John Rechy has devoted some of his closely autobiographical writings to the exploration and presentation of derelict and homosexual life in the United States. His approach to the subject is explicit, anguished, intense, and sometimes sensationalistic. One critic, Terry Southern, has classified him with "the self-revelatory school of Romantic Agony" whose basic mandate is "Feel everything and leave nothing unsaid." But some of Rechy's works have a documentary quality that critics such as Lee T. Lemon relate to the social-reform novel and sociology. These views summarize the basic impact of Rechy's reports on the desperate agony of social outcasts in the midst of a repressive but "lost" society. In Rechy's work the plight of the outcast is only an extreme version of the essentially "lost" nature of the human condition.

Like the main character in his first novel (City of Night, 1963), Rechy grew up in El Paso, Texas...