“I’m promiscuously autobiographical.” – Samuel R. Delany1 “Improvisation, in whatever possible excess of representation that inheres in whatever probable deviance of form, always also operates as a kind of foreshadowing,…
Archive for November, 2024
Improbable Communities: Post-precarity and the Politics of Sex in Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders
Samuel R. Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand appeared in 1984, the same year as William Gibson’s Neuromancer. While more people have likely read Gibson’s novel, Delany gives…
Delany’s Complex Singularity or, the Astonishing Whole
Twenty-five years ago, Lauren Berlant’s and Michael Warner’s essay “Sex in Public” traced how the privatization of sex devastated public sex cultures in New York City at the turn of…
Phallos/Phallus: Queer Sex Magick
Author’s note #1: On the cover of Samuel R. Delany’s metafictional novella Phallos is a drawing of a winged Minotaur: head and tail of a bull, beclawed hands and foot,…
“Filthy!”: an Introduction to Samuel Delany’s Late Paraliterary Style
In his 2005 essay “The Gamble,” Samuel R. Delany recounts a dinner conversation he had with a gay porn star named B.J., who told Delany that he contracted HIV from…
Blueprints for a Red Sexual Revolution: Samuel Delany’s Sexual Commons
For Earl Jackson Jr. who introduced me to Samuel R. Delany’s brilliance. Willfully Confusing Sex and Revolution Early in my professional career, when I had just moved back from California…