John Rechy and the Novel of Opportunity

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article argues that the career of queer Mexican American author John Rechy has been shaped by the epistemological limits of twentieth-century publishing—that is, what presses will and will not print. Because his early efforts to publish as an intersectional subject met continual rejection, Rechy leaned into the “sexual outlaw” reputation curated for him by Grove Press. Thus, the critical reception surrounding Rechy failed to acknowledge his status as a Latino author and Chicano subject until the mid-1980s. By comparing Rechy’s first, long-unpublished novel Pablo! to The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez, his first novel to be explicitly marketed as Latinx, this article suggests that the horizon of publishable Latinidad has structured his legacy as an artist. Rechy’s career in publishing echoes his larger status as hustler and “sexual outlaw” in that he deployed publishers’ sensationalist characterizations of his identity against them, playing up different aspects of his marginalized subjectivity at opportune moments.