselves to the heterosexual world propels such resistance and becomes, according to Guattari, "a matter of heterosexuality's having to explain itself; the problem is displaced, the phallocratic power in general comes into question." A resistant homosexual identity inverts a traditional relationship to heterosocial power. It ceases to explain its own existence and instead questions and critiques the centrality of the other's position.

Rechy's narrative, however, does not fully achieve the critical (and some might say facile) point of inversion Guattari's analysis champions. The Sexual Outlaw explores a homosexuality that is both reliant upon and resistant to the values and systems of the dominant society. It engages with a notion of the marginal quite distinct from the sense of pure otherness posited by Guattari. The narrative suggests that a reliance upon heterosocial norms leads to a false and destructive sense of identity while also indicating that a powerful belief in the fully resistant and militant quality of homosexual revolt can lead to a code that reterritorializes identity:

Increasingly easy on campuses and within other enclosed groups to announce openly that one is gay. The shock is gone…. It is equally easy to say "gayisbeautiful—gayisproud." Almost one word, meaning obscured. But are homosexuals discovering their particular and varied beauty? From that of the transvestite to that of the bodybuilder? The young to the old? The effeminate to the masculine? The athletic to the intellectual? Gay must be allowed variations. It is gay fascism to decree that one must perform this sex act, and must allow that one, in order to be gay; it is gay fascism to deny genuine bisexuality, or to suspect all heterosexuals.

The narrative calls for (but does not necessarily privilege) a genuine multiplicity of identity and sexuality. It thus explores the complicated and compromised position of a resistant homosexual minority, yet it leaves intact the sense of irresolvable contradiction it finds there. Ultimately, Rechy's text is useful less as a meditation on what homosexual "being" means than as an anticipation of how homosexual "becoming" can move beyond the binaries of heterosocial order. Heterosocial order defines masculinity through a manifestation of physical and social strength. Physical prowess and politico-economic power are the marks of heterosexual machismo. In his outward appearance, the homosexual can represent an exaggerated image of male heterosocial power. Bulging muscles, cowboy boots, leather jackets, worn blue jeans as cultural icons evoke images of masculine heterosexual power. The male hustler assumes the physical role traditionally assigned to that faction most empowered by society and that most insists upon separating itself from homosexual behavior: the macho heterosexual male. One manifestation of becoming queer involves the ironic appropriation of those signs belonging to the powerful, turning those signs "queer" and resisting their circulation within heterosocial systems of exchange. This appropriation does not imply the simple inversion of signifying systems, however. As Rechy's text all too clearly reveals, inversion only recreates a mirror image of asymmetrical power relations.

The Sexual Outlaw signals the inevitable repression when becoming queer is fixed (reterritorialized) as a form of homosexual being. The narrative problematizes the process of discursive appropriation as the protagonist assumes modes of being that fix trajectories of empowerment and disempowerment. In order to attain a degree of agency and control, Jim feels he must affirm his subjectivity by always being a passive object of desire as an assertion of his masculine allure. He moves through a point where, incorporating contradictory heterosocial sexual roles, those passive modes of behavior socially sanctioned for women cross with the dominant modes of behavior appropriate for men. Jim's identity incorporates the binaries of socially sanctified sexual identity, reveals their contradictions, but does not move beyond them. Homosexual being in the narrative is fixed, stuck, unable to reach out beyond the series of irreducible conflicts Jim employs to define himself. Bound by a code circumscribed by heterosocial norms, the homosexual in The Sexual Outlaw becomes a critical locus at which the contradictory trajectories of his dominant society converge. The novel thus posits a rebellious hero but offers us something less. In so doing, it presents an image of a compromised critique that the narrative seeks all to easily to resolve.

The narrative expresses an impossible desire for resolution and transcendence that only serves to re-entrench the contradictory position of the hustling outlaw. As the narrator explains, the "warring attempts to fuse heterosexual expectations with homosexual needs and realities create the contradictions in the gay world." The homosexual world, Rechy's text implies, would be free of contradictions if freed of restraints. Or as the authorial voice articulates:

Release the heterosexual pressures on our world—convert the rage—and you release a creative energy to enrich two worlds. Pressurize the homosexual world further, and it may yet set your straight world on fire.

And when the sexual revolution is won—if it is ever won—what of the fighters of that war? Doesn't a won revolution end the life of the revolutionary? What of the sexual outlaw?

One will mourn his passing.

The narrative points toward an apocalyptic completion of the outlaw function—toward the resolution of contradictions—as it looks forward to a social order liberated from the restraints imposed upon sexual behavior and, emblematically, upon all creative human endeavors. Such a resolution of mutual destruction posits a transcendent image of the revolutionary that the entire narrative has to this point found impossible.

Moreover, Rechy's narrative evokes a portrait of the male hustler premised on culturally inscribed discourses of rebellion, resistance, and revolution. This resistance can be viewed from a historical perspective as part of a larger movement of civil disobedience integrally related to the conditions of American civil rights activism in the 1950s and 1960s. From a cultural perspective, the resistance also evokes a romantic tradition traceable in American letters from Cooper and Emerson to (yes) Hemingway and Mailer. The artist stands as the creator of order within a disordered world, an agent of resistance to oppression and persecution. So too does the sexual outlaw.

As the narrative projects this image of the hustler, it becomes clear that the social order forming the "outside" also informs the psychosexual "inside." The novel thus describes sadomasochistic practices in the gay community as a dark imitation of heterosocial repression. In his journey through a maze of bathhouse orgies, paid sexual contact, and random encounters, Jim feels the appeal of sadomasochism as a play for power and dominance. He surrenders "to the part of him he hates," the master of "reeling scenes, spat words, rushing sensations, clashing emotions." Similarly, the narrative surrenders to the strutting power of the ultra-macho hustler and the garish femininity of the amazonian drag queens. Both are interiorized versions of sexual roles found in the straight world, roles against and also out of which the homosexual defines himself. The narrative thus proves ambiguous when indicating which sociosexual identities allow for a critical appropriation and which create a repressive interiorization. Rechy's novel fails to articulate adequately where critical inversion ends and slavish imitation begins.

As a repeated thematic and structural motif, the tensions and contradictions between opposites—repression and freedom, hegemony and alterity, masculinity and femininity, passivity and activity—create a picture of a fully traversed, schizophrenic world. The heterosocial arena scrutinized in The Sexual Outlaw attempts to create a black-and-white vision in which the actions it views as wholly good seek to repress those it perceives as wholly evil. Rechy's novel reveals this to be wholly inadequate and instead disrupts the neat acts of heterosocial definition and circumscription. In so doing, however, the narrative indicates that a movement beyond binary opposition is desirable while at the same time failing to effect such a movement. The narrative seeks an answer to problems of identity through what is essentially a strategy of appropriation and inversion. In appropriating discourses of oppression, the novel oscillates between exposing and hiding, attacking and bolstering, destroying and reconstructing repressive discursive acts. Finally, the desire for a world of absolutes—the sexual outlaw as absolute other, heterosocial order as absolute evil—mirrors the repressive practices against which this desire ostensibly speaks.

Though failing to articulate a truly revolutionary function for the sexual outlaw, the novel does not represent failure. Although it calls for synthesis and transcendence, the novel cannot accomplish either. Instead, it replicates, doubles, refutes, and challenges those signs of repression and discord that map the delimiting and silencing geography through and against which the male sexual outlaw acts. Clearly the novel reveals an ideological enslavement to the binaries of heterosocial sexual identification. In its exposure of this enslavement, in its attempt to reveal that which it has in 1977 not yet the vocabulary to articulate, The Sexual Outlaw not only reinscribes the binary of heterosocial order. It accepts it and rejects it and reveals an impossible topology from which future constructions of sexual identity may move.