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

In the following interview, Rechy discusses Latino culture, homosexuality, and the critical reception of his work.

In the interview below, Rechy discusses his literary influences, style, and the role of homosexuality in his work.

In the following excerpt, Nelson explores how Rechy's and James Baldwin's status as homosexuals and ethnic minorities has influenced their perspectives.

In the following essay, Satterfield explores the alienated characters and hellish atmosphere which Rechy has created in his first five novels.

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 ...

John Rechy's fiction has always shown an interest in the night side of human feeling. He is drawn to the illicit, to outcasts, to the transgressor's knowledge…. Rushes, though yet another exploration of the underground, represents a culmination of Rechy's themes. Unaccommodating, aggressive, brooding, it is Rechy's most ambitious work stylistically and also in the questions it raises about the quality of "liberation."

In the following review, Hand argues that while the idea behind Our Lady of Babylon is good, Rechy's narrative is choppy and the novel is a disappointment.

[The Sexual Outlaw is a] fictionalized "non-fiction" account of a "true spectrum of the [homosexual] promiscuous experience", three days and nights in the life of Jim ("sometimes Jerry, sometimes John") alias John Rechy…. By a quantitative measure, this sexual marathon seems to rate highly. And yet The Sexual Outlaw is not erotic, and is unlikely to excite anyone but a member of the Festival of Light. The "youngmen" (Rechy's own curious w...

In the following excerpt, Lemon argues that This Day's Death is made more powerful because Rechy refrains from preaching.

Rushes is not a novel of propaganda; if any political statement is to be derived from the novel, it would seem to be that the oppressive "straight" world is ultimately responsible for the grotesque and perverse behavior to which the alienated homosexual is driven. The novel has much wider social implications, however. Rushes presents not so much the homosexual world but a particular cult within it. When it is seen as a cult with all the dogmas and trappings of a religion, the world of Rushes b...

[There's] no doubt in my mind that [the sadism in "Rushes"] is not just a ritual played out among characters. It's also a literary rite directed at the reader. The language of the text demands that the reader suffer sexually: hurt, submit, and therefore love this book. That's too much to ask. Still, provided one is willing to make the effort, there's a lot to appreciate here, if not to love. For one thing, Mr. Rechy is working a difficult vein of fiction, the traged...

By making [the hero of Numbers] an Adonis, Rechy attempts to show that whatever his outward appearance, the homosexual is basically a person who is unsure of himself, a person constantly in search of acceptance. He continually relives the initial crisis, the trauma of parental rejection…. The homosexual, the "cruiser," is an eternal Morgan in search of his Pemberton. The monotony of Rechy's novel, which might be considered a technical defect, marvelously evokes the obsessive natu...