John Rechy: Bodies and Souls and the Homoeroticization of the Urban Quest

Abstract

It has been difficult for John Rechy to become established in the canon of Chicano literature, in large part because of the homophobia that held sway during the formative period of Chicano literary criticism. However, now recognized as a founding figure of U.S. homoerotic writing, Rechy is also widely recognized as important to the Chicano literary tradition. This study focuses on the importance of Rechy less as a gay writer than to explore the ways in which his great Los Angeles novel, Bodies and Souls (1983), explores the conflicts between sexuality and the emotionally and physically deadening effects of modern urban society. Homoerotic desire, as much as erotic desire in general, emerges as a project of impossible fulfillment in the sex-dead Los Angeles that is an icon of the American landscape. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol25/iss1/10 John Rechy: Bodies and Souls and the Homoeroticization of the Urban Quest David William Foster Arizona State University It would probably be critical hype to assert that John Rechy's Bodies and Souls (1983) is the best Los Angeles novel to date, but it certainly must count as one of the very best. This novel was written at a time when Rechy was moving beyond the exclusively gay characters of his first novels, City of Night (1963), Numbers (1967), and the quasidocumentary The Sexual Outlaw (1977), novels that contained Chicano (usually main) characters. These novels were followed by fictional worlds in which neither the Chicano nor the gay is the specific controlling perspective of the novel (for example, Marilyn's Daughter [1988], The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez [1991], Our Lady of Babylon [1996] -the latter being Rechy's weakest novel to date (see Bredbeck, Ortiz, and Jaen for general overviews of Rechy's writing; also Castillo's superb interview). Bodies and Souls is a sort of urban Pilgrim's Progress. It is the story of three lost children of America (in reality, young adults) who make a car trip from the heartland across the country to the Promised Land of Los Angeles. Wandering the vast megalopolis, Orin (obsessed with messianic religion), Lisa (lost in a world of romantic Hollywood-style love), and Jesse (seething with images of American outlaws) interact with what Rechy's Gothic dirty realism portrays as the paradigmatic denizens of the California myth: the homeless, violent racist police, oppressed people of color, agents of transcendence through religion and popular culture (especially, of course, the movies), and other tourists, each seeking the fulfillment of a personal vision of the city. Crisscrossing the city in an imposing Lin1 Foster: John Rechy: Bodies and Souls and the Homoeroticization of the Urb Published by New Prairie Press