Authors / The people behind the books we read. : A Writer’s Return to the City of Night

The scene: a hot night in the City of Angels. Santa Ana “devil winds” breathe fire through the canyons.

The time: summer, 1981--the final moments before the AIDS epidemic.

The cast of characters: gay pornographer Za-Za LaGrande; Dave, a leather biker into S&M; Jesse, a lusty young street hustler; and Clint, a handsome fortysomething from New York looking for love on the streets of L.A.

John Rechy, America’s preeminent chronicler of sexuality in the world of gay men, is back.

After a dozen books about subjects ranging from life in the barrios of East L.A. to runaway teens to the myth of the fallen woman, Rechy, author of the 1963 bestseller “City of Night,” returns this month to the place where he began--the violent intensity of desire in the sexual underground of Southern California.

And the question Rechy asks is still potent: Would you die for sex?

Rechy’s sizzling literary response--”The Coming of the Night” (Grove Press)--is as exciting as it is chilling.

“I wanted to re-create the time when AIDS was creeping up on us as whispers. I wanted to generate that same heat and the mounting terror,” Rechy says. “In this pre-millennium era, people are rather ignorantly thinking this [AIDS threat] is over. It is not. And while this book still champions rich desire, it is also admonitory.”

At an age when many authors are gathering anecdotes for their final memoirs--a “smashingly 60ish” (his words) Rechy’s latest novel returns almost nostalgically to a time when sex, even street sex, was more carefree, and, if not entirely safe, at least not life-threatening.

“In 1981, at about 2 in the morning on a hot windy night, I witnessed an event while cruising a small park in West Hollywood that was so raw and, in retrospect, so frightening, that I knew someday I had to return to it if I was going to understand that time.”

In “The Coming of the Night,” Rechy shares what he saw in that park in his own last days as a hustler who unapologetically peddled his promiscuity on the streets of L.A.

Although his sexual outlaw days ended more than a decade ago when Rechy settled down for thelove of one man, the heat of those pre-AIDS times still burns.

There is no air-conditioning in the Los Feliz garden apartment where John Rechy has lived for 20 years. On an overheated afternoon last week, a day temperatures in nearby Griffith Park rose to a steamy 100 degrees, Rechy appears as cool as the collection of icy crystal displayed on his glass coffee table.

Rechy is freshly showered after his habitual midday workout with weights.

“Yes, yes, I still do the bench presses, and the waist crunches--like sit-ups but to the point of tension--seven sets of 50.”

His muscled torso--a smooth, tan triangle--is lightly freckled beneath a sleeveless white undershirt. His hair, lush and wavy, is hennaed to match exactly the shade of his heavy eyebrows. Rechy’s jeans are fashionably faded and frayed, and he is wearing his favorite Tony Lama cowboy boots, mahogany leather with stacked brown heels.

The onetime sex hustler ambles over to throw open the dining room window. Outside, beneath the feathered ferns and shiny leaves of overgrown schefflera plants, a three-tiered cement fountain gurgles recycled water--Rechy’s cue to rush to the refrigerator for refreshments for his guests.

“Will you take a nice cold drink of diet soda, iced tea, white wine? Please, please, a glass of fresh-squeezed juice, at least.”

It is here in this apartment, beneath the oversized black-and-white likenesses of such Hollywood icons as Bette Davis, Carol Baker and Cary Grant, that another generation of young writers sit at Rechy’s feet, learning not only how to write, but how to survive as writers.

As a creative writing teacher for USC and other schools, Rechy has sheltered and guided such now-thriving authors as Gina B. Nahai, whose novel “Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith” (Harcourt Brace) has enjoyed great success this year, and Kate Braverman, who wrote the popular “Palm Latitudes” (Linden Press, 1988).

“I started teaching when I was 22 and in the Army,” says Rechy. “I was working with people who were functional illiterates. What I told them, and I now tell my students, is that the only thing I can do for them is to allow them to achieve the best they can and, once they are the best, help them have the courage to withstand what will come. What I call the enormous ‘NO.’ ”

Such rejection--whether by critics or by ordinary readers--is not easy to overcome, says Rechy. Despite his personal successes, Rechy continues to fight the tendency of many reviewers to categorize him and his work.

“Because my mother was Mexican and I grew up in Texas,” says Rechy, “I can be and have been labeled a Chicano writer. Because I am homosexual and sometimes write about gay people and situations, I can be pushed into that box.”

Rechy nearly lost his creative identity completely when “City of Night” exploded on the literary scene 36 years ago. Reviewing for the prestigious New York Review of Books what would later become a gay classic, critic Alfred Chester not only attacked Rechy in a column that appeared beneath the headline “Fruit Salad,” Chester went so far as to question Rechy’s very existence.

“City of Night”--Rechy’s sensuous and often sinister fictionalized diary of a male hustler on the make from Santa Monica to New Orleans-was an instant bestseller. But because Rechy went underground, purposely avoiding any public promotion of the book, Chester and others speculated that the “true identity” of the book’s author was more likely someone as famous as Tennessee Williams or James Baldwin.

Now that Rechy has returned in his work to the setting of “City of Night,” he is worried less about his literary identity than about how this latest work will be received. Leaning against a wall in his combination writer’s den and workout room, thumbs hooked into the belt loops of his jeans, Rechy shakes his head in mock dismay.

“Some may wonder why am I looking back now? I can only say, ‘It was time. This had to be written.’ ”

By returning to the setting of a book that has in three decades become an international bestseller translated into 20 languages, Rechy has achieved a certain literary and personal symmetry.

By chronicling a day in the sex-obsessed lives of a group of gay men on the eve of the AIDS epidemic, Rechy celebrates what he calls “the golden age of promiscuity” while at the same time exposing its darkest side.

“This is a very sexual book--maybe my most sexual--and that is by design,” says Rechy. “Because I think we need to look back and answer the question of where we were going with our sexuality.”

Now Rechy--who between books, teaches creative writing at USC and in private seminars--is ready to move on. Last week, he finished the manuscripts of what he calls his “new, new novel.”

The title? “The Naked Cowboy.” And you thought the summer couldn’t get any hotter.

* John Rechy will sign his latest book at 7 p.m. Sept. 16 at Dutton’s Brentwood Bookshop, 11975 San Vicente Blvd., Los Angeles. More information can be obtained by calling (310) 476-6263.

* Pamela Warrick can be reached by e-mail at pamela.warrick@latimes.com.