Credit Where It’s Overdue

At first glance, John Rechy assumed the letter must be meant for someone else. “Here was a lovely letter announcing this extraordinary honor. Well, I had to turn the envelope over to make sure it really was addressed to me. And, oh my, yes, it was!”

And now it is official. Rechy--the gay, Latino, body-building Los Angeles writer and teacher whose very existence was once challenged by the New York Review of Books--will receive the PEN Center USA West’s prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award on Tuesday at the Regal Biltmore. He is the first novelist to be so honored. (Neil Simon, Betty Friedan and Billy Wilder are the only others to have received the award.)

To appreciate how exceptional it is for Rechy’s life work to receive such lofty notice, it is useful to recall his first encounter with fame. That came in 1963 when Rechy published his now-classic “City of Night”--a first-person diary of a male hustler on the make from Santa Monica to New Orleans.

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In sometimes graphic, though always lyrical, detail, the book visits the sensuous and often sinister underworld of gay prostitution--a world then inhabited by the author himself. The book set off such a literary orgasm that John Rechy, who purposely stayed underground, was for a time considered a nom de plume for a more famous writer. Tennessee Williams, perhaps, or James Baldwin.

Convinced that there was no such person as John Rechy, critic Alfred Chester launched a full-scale attack against the book in the august Review of Books under the headline “Fruit Salad.”

Although Rechy wrested an apology from the Review after 33 years and a dozen critically acclaimed books, he has continued to be haunted by Chester’s vitriol.

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But, with the announcement of his latest honor, even that has changed. “This is so tremendous, such an affirmation from a group of professional writers, that I have to say that right now I feel nothing but joy,” Rechy said.

That joy was only enhanced this month when a letter from PEN West executive director Sherrill Britton announcing Rechy’s award was published in the most recent New York Review of Books under the headline “Congratulations!”

“An exclamation point! They never use exclamation points!” says Rechy. “And they did it for me! Can you imagine? For me!”