He is more reasoned in his depiction of a specific S & M scene: I checked Google, I don’t see evidence of fisting making someone crippled, there are a very few cases documented of people dying, but it doesn’t seem to be any different from other large items that could be inserted. Especially when Rechy himself uses this at the end of his book The Coming of the Night, published in 1999, so perhaps his attitude has evolved. I had never heard this idea before that people who want to be fisted are really looking for ways to die. On Fisting: “this activity has already resulted in death and permanent crippling.”

From there the defense of S & M is easy.”Ĭomparing things to Hitler is a guaranteed way to bring the conversation to a stop. “I heard, increasingly, intellectualized defenses of Manson, even of Hitler. But Rechy is not always reasoned in his arguments: I will acknowledge that there is some of that, I think all oppressed people take on characteristics of their oppressors. With the recent release of the Fifty Shades of Grey trailer, you can’t call S & M exclusively for self-hating gays looking to act out the experiences of their tormentors. The last twenty percent of the book delves into S & M, or what Rechy would I think call then the problem of S & M. The piece on the slave auction in particular stands out. They turn out to be vice cops, and you’re charged with assaulting an officer.” Two men drive by and call him a ‘fucking queer.’ Through their window, you swing at one angrily.

There are several incidents described which almost defy belief in our time:Ī youngman cruising: “The judge threatens to hold you incommunicado for three months-for ‘psychiatric examination,’ insisting that all homosexuals are insane.”

For example I think with liberation a lot of anonymous cruising areas have disappeared. There’s always been the idea, are gay men so promiscuous because they’re men, because they’re gay, because they’re oppressed, why? This book attempts to answer some of those questions and I think it would be interesting to take these ideas and re-work them against modern concepts. The book is a valuable piece of history, one that I think will stand up for generations, showing the pursuit of sex and interaction with police over a period in the seventies. He has some good ideas in this book but I don’t know that they were all fully explored or that they necessarily stand up over time. Rechy seems to me to be unappreciated in our time, perhaps because of his frank use of sex.

The Sexual Outlaw by John Rechy