In three important novels of the American literature of homosexuality—Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar, Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, and John Rechy's City of Night—there is a changing relationship between the two poles of the "gay world" and the personal homosexual relationship, with the gay world as an emerging metaphor. The culmination of this emergence occurs, I think, in Rechy's novel, where the "gay world" and all its parts overwhelm not only the possibility of any relationship implying human involvement, but also the existence of the particular characters who would form this relationship if they could, and especially the existence of what is meant to be the center of focus in that novel, the narrator as character, and where it functions as a metaphor for a destructive and despair-ridden American reality. The America of these novels is the possibility of a vast hell always defining a...