John Rechy has always been a path breaker. His first novel, City of Night, is a modern classic and his subsequent body of work has kept him among America's most important writers. Now, for the first time, he writes openly about his life, in a volume that is a testament to the power of pride and self-acceptance. Rechy was raised Mexican-American in El Paso, Texas, at a time when Latino children were routinely segregated and discriminated against. Because of his light skin, he was often assumed to be Anglo and had his name "changed" for him by a teacher, from Juan to John. As he grew older--and as his fascination with the memory of a notorious kept woman in his childhood deepened--Rechy became aware that his differences lay not just in his heritage but in his sexuality. While he performed the roles others wanted for him, he never allowed them to define him--whether it was the authoritarians in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, the bigoted relatives of his Anglo college classmates, or the men and women who wanted him to be something he was not. About My Life and the Kept Woman is a moving, powerful story of a life that bears witness to some of the most riotous changes of the past century. Resonating with fierce individualism and utter candor, it is as much a portrait of intolerance as of an individual who defied it to forge his own path.