Many of these writings were anthologized in his 2004 publication "Beneath the Skin". He has written three plays, "Tigers Wild" (first performed as "The Fourth Angel" and based on Rechy's novel of that title), "Rushes" (based on his novel of the same title), and "Momma as She Became—Not as She Was", a one-act play. Rechy was cited by journalist Amy Harmon in a 2004 "New York Times" article that reported about a computer glitch on Amazon.com that suddenly revealed the identities of thousands of people who had anonymously posted book reviews. It was revealed that Rechy, among several other authors, had "pseudonymously written themselves five-star reviews, Amazon's highest rating". Amazon stopped accepting anonymous reviews as a result of this finding. Rechy is the first novelist to receive PEN-USA-West's Lifetime Achievement Award (1997); he is the recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from Publishing Triangle (1999) and an NEA fellow. He is a faculty member at the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California. He is the first recipient of "ONE Magazine" Culture Hero Award. At the 30th Lambda Literary Awards in 2018, he won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction for "After the Blue Hour". Writers Michael Cunningham, Kate Braverman, Sandra Tsing Loh, and Gina Nahai were students of Rechy's creative writing classes before becoming published authors. English pop artist David Hockney's painting "Building, Pershing Square, Los Angeles" was inspired by a passage in "City of Night". The 1983 song "Numbers" by the English synthpop duo Soft Cell was inspired by Rechy's 1967 novel of the same title. A CD-ROM of Rechy's life and work was produced by the Annenberg Center of Communications and is titled "Mysteries and Desire: Searching the Worlds of John Rechy".