A "tour de force" novel from the groundbreaking author of City of Night and one of the premier chroniclers of gay life in America ( Los Angeles Times). John Rechy takes us inside a "leather and Western" bar located near the deserted waterfront of a large American city. This is a sexual battlefield—a world of trucks, piers, and warehouses—depicted in Rechy's "eloquent, convincing, basically unsparing" prose (Herbert Gold). The bar regulars are on a ceaseless search for compatible love. The occasional customer hopes for a quick sexual fix. Female and transvestite hookers work the dark streets outside. A couple seeks a voyeuristic experience. And one young man ventures out for the first time. During the course of a single evening we get to know them all and watch as the night descends into the depths of a sexual underworld where danger and play transform into quasi-religious rites that end in ritual sacrifice.
