City of Night

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City of Night is a novel written by John Rechy. Set in the 1960s, the book follows the travels of a young man (Rechy uses the trem "youngman" when referring to hustlers) across the country while working as a hustler. The book focuses chapters on locations that the boy visits and certain personages he meets there, from New York, to Los Angeles, San Francisco and New Orleans. Throughout the novel, the unnamed narrator has trysts with various peculiar characters, including another hustler, an older man, an S&M enthusiast and a bed-ridden old man. All of these relationships range in the extent of their emotional and sexual nature, as well as in their peculiarity. The narrator shares many characteristics, including his ethnicity and relative age, with the author at the time.

The author uses curious methods to achieve verisimilitude, for instance, omitting the apostrophe in contractions, in order to recreate the speech of characters who are barely literate.

The book has been noted as an influence by The Doors. A curious object of note is the reference to "City of Night" in L.A. Woman. The Los Angeles based portion of the book relies heavily on characters who are drag queens and Transgendered, which would seem to leave the object of the song as sexually ambiguous.