Blueprints for a Red Sexual Revolution: Samuel Delany’s Sexual Commons

Willfully Confusing Sex and Revolution

Early in my professional career, when I had just moved back from California to take a job in Illinois, the leftist partner of a colleague of mine told me that the problem with "Californians like me" was that "we confused sex with revolution." It was a good line and not entirely inaccurate. As I often said during the eight years (1992-2000) I lived in Santa Cruz and San Francisco, Northern Californians will affirm almost any lifestyle a person can afford — if it does not cost other people anything. Cultural radicalism rubbed shoulders (and other body parts) with an economic, and increasingly Silicon-Valley-influenced, libertarianism.  

This was, of course, the California not only of the pro-sex movement and gay liberation but also of the tax revolt, enshrined in 1978's Proposition 15. Economic neoliberalism fused ever more tightly with identity-based cultural radicalism, laying the blueprint for the present in which profound levels of economic inequality intertwine with political discourses that are very good at engaging representation but are still searching for a collective language to not only address class (and class was the term that always dropped out of the discussion first in the No Cal of the 1990s) but economic inequalities that structure race, gender, and sexuality.1 All one needs to do is visit San Francisco in the present to see how this combination has fared. A gutted downtown, remade and then divested by the tech industry, now forms the backdrop to an increasingly desperate population of homeless who pitch their tents next to abandoned retail outlets, shuttered strip clubs, and the bottom floors of often vacant condos, which function primarily as tax shelters for the international 1%. Homelessness is pervasive in a city in which the average 737 square foot apartment rents for $3,313 a month.2 The dystopian vision of William Gibson's Virtual Light, in which the homeless have built an alternative society on the Bay Bridge and San Francisco is completely split between the obscenely rich and the underclass, has emerged as particularly prescient.3 Compared to the current situation, Gibson's novel, with its vision of alternate community formation, feels almost hopeful (although important self-organizing does take place on San Francisco's streets).  

Before I put the final nail in the coffin of San Francisco's sex radicalism, I want to indicate how important it was for many of us. At its best, it was not primarily about representation but the material transformation of public space and the affirmation of pleasurable public actions. It also produced an ideological transformation around sex that affirmed it as a positive and public good. Like gay liberation, pro-sex culture transformed city space, producing something akin to a sexual commons, although one that had, at its core, a relationship to various commercial establishments. This relationship to capitalism was, of course, the weak link in its chain. Once out of its chains, capitalism went from being a dutiful bottom to an increasingly nonconsensual and violent top. Still, for a Midwest kid like me, who was just coming to realize that I was intersex and all those nonconsensual surgeries I underwent were not necessary, the left coast's prosex culture was a lifeline. For the first time, it did not feel like my whole embodied and sexual formation was monstrous. The complex and dark fantasies in my head, which were a product of these surgeries and produced endless sexual guilt, seemed not so unusual or fraught on the West Coast. Moreover, the recognition and pursuit of alternative sexual pleasures and embodiments echoed the fictional experiments of San Francisco's latest (and it seems last) literary avant-garde, the new narrative writers, who willfully mixed sex, fiction, autobiography, and theory into a complex and heady brew. At its most radical, the prosex culture of San Francisco (and Northern California more generally) willfully tried to mix sex and revolution. Rather than seeing this as a sun-dazzled, coastal dream that distracted from the more serious work of economic transformation, prosex culture suggested a real communist or socialist revolution would be sexual as well as economic. It would produce a sexual commons that intersected with the economic commons. Pace my friend's partner, this was the real promise of California: an intentional mixing of sex and revolution. 

This dream was alive on the opposite coast as well, nowhere more than in the writings of Samuel R. Delany. Delany not only writes about radical sex, but he lives it as well. This fusion of the written as lived (and lived as written) is perhaps nowhere more famously expressed than in his celebrated Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, which details the destruction of the old sexual culture of Times Square and its replacement by the Disneyfied nightmare of the present. Of course, prosex culture was not just a California phenomenon. While this culture was anchored in San Francisco and New York City (the latter with its long history of nonormative, public sex cultures in spaces from Times Square, to Harlem, to the Villages4), it has sprouted up in myriad locations between the two coasts, as John Rechy described it, "one vast city of night" (and these day it may be more genuinely found in such places, given their affordability and the ability to sustain noncommercial cultures).5 While NYC has undergone similar neoliberal transformations to San Francisco, it is a bigger city, allowing subcultures to persist in other locales in ways not available to its West Coast cultural sibling. It thus may be a better location to imagine sex as revolutionary, as producing and part of a sexual commons. This is the "red" (i.e queer communist) revolutionary promise of Delany's text.  

The Red and the Blue 

Delany is not only a participant in prosex culture, but he is a writer who has laid the groundwork for many new narrative writers, in addition to his enormous contributions to and influence on science fiction. His writings inhabit multiple genres, moving between what he describes as "paraliterature" (especially science fiction, fantasy, and pornography), autobiography, essay, theory, and criticism.6 Delany's understanding of "paraliterature" should be distinguished from what Merve Emre has defined as the "paraliterary," which she describes as a mode of reading both the literary and the nonliterary, but one produced by reading the latter.7 For Delany, on the other hand, paraliterature describes the specific work done by genre fiction, work that is not encompassed by a purely aesthetic mode of understanding literature, but does genre-specific theoretical and social work as well. While he takes seriously the force of genre and the importance of paraliterature (for example, he contrasts the science fiction's world-building with the limits of "mundane" — conventionally literary — fiction), he also regularly mixes paraliterature with theory or autobiography in the same text. One thinks of the complex theoretical framing of Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979) by a certain academic, K. Leslie Steiner (i.e. Delany himself), who provides a theoretical frame for the fantasy stories to follow, or the exploration of structuralism and the SapirWhorf hypothesis in Babel-17 (1966).8 

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue details the social and sexual world of the old Times Square and Delany's pleasurable participation in it, offering as well a theoretically-driven reflection on how urban space and other spaces (such as those that structure the academy) are organized by different vectors of power (horizontal, vertical, in group, out of group, etc.). At first glance, the book seems to be divided into neat genre affiliations: history told through memoir, a theoretical essay on the relationship between power and space.9 Yet, to read the essays as fully separate is to misread Delany's text. The juxtaposition of the two essays — "Times Square Blue" and "...Three, Two, One, Contact: Times Square Red" (the autobiographical/ethnographic and the theoretical) — is crucial. The meaning of the texts emerges in their juxtaposition and how, like a pleasurable encounter in a porn theater, they intellectually, affectively, and erotically intertwine.  

Delany's red and blue, taken together, offer a vision of sex as liberation and liberation as sex. It is decidedly not Stendhal's red and black, with its mapping of the fixed forms of power that returned to organize postrevolutionary France. It is also not the red and blue by which Americans have learned to constrain their political visions between a party of feckless moderates and one of death-cult fascism. Instead, both colors retrain their most forceful popular resonances. The blue stands for everything erotic, obscene, and overtly sexual. It is the blue of "blue movies" and "working blue." The red for Delany is the red of communism. Not the historical communism of repressive states, betrayed revolutions, but the promise of a radically democratic and egalitarian communism to come. It is the "actuality of communism," to borrow a phrase from Bruno Bosteels.10

Within this framework, reading Times Square Red, Times Square Blue only for its salacious parts, perhaps as a series of fantasy prompts, is to misread it. It is like reading Sade only for the (endlessly repetitive) accounts of sexual violence and eschewing the complex political theorizing that is intertwined with it. Yet, unlike in Sade's novels, the sex in Delany's book is consensual, typically pleasurable for all parties involved, and organized around the construction of a social fabric rather than the parodic destruction of one. The sex in Delany needs to be understood as part of an ongoing argument that organizes both sections of the book:  

However indirect, my argument's polemical thrust is toward conceiving, organizing, and setting into place new establishments — and even entirely new types of institutions — that would offer the services and fulfill the functions provided by the porn houses that encouraged sex among the audience. Further, such new institutions should make those services available not only to gay men but all men and women, gay and straight, over an even wider social range than did the old ones. (xxv) 

Delany's vision is thus a thoroughly social one. He regales us with accounts of sex in the porn theaters not solely to titillate (although such a byproduct may be a welcome part of what the text provides) or to imagine that the world of cruising in Times Square theaters is free from problems or complications; indeed, he provides a means of thinking through what he learned in such contexts about producing a consensual and pleasurable sexual culture.  

The focus on institutions, indeed future institutions, is crucial here. Delany wants to imagine institutions (notably not businesses) that can generate and sustain a public culture of sexual flourishing. Such institutions would not thoroughly encompass or impose a sexual culture. Rather, given Delany's emphasis on how this culture works best when it is allowed to develop its own rules and police itself, the vision is one of a sexual commons, in which the culture and the spaces it forms around are held in common, in contrast to private ownership (by corporations) or public ownership (by the state).11  

Criticisms of Times Square Red, Times Square Blue have sometimes focused on moments of potential nonconsensuality or sexual violence in some of the scenes depicted by the text. Delany, however, relates these moments self-reflexively as problems: they are things he needs to bring into literary commons he is creating for readers. Cynthia Barounis recalls some of the more disturbing moments in Delany's text: his account of the "mad masturbator" whose sexual compulsion seems tied to a mental disability; his acquaintance, Rannit, who regularly harasses women on the streets when not in the porn theaters; and Delany's sexual encounters with Jonathan, who unbeknownst to Delany used a fake ID to get into the theater and whom Delany later learns was underage during their encounters.12 Similarly, in an otherwise affirmative account of how Delany articulates a queer counterpublic, Jolene Hubbs argues that the Times Square celebrated by Delany "proved inhospitable to women (355)."13 As Delany himself articulates it, "This essay's purpose is to present a vernacular periplum of what might be found in the Times Square gay cruising venues and the culture that grew up around them, as well as to suggest an overview of what went on in Manhattan those years. I believe I've done that and done it honestly. But it would be untrue to leave you with the sense of that I never saw any psychologically troubling events"14 He spends a decent amount of the first essay describing these "troubling events," but they truly become rare exceptions — which he thinks about with care — given the "many, many, indeed thousands, briefer now more extended" encounters Delany experienced and witnessed.15 

Many criticisms of Delany's depiction of the sexual culture of Times Square situate any problems as detriments to his utopian vision.16 Yet the Times Square of the 1970-90s that is the focus of the first half of the book is more of a heterotopia, like the unlicensed sector in Trouble on Triton (1976), than utopia.17 Heterotopia is a term coined by Michel Foucault to designate an other place. It is neither the perfect world promised by utopia (which, as Fredric Jameson argues, both translates as "no place" and promises the possibility of imagining and inhabiting the best of social worlds) nor the nightmarish one conjured by a dystopia. Heterotopias are spaces that allow other, countercultural practices and dynamics to flourish. The cruising that Delany documents in the porn theaters in his "Blue" essay can be understood as one version of a heterotopia. Yet, you can only understand Times Square Red, Times Square Blue as thoroughly heterotopian if you read the "Blue" essay separate from the "Red" one, for the latter is invested in articulating a utopian vision, one focused around public space as producing spaces for queer flourishing and utopian sex. The two essays are meant to be read together; the heterotopian documentation of the first essay points toward the utopian possibilities articulated by the second.  

Utopian Sex 

The utopian (rather than heterotopian) dimensions of Delany's argument emerge in the second half of the book, "Times Square Red." It is here where he critiques the transformation of the old Times Square into a district both "asexual and "safe" in the name of "family values and corporate gigantism." (169) Contemporary asexual theory might want to challenge the coding of asexuality as negative in Delany's prose. Yet, asexuality, at its most radical, promotes an alternative "eroticism," as Ela Przybylo has argued.18 Such an understanding is not the version of family values asexuality that Delany is rightfully criticizing. There have been other theoretical objections to Delany's vision of affirmative public sex. Barounis uses asexual and disability theory to question the gendering of the forms of sex positivity that Delany affirms in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue: "Delany seems unwilling to acknowledge the structural overhaul that may be necessary to make these spaces of contact truly inclusive and accessible to women."19 While I agree with Barounis that this will necessitate a structural overhaul, such an outcome is precisely Delany's vision at its most radical. (Barounis also criticizes Delany's vision for being "utopian," arguing that she wants to address the "less utopian possibilities of conflict and violence" if we are to take Delany's vision seriously.20) 

While I appreciate Barounis' critique (particularly her discussion of the gendering of transgression), my own issue with Times Square Blue, Times Square Red is the opposite of hers. Delany's vision is, at times, insufficiently utopian. A product of the long 1990s and its triumphalist celebration of American capitalism as the final logic of the world system, the book cannot imagine a world fully outside of capitalism, as Patricia Stuelke also notes.21 Even its most socialist moments, which turn on an understanding of public contact between those of different classes and backgrounds, the vision of the city that Delany seems to champion is that of the 1970s, in which small businesses mix with larger ones and people of different class, racial, and sexual backgrounds can mix in consensual ways, both erotic and non-erotic. As much as he wants his vision to be a "red" one, and points in the direction of what a truly anti-capitalist might look like, it still relies on a capitalist logic of the virtue of small businesses and a midcentury practice of public street culture. Delany rightly critiques the notion of being nostalgic for earlier and disappearing social practices, but he has trouble fully articulating a vision of a very different future in which public sex and socialism or communism can exist together.  

Where Delany comes closest to articulating such a vision is in his affirmation of the virtue of public contact. He derives this notion from Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs criticizes the monumental and anti-urban bias that inflected much urban planning and development in the midcentury moment.22 By revealing how communities collectively maintain social living spaces as both safe and pleasurable through modes of unofficial contact and observation, Jacobs's book, like Michel de Certeau's chapter "Walking in the City" in The Practice of Everyday Life, demonstrates how urban dwellers actively work against unduly large-scale visions of urban planners and produce, as a result, a democratic and sustaining culture of the streets.23  

Given Delany's own investment in the collectively maintained and structured public sex culture of the old Times Square, Jacobs's emphasis on contact makes perfect sense. Delany radicalizes Jacobs's notion of contact, nicely contrasting it with what he calls networking. For him, contact is what takes place between people encountering each other in an urban setting without any prior social sorting. Contact, at its best, involves cross-class and cross-identity encounters. In contrast to the separatist mentality that shapes much of identitarian politics on contemporary social media and increasingly outside of it, contact is about encountering the different, the unknown, and the pleasurably transformative. The transformation does not have to be great: it could be a verbal exchange in a grocery store in which you learn something new, or it could be a public sexual encounter in which the intersubjective practice of sex is marked by difference. In contrast, networking is pre-scripted (often prescriptive) and institutionally bound. It is the kind of interaction that takes place at a conference, in an office, or at a cocktail party. It brings together people of the same class and often promotes a specific notion of identity. Networks can be commercialized and often turn on who has access to social and/or actual capital. It is striking that the practice of casual sex in the present has gone from cruising, which involved a specific relationship to public space and social knowledge, to hookups via Tinder and Grindr, both commercial apps designed to filter out anyone in advance who does not fit your immediate desires.24 The old Times Square it is not.  

This attenuation of public sex culture has gone hand in hand with what David M. Halperin describes as the war on sex, in which ideas of sexual freedom and encounter are replaced with surveillance, laws legislating public sexual expression or practice, and a carceral state that disproportionally impacts poor people, queer people, and people of color. Sex, like so much of the rest of life in the late neoliberal present, has become increasingly privatized.25 It is not so much that it has vanished, as there are sexed-up ads everywhere and porn is a planetary capitalist enterprise. It is more that sex is commercially ubiquitous yet ubiquitously a problem if it finds noncommercial, public expression. Is it any wonder that some of the more popular porn scenarios in the present feature stepfamily encounters? When sex is thoroughly repressed from public expression, it returns, in all its perversity, in the space of the private.  

Delany's emphasis on contact, including consensual sexual contact in public, is the closest he comes to articulating a vision of a sexual commons. The commons, unlike notions of the private or public, is not mediated by larger institutions. It is that which is commonly owned and regulated. It contradicts not only capitalist institutions, but those of the state. While many visions of the commons tend to emphasize the violence of the state (linking it to the appropriative and exploitative violence of capitalist enterprises), the commons can also be used as a mode that not only challenges public forms of power but can work side by side with institutionalized public endeavors. The co-articulation of the public and the common can keep the commons economically and structurally supported and the state from coalescing into antidemocratic and anti-collective forms of appropriative power. For a non-capitalist sexual commons to function effectively, we not only need a set of rules and institutional practices that help maintain its accessibility and enjoyment for all who desire to participate in it, but other institutional practices, such as free contraceptives, free, legal, and safe access to abortions, free medical transitioning (as well as the end to nonconsensual surgeries on intersex subjects), a restorative justice system that can address sexual violence in a way that does not contribute to carceral politics, a socialized medical system, a socialized educational system, and more. Such a socialist vision would not only affirm public sexual cultures (or those of the commons to be more precise) but private sexual cultures as well, given that forms of being public, in proper democratic socialist fasion, should be enabled rather than imposed.  

A sexual commons can only fully function as an egalitarian space of chance encounter if the material conditions are equal. Thus, in place of Delany's interclass contact as one of the virtues of public sex (and he is certainly right that in a class society such contact is a virtue, one that is increasingly being legislated and zoned out of existence in the U.S. and elsewhere), I want to affirm the pleasures of contact in a classless society. Of course, Delany is right to still emphasize the encounter with otherness as one of the defining virtues of a public sex. But we can only have the most radical version of a sexual commons when economic and social equality are real achievements. 

To imagine such an anti-capitalist vision, we need to move past the critique of planning central to Jacobs, de Certeau, and others, including Delany: this critique threatens to become purely a reaction to the capitalist world's creeping control over the commons, as it does for Delany, who employs it because it worked as part of his polemic against the backers of the new Times Square. Instead the commons should refuse capitalism's terms,  imagining far different social formations that can shape contact. If the danger in the late 1960s was public planning, the danger in our present moment is the private (and private-public) transformation of the very life and livability of cities in the name of financial speculation and gain. As Spencer Adams argues, part of what Delany's text documents is the loss of such livability in relationship to the wave of financialization that restructured the very space of New York City in the 1990s and 2000s.26 We instead need a return to a public vision for "rebel cities" (and for that matter, rebel societies) as David Harvey has framed it.27 We can learn from the critiques of modernist planning, but we also need to plan, in a more democratically oriented and less hubristic way, to reclaim the devastations that have been wrought in our major cities. If we can achieve such a vision, San Francisco, New York and other cities of all sizes and locations will feature sexual commons and function as egalitarian spaces in ways that have not yet been realized. The problem is not the sexual revolution and the inequalities that it maintained. The problem is that the sexual revolution, like the political-economic revolution, remains unfinished. At its best, Delany's text points toward such a revolution. It is a blueprint for a red sexual revolution. 

---

Christopher Breu is Professor of English at Illinois State University, and author of the recently published book, In Defense of Sex: Nonbinary Embodiment and Desire (Fordham University Press, 2024). Breu is also the author of Insistence of the Material (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) and Hard-Boiled Masculinities (University of Minnesota Press, 2005), and is the co-editor, alongside Elizabeth A. Hatmaker, of Noir Affect (Fordham University Press, 2020). Breu's essays have appeared in Symplokē, The Goose, Humanities, and Cultural Critique, among other venues.

---

References