THE COMING OF THE NIGHT

A flat, unsurprising record of one day in the life of various gay men in 1981 Los Angeles. Rechy (Our Lady of Babylon, 1996, etc.) has apparently set out to recover something of the blithe, libidinal spirit of homosexual life in America at the moment when the gay community was enjoying a new-found and assertive presence—and before some aspects of its identity were altered or erased by the onset of AIDS. He does so by following a variety of figures through a day when the Santa Ana winds are blowing—arousing, as more than one character remarks, an uneasy, restless, persistent yearning for sex. The characters include a troubled couple, struggling to overcome ennui and mistrust to stay together; a bright, staid middle-aged man, both envious—and resentful—of the freedom heedlessly enjoyed by a younger generation never exposed to police raids and public loathing; a bodybuilder who suffers a series of romantic pratfalls; a young man beginning, painfully, to suspect that he’s gay; a teenaged hustler scornfully working the boulevards; and a wealthy, worldly man who’s fled an act of violence in Manhattan, only to find that a different kind of mortality seeks him out in la-la land. Also wandering about the city is a trio of thugs, uncertain of their own sexual orientation and looking for gays to assault. There’s a substory involving the intermittently comic efforts of a drag queen to produce a private stage version of a porn film for a wealthy patron and his cronies. Many of the plot strands culminate in a Los Angeles park at night, when several of the gay characters collide with the thugs. The encounter, however—though heavily foreshadowed’seems more of an afterthought than a climax. The characters are rather sketchily drawn, the plot is thin: the result is a novel that, while vivid and sometimes very droll, is more an X-rated reverie than a sustained narrative.