It’s been more difficult for me to come out as a Mexican-American than come out as gay. - John Rechy

I was bewildered. I did nothing at all to promote the book, even to the extent of denying that I wrote it. 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. And the truth is that I couldn't give it up. I'd been hustling for so long that it was a habit.

…Pershing Square was a gathering of denizens of every type, the gospel people would preach, hustlers would hustle, queens would camp. It was an incredible array of society. There was a cop there that ruled it, I mean as if he was the king. And he was a terror. And if he saw anybody there whom he had not seen, you went downstairs to a little place that was kind of secret. It was very, very weird downstairs, a little room where he would interview you without saying that he suspected you of anything. If it looked like you were hustling or the queens or whatever he would go there and hassle you.

You have to understand what the world was like back then. Being queer was very dangerous, and there was a lot of stigma about it. Even when I was hustling, it took me a long time to realise myself as a gay man. It's hard to accept that some of us, at one time or another, had heterosexual feelings. I certainly did. I emerged very slowly into homosexuality, despite the way I was living.