SOURCE: "The Ambiguous Outlaw: John Rechy and Complicitous Homotextuality," in Fictions of Masculinity: Crossing Cultures, Crossing Sexualities, edited by Peter F. Murphy, New York University Press, 1994, pp. 204-25.

In the following essay, Perez-Torres concentrates primarily on The Sexual Outlaw, considering the role of the homosexual hustler in Rechy's work.

The Sexual Outlaw: A Documentary represents John Rechy's most overtly political novel. Although this is not a terribly interesting fact in and of itself, the text (first published in 1977) does represent for gay liberation an early and aggressive assertion of the lessons learned from the women's movement: the personal is political. Asserting this view, the book simultaneously complicates it by revealing the potentially contradictory politics of personal liberation.

The novel concerns itself with the actions of a socially marginal but sexually liberated figure as he moves through the decaying urban landscape of our postindustrial age. The protagonist—a semicomposite...