The Sexual Outlaw: A Documentary (Rechy, John)

Back in the late '70s when this book first came out I remember snatching up a copy at the college bookstore. I was already familar with John Rechy after reading his groundbreaking 1963 novel City of Night. In The Sexual Outlaw I found a book that was as brutally honest as it was searing.The book alternates between chapters in which "Jim" (the stand-in for Rechy) cruises the parks, bars, bathhouses and beaches of L.A. for sex and chapters in which Rechy turns his attention to such subjects as police corruption, the court system, discrimination, S&M, and a subject he returns to frequently - promiscuity as a revolutionary act.As a Midwestern guy in his late teens, the book was both offputting and a revelation. Offputing because the open embrace of sexuality was an aspect of being gay I hadn't seen in the Midwest and a revelation because the arguments that Rechy put forth against those who would condemn gay sexuality gave me my first answers to refute the anti-gay attitudes that were prevalent at the time. (In fact, I was surprised to be reading a section of the book when I came across a statement I have used many times in support of gay issues. It hadn't occurred to me where the statement came from until I found it as I re-read the book.)The Sexual Outlaw stands as a statement of its times. It's difficult to read it now without thinking of how many lives have been lost to AIDS. Looking back, it's hard to imagine how different life was in that brief 12-year period between the Stonewall riots and birth of the modern gay liberation movement in 1969 and the discovery of AIDS in 1981. This book is a sort of time capsule of that brief era.

John Rechy is a classic writer, as the top of his form in this book. The narrative parts are neatly written, not too many adjectives, not too much drama, so you have to fill in a lot of it in your own mind. In between the narrative are passages about how it was being gay in Los Angeles during the 1970's. They're valuable historically, but also for Rechy's vision of what it means to live with dignity in a world of judgment and oppression. It's just a beautiful book overall, and I'm glad I bought it.

Good read A++

Great story! So glad it is available on Kindle. A classic gay man's story before the era of AIDS. Very empowering reading.

This important piece of Gay literature is often overlooked. It is the voice of an entire sub-genre of our fight for equality, one whose voice made us seen, but now seems all but forgotten.

Described as "A Documentary," THE SEXUAL OUTLAW is an unexpected construction and as such it is an extremely, extremely difficult work to describe--part fact, part opinion, part autobiography, and part fiction--and often blurring the distinction between the four.Published in 1977, the book is essentially a snapshot of the underbelly of the Los Angeles community through John Rechy moved in that decade. The fictional material concerns Jim, a man that the rest of the book encourages us to read as Rechy himself, who travels a stream of sexual contacts over the course of a long weekend: sex at the beach, in the park, on the street, in the bar, in the alley. And always running one step ahead of a highly hypocritical society and police department that is forever in hot pursuit to arrest, eradicate, and destroy him and his kind forever.These are the "sexual outlaws." The remaining portions of the book veers from sado-masochism to double sexual standards to corrupt police officers to newspaper headlines--and all, ultimately, in an effort to explain why a person such as "Jim" would actively select such a nihilistic way of life. And Rechy does indeed have a point; to a certain extent, the choice is between rebelling against or being buried by the status quo.In one sense, the book will--or at least should--make your blood boil in its highly accurate depiction of the horrific repression homosexuals have faced in the past and indeed might again face in the future. It also conveys a sense of the excitement of the illicit sexual chase. At the same time, Rechy does not spare you the emptiness and ugliness of such a lifestyle; indeed, he makes such aspects of wholesale promiscuity extremely apparent.In the end, Rechy seems to be saying that when the choice is between rebelling or being buried, he prefers to rebel. But there is a catch in here: he presents a street-sex lifestyle as the only possible rebellion and to a certain extent tries to posit his own choices as a commonplace.At one point in the book, Rechy states that he has had over 7000 sexual contacts up that point--which breaks down to an average of about one contact per day for twenty years. I don't doubt that such people exist and I don't doubt that some of them are homosexual, but I have extreme doubts about how statistically typical this would be of any segment of the population, male or female, gay or straight.Because of this Rechy tends to undercut his own argument, and a whiff of self-justification begins to enter the mix as the book progresses. That aside, the adventures of Jim become repetitive and seem less included than to make a point than as expertly written pornography. I need hardly add that the advent of AIDS and changing attitudes and laws about homosexuality have left the book extremely dated.Even so, this is in some respects the best of Rechy's work, very direct, passionate, clearly written in white-hot anger; it is remarkably driven in tone, furious in execution. I would not really recommend it to a casual reader, but I think it is important as a social document, and it deserves to be read on that basis.GFT, Amazon Reviewer