Moreover, critics have imagined this gay-oriented work itself to be “reductive.” Rechy is therefore the occasion to ask, counterintuitively, if queer scholarship's aversion to reductionism as mistakenly limiting and homogenizing recapitulates the devaluing of homosexuality in the modern West as a misguided attachment to sameness. Rechy frequently presents a close relation between forms of reduction and the gay lives and worlds that are a significant focus of his work. However, the essay suggests that the writing of John Rechy can help us reflect on why queer scholarship should be organized in this way. Addressing a range of theoretical material, especially the work of Leo Bersani, this essay attributes the taken-for-granted status of reductionism to queer theory's structuring opposition to ideas associated with sameness-among them normativity, reproduction, and the status quo. Middle of the Road” trope so exalted in Adair’s documentary.What is so bad about the “reductive”? In queer and other scholarship, reductionism signals simplistic homogeneity, fixity, and limitation, which are ideas often taken to be self-evidently problematic.
Putting Rechy’s text in conversation with the contemporaneous documentary Word Is Out (1977), by Peter Adair, the article establishes The Sexual Outlaw as both a response to and a parody of these landmark films, specifically by shedding light on the invisible and oft-forgotten outcasts of the LGBT community, those young outlaws of the working class who cruise and define themselves against the white and affluent “Mr. While tracing the continuities between this text from 1977 and his earlier best-selling novels, the article locates this genre-bending novel in the context of the boom in LGBT documentaries of the time. Interrogating this characterization, the present article takes up the subtitle to Rechy’s sixth novel, The Sexual Outlaw (“a prose documentary”), as a way to analyze the novel’s generic and formal choices. Known for his controversial first novel, City of Night (1963), John Rechy is a Chicano gay writer whose reputation as a documenter of the seedy sexual underworld of hustlers and tricks has set the tone for discussions about his work.
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