Unlike his would-be seducer Christopher Isherwood, Rechy positioned himself right at the heart of the homosexual world he was writing about. After a few years the calls stopped, so I guess Miss Destiny is now rattling her beads in God's face, like she always said she would.' Then some boozy voice would come on, and I'd have to say 'Yes, that really is the fabulous Miss Destiny'. We kept in touch for a few years after the book came out she'd ring me in the middle of the night, saying she was with one of her 'husbands' who didn't believe she could be a character in a famous novel.

That was the name she used, and all those stories were based on my recollections of her. 'Every character in City of Night has a strong antecedent,' says Rechy. Despite hideous reviews, City of Night sold in massive quantities to a sensation-hungry public. It might be as famous as those books, too, were it not for Rechy's unapologetic portrayal of the drag queens, hustlers and clients who populated his world: Chuck the cowboy 'stud', Chi-Chi and Darling Dolly Dane the street queens, Mr King the surly client ('I'll give you 10, and I don't give a damn for you') – and, towering above them all, the regal LA drag diva Miss Destiny. It's an American classic, with its loner hero, its juke joints and neon signs, its restless shifting from city to city, bed to bed a hybrid of On the Road and Catcher in the Rye.

But it was City of Night that made his name, and on which his reputation rests. Rechy kept writing throughout the 1970s and 1980s, detailing the ups and (mostly) downs of his compulsive sex life in Numbers, Rushes and the non-fiction polemic The Sexual Outlaw. I'd been hustling for so long that it was a habit.' And the truth is that I couldn't give it up. I felt that if I left the streets as soon as I had some success, I'd be betraying the world that I wrote about. I did nothing at all to promote the book, even to the extent of denying that I wrote it. 'It caught me out completely,' says Rechy, now 74, and still living in Los Angeles. But Rechy still couldn't leave the streets. To Rechy's astonishment, and despite the best efforts of homophobic critics, the book was a smash and money started rolling in. It made sense: he didn't expect a book that dealt with underground gay life in America to make him much money, and it's a foolish writer who gives up the day job (or in Rechy's case, the night job) with the first flush of publication. When John Rechy published his first novel, City of Night, in 1963, he was still earning his living as a prostitute on the streets of Los Angeles.

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