LONELY CHRISTOPER ON PLACE AND SAMUEL R. DELANY: THE SPLENDOR AND MISERY OF BODIES, OF CITIES

Samuel Ray Delany Jr., Chip to his friends, is an American author and literary critic. His work includes fiction, memoir, criticism and essays on sexuality and society. His works include Babel-17, The Einstein Intersection, Nova, Dhalgren, and the Return to Nevèrÿon series.

Both Renee Gladman and Delany give personalities to physical spaces, public and private, naturally-occurring and manmade. In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin writes “The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well.” The personalities of these spaces reflect both their physical shape/design as well as the power structure and the individuals who inhabit them. The spheres and settings in Gladman and Delany’s writings are not indifferent but active participants reflecting and influencing narrative arcs.

Preeminent science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany (b. 1942) has published epic intergalactic adventure stories as well as intimate, earthbound character studies, but one of his major overarching themes has been the formation and function of communities and societies. The Return to Nevèrÿon series resemble postmodern sword and sorcery tales that use the premodern movement from a barter economy to a money economy to allegorize the contemporary movement from a money economy to a credit economy. Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand speculatively investigates how systems of control are structured and propagated. Dhalgren is a story about a city absent of authority, who might want to live in such a permanent autonomous zone, and how things would work. The Mad Man is an academic mystery turned into a pornographic fantasia about the societal fault lines ripped open by AIDS. Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders takes place in a heavily subsidized utopian community designed for working class gay men of color, valorizing the lives and desires of rural garbagemen. Delany harnesses (and embodies) the perspective of the outsider to provide a systemics of oversight gazing into hegemonic operations. Late capitalism alienates us from our communities and their inhabitants. As an Afrofuturist, Delany dares to imagine alternatives to current regimes and uncover the street-level modalities that run concurrent to while being suppressed by top-down city planning and management.

Quality of human contact is of fundamental importance to Delany. He distinguishes “contact” from “networking” based on purposes served. As Robert F. Reid-Pharr has it in his introduction to Delany’s book of two essays, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, networking “is always established within the protocols of capitalist competition.” Genuine human interaction happens outside of and in contradistinction to entrenched municipal interests. That is why sites of contact, such as movie theaters and bathhouses, become targets for closure and removal (codeword: “redevelopment”). Whereas networking, even if it feels like “getting out there,” is a self-contained and self-propagating mechanism, contact is intersectional and generative. The area went from being the Deuce, a neighborhood whose uses were mediated by its residents and consumers, to the new Times Square business district, whose purposes are controlled by corporate interests which leveraged civic power against communal self-determination to forcefully rezone the land and remake it in the image of late capitalism. This was the transition from working-class utility to business headquarters and tourism. Not an experience itself but a company selling you the idea of an experience. The head honchos felt that Times Square was the wrong kind of playground, benefiting the wrong people, and it took decades of maneuvering to chase out purveyors of sexual exchange and raze their cum-stained monuments. The state was an enthusiastic enforcer but it was the Walt Disney Company that underwrote much of the expense incurred by this hostile takeover, an experiment in forceful assimilation, almost terraforming, that gave the House of Mouse the tools to expropriate and launder subcultures. First Disney took a major television network (ABC), then they took Broadway, then they took Lucasfilm, then they took 20th Century Fox, and on it goes.

The Deuce catered to several different kinds of men. Most of the moviehouses played straight porn despite what might be happening in the audience. Some guys were just there to jack off in solitude. Some were what we’d call today “MSM,” men who have sex with men while striaght identified, and a mouth was a mouth. A few homeless people lived there for the three buck daily admission fee. Delany was there as a gay man willing to engage in certain types of low risk sexual acts with whoever was interested. He also mentions “the transsexual bars, the hard-core hustling scene (male and female), the heterosexual peep show life” as other facets of a local culture wiped out with minimal protest because the affected communities were marginalized. As if Times Square existed just for a handful of creeps and junkies. The author notes, “It is the same argument that dismisses the needs of blacks, Jews, Hispanics, Asians, women, gays, the homeless, the poor, the worker—and all other margins that, taken together (people like you, people like me), are the country’s overwhelming majority: those who, socioeconomically, are simply less powerful.” For too many people the land was far more valuable than its established tenants. The social restrictions forced upon communities ravaged by AIDS were done so in the interest of “public health,” a precept that foreclosed “gay liberation” in its definitions of what is public and what is healthy. Delany sees this as regression to a pre-Stonewall moralism. 

The new city is scrubbed of undesirables as authentic interactions are homogenized, arbitrated, and replaced by control. Delany states, “because there’s not enough intertwined commercial and residential variety to create a vital and lively street life, the neighborhood becomes a glass and aluminum graveyard, on its way to a postmodern superslum, without even going through the process of overcrowding—abandoned before it’s ever really used.” When real estate scheming goes way wrong, the endgame of gentrification becomes too demanding to function, which results in the “luxury blight” apparent today in neighborhoods like SoHo, where mom and pop shops were usurped by unsustainable high-end boutiques that went out of business leaving streets full of empty storefronts. Downtown Brooklyn is getting residential highrises one after another and most of them are half empty. Then there are the places that get fabricated out of whole cloth, such as the new Hudson Yards: an office and tourism district with its own designer shopping mall. A facsimile of a fantasy for the one percent. Similarly, as Sarah Schulman points out, our minds become gentrified along with our cities. Delany notes, “if every sexual encounter involves bringing someone back to your house, the general sexual activity in a city becomes anxiety-filled, class-bound, and choosy. This is precisely why public rest rooms, peep shows, sex movies, bars with grope rooms, and parks with enough greenery are necessary for a relaxed and friendly sexual atmosphere in a democratic metropolis.” His predictions have come to pass in the age of Grindr and other hook-up apps. We race around our maze of exclusion. 

When television showrunner David Simon asked to retain Delany as a consultant for his show, The Deuce, the author declined. He felt the cultural imagination unique to the area in the 70s would be heterosexualized for HBO and that audiences at home would get a sanitized, knock-off version of the story. Reconstructing the gritty look of an erstwhile vice district is a neat trick of production design, but with no care for accuracy in representing the scene’s precise demographics, the show revives a subculture and its unique subeconomy only to flatly commoditize it for a general audience. The process is more important than the product because that’s where the real money is made. New skyscrapers in Times Square were not purposed to serve the community but to enrich the builders. Whether or not the space is used is secondary to how much money can be made through its construction. In Dhalgren, Delany shares with us a vision of the imaginary city of Bellona, where technology fails and the superstructure has abandoned the infrastructure. Instead of trying to capture the collapsed utopianism of the 60s, Delany envisioned a paradigm where destabilizing forces were exciting and useful to those willing to open themselves up to the experience. The lives of those who stayed behind out of arrogance or stubbornness are miserable. They violently attempt to maintain their capitalistic existence in a flexible unreality often functioning in direct opposition to the values and standards they cherish. But the angel-haired hipsters and other mad men find Bellona a festival of opportunity and under Delany’s pen they get to explore and gain. What is built around us shapes us and it should be the reverse.