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 the millennium. Their aim, in the face of this takeover, was the promotion of "queer culture building"; a call to action they defined as decidedly "not just a safe zone for queer sex."1 "Safe zones," which one could argue partially undergirds the 2015 Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges that guaranteed same-sex marriage as a fundamental right, while perhaps politically and materially necessary, are nevertheless what sex radical Samuel R. Delany might refer to as "progressive banalization."2 Prioritizing queer "safe zones" led to a banality that attenuated public sex and interclass communication rather than successfully building queer culture as Berlant and Warner envisioned. These theorists called for "changed possibilities of identity, intelligibility, publics, culture, and sex that appear when the heterosexual couple is no longer the referent or the privileged example of sexual culture."3 Theirs was a vision of disrupting (private) property and propriety.   

Respectable queer sex is not something Delany is concerned with as a writer (an aesthetic choice he has made since at least 1969's Hogg). His relentless commitment to pornotopic maximalism (that is, the rampantly sexual) provides sustenance for many (likewise, it allows many to disregard so much of his work). But the critically lauded science fiction (SF) writer cannot be distinguished from the avuncular pervert; his work cannot be split into two distinct columns. As he details in his memoir The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village 1960-1965  (1988), sex and SF writing catalyzed each other. His work has long testified to, and continues to envision, forms of erotic living and nonstandard intimacies that make up a queer life, or that make a life rich and wonder-filled in the pursuit of building a queer world.   

In this essay, I consider how "sex . . . is mediated by publics" in Delany's representations of urban, interclass contact in two of his New York City-based memoirist works written a decade apart: The Motion of Light in Water and Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999).4 In the first, Delany reflects on learning to cruise as a young man in the pre-Stonewall 1960s while married to the poet Marilyn Hacker (who was well aware of Delany's queerness). In the second, he anticipates the demise of a specific queer culture while looking back on a public sex life well-lived in institutions facilitating that purpose. Berlant's and Warner's three different definitions of "public" ("social spaces and practices directly related to sex"; "social spaces and practices organized around sex"; and "tacit scenes of sexuality . . . that protect the zone of heterosexual privacy") can certainly shed light on Delany's erotics of queer culture building in a gentrifying city.5 

While he questions the concept of "gay culture" in The Motion of Light in Water, Delany nevertheless notes that   

I take Delany's polemical thrust to heart by returning to how he locates gay sexual patterns of New York City in the twentieth century. By looking to how Delany engages with this queer past, we can also see how he considers ways to "ground future possibilities" that fulfill the "social functions" of sex in public — that is, that satisfy "humane and functional . . . needs that most of our society does not yet know how to acknowledge."7 Taken as a whole, Delany's work — often repetitive and ruminative in its sexual obsessions — offers a rhetoric of behavior that thickly compose a sex commons, the likes of which still awaits our (re)invention. 

Public Perversion: Social spaces and practices organized around sex  

In The Motion of Light in Water, Delany recalls a stimulating disturbance in his family. His Uncle Myles recounts to his parents, Samuel Sr. and Margaret, news of an exciting drag show, The Jewel Box Review, in residence at Harlem's famed Apollo Theater.   

The Jewel Box Review was one of America's first queer sex publics. Formed in 1939 by Danny Brown and Doc Benner, the Review was an interracial touring group of 25 female impersonators and one male impersonator who served as the Master of Ceremonies. The Review influenced drag shows of the 1940s and 50s, helping to establish queer communities across America's postwar, urban landscapes. Exposure to such publics organized around sex directly contributed to the Sexual Revolution and Gay Liberation movements of the 1960s. Young Delany anticipated as much and Aunt Dorothy did, too, with her observation that "the show in the first ten rows of the theater was even stranger that what was going on on stage."8 

Delany's parents are rather disinterested in response to Uncle Myles's boisterous endorsement. But the boy, seventeen at the time, is rapt with "electric" attention — sensing there is something "anarchic" about how the Review managed to be sexually suggestive far beyond what was legal at the time, and, in so doing, scrambled accepted knowledge.9 

In Delany's recollection, sex in the 1940s and 50s was unspeakable. "Those years saw," Delany recounts, "throughout the middle classes of our country, a deep, widespread fear and mistrust of sex — a fear of speaking of sex (for there was a whole lexicon of words that in those days could not be printed in even the most serious fiction, could not be heard on the stage or on the screen in even the most mature play or film; there was a whole gallery of texts that could not be printed, sold, read in this country)."10 A text and its creator were subject to being "attacked, detained, impounded, exploited, and punished," revealing the fine line between legal "protection" and "retribution."11 This history of the unprintable informed Delany's thinking about the unspeakable.  

Young Delany desires to visit the Review's "transvestial extravaganza" to gain an education.12 "Perhaps," he thinks, "I would notice something, meet someone, recognize something in one of those strange people who'd clearly been marked as foreign and alien to everything I knew, that would, in some way, enlighten me about my own sexuality."13 He intuits that social spaces organized around sex might make the sex one wished to have intelligible. He commits to seeing the show with a type of "desperation," the likes of which had driven him, years earlier, to seek out whatever queer literature he could find, such as James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room.14 He never mentions his clandestine visit to his family.   

Delany's pilgrimage to the Review informed him not only about the malleability of gender identity and presentation but also about his own queerness. Delany claims his sexually explicit work offers "aesthetically serious undertakings," a statement I understand as a commitment to thinking sex and form together; the "trade-off between writing and desire" he has been aware of in his own practice since age ten.15 

Delany obsessively muses over one form throughout The Motion of Light in Water and it coalesces into his 1992 essay "On the Unspeakable": the double narrative, shaped as a parallel column (the essay takes a form akin to a Möbius strip). The dual column functions as the running metaphor of his memoir, shaping how he recalls both his sexual awakening and drive to begin writing as interrelated, and it becomes the framework by which he understands "the prototype for all social division."16 His double vision (a literal affliction since childhood) lends him a sense of depth and parallax.17

Such twofold perception announced itself when, after visiting the Review, Delany overhears his mother and a neighbor discussing the show's one male impersonator (the famed Black lesbian drag king Stormie Delarvarie):  

This realization — that his childhood camp counselor is also a renowned sexual outlaw — goads Delany toward conceptualizing something important on a formal, aesthetic, philosophical, and sexual level. Upon learning of Mary's/Stormy's fluid multiplicities — of gender, of sexuality, of labor, of publics, of rhetoric and discourse —  Delany recollects,    

Delany glimpses what he later comes to think of as "the complex singularity" of artificial social boundaries.20

Public XXX: Social spaces and practices directly related to sex  

Since the age of ten, Delany has been interested in another dualistic construction, which he perceives as "two graphic poles." One is desire (sex outside of language), and the other is writing (materializing the unspeakable into language).21 Recalling the sexual fantasies he filled his notebook with as a child, and, more importantly, the masturbatory process by which he both deferred and transmuted them he philosophizes:   

Delany's mother Margaret finds his notebooks and forces him into therapy. But Delany realizes that the doctor fails to comprehend the notebooks' erotic function of delay and fulfillment. It is precisely the doctor's (willful?) ignorance that helps Delany move past a fear of materializing queer culture through public-facing language. He recalls this paramount lesson, which catalyzed his life's work: "it was my first indication that the movement from private to public by way of writing was not as traumatic as desire, with its attendant terror of total, social, absolute, and individual rejection, often makes us fear."23 

Desire and deceit always accompany the so-called socially acceptable, but they are meant to be kept private; after all, Delany queries sardonically, "why speak of what's uncomfortable to speak of? What damage might it do . . . to those with a barely controlled tendency towards the perverse?"24 While some think such material should remain "outside of language," Delany learns that to speak the unspeakable can be the philosophical disposition of artists.25 Bringing desire into discourse makes for a socially accessible world. And for Delany, the social and the sexual are inextricable. Some publics are organized around explicit sexual encounters: "Pornographic cinema, phone sex, 'adult' markets for print, lap dancing" and other such sites and technologies mediate sex directly, both alone and with others.26 

The infamous Christopher Street piers are legendary in this regard. In America's cruising heyday, gay sex materialized at this site cloaked in silence and shadow, both code and convention. Delany describes that on any given night, between 35 to 150 men would show up to engage in numerous sex acts — an experience that, for the author, was engrossing, exhausting, reassuring, and very human.27   

While getting his cock sucked in a truck at 3 AM and watching the motion of light in water, Delany sees the parallel columns of the piers dancing in shadow and illumination. He drowsily perceives sex and aesthetic form promiscuously interpenetrating, despite social conventions at the time maintaining certain (queer) sexual relations outside of the official parameters of language.28

While he writes about explicit sex publics, Delany also wants his readers to be aware that the unspeakable never stands alone. Rather, the writer is always traversing the yawning chasm or "the spaces between the columns (one resplendent and lucid with the writings of legitimacy, the other dark and hollow with the voices of the illegitimate, and even a third aglitter with ironic alterities) . . . [that] demand the appropriation of language — now spoken, now written — in both directions, over the gap."29

To write or speak the unspeakable, to figure it in language, is to refuse to relegate modes of living into two artificially distinct columns. "The unspeakable," Delany argues, "is not a boundary dividing a positive area of allowability from a complete and totalized negativity, a boundary located at least one step beyond the forbidden (and the forbidden, by definition — no ?— must be speakable if its proscriptive power is to function). . . . Rather it is a set of positive conventions governing what can be spoken of (or written about) in general," and, in particular, it describes the necessary, specialized conventions to write or speak within specific social contexts.30 Most of us are not taught the conventions to write or to speak the unspeakable, and Delany claims this is a "form of oppression."31 His commitment to forming the unspeakable into language is a guide to recognize that it is always "the positioning of desire that draws us to 'the unspeakable' in the first place," elucidating how sex is mediated by publics.32 

For example, the orgy, for Delany, is the most social of human interchanges.33 It is not chaos. Rather, it is just as bounded by social conventions that are "hugely ordered, highly social, attentive, silent, and grounded in a certain care, if not community" as those that tacitly legitimate the everyday.34

Delany and his wife, Marilyn, had threesomes. He engaged in orgies at the Christopher Street piers among the loading docks and in the vans. But the first orgy Delany takes part in at the St. Marks Bath House, in 1963 (six years before Stonewall), is the first experience he has with the concept of what he refers to as "massed bodies" —  "whether male, female, working or middle class, the first direct sense of political power comes from the apprehension of massed bodies."35

Face to face with hundreds of undulating, gay men occupying an entire floor dedicated to fucking (an unobstructed, uncontained view of public sex), Delany experiences somatic and psychological "heart thudding astonishment, very close to fear."36 Not only does he not, at that time, know the codes and conventions organizing the space but he is confronted with the double column's collapse: a wholeness of gay sex and nascent political power unfolds before his view.37 Even historic cruising sites such as the Christopher Street piers bisected this power. To cruise in the truck beds — each one isolated, positioned one next to the other — obscured the full comprehension of the radical act of queer culture building even from its own public's participants.   

As frightened as he is, Delany moves forward into it and experiences becoming one with/of the massed bodies; a fulfillment of the pornotopian promise.    

Public Policing: Tacit scenes of sexuality that protect the zone of heterosexual privacy  

Delany's ecstatic representation of public sex at the piers and in the bathhouse should be balanced against his discussion of furtive queer sociality at Dirty Dick's, the gay bar run by a trans woman across the street (in the opposite column?) from the Christopher Street docks. The unspeakable is also, sometimes, the unspoken, including the tacit maneuvers of the law to punish, to protect. The unspoken codes of conduct to move in a queer space in response to legal intrusion.   

"In the fifties — and it was a fifties model of homosexuality that controlled all that was done, by both ourselves and the law that persecuted us," Delany recalls, "homosexuality was a solitary perversion. Before and above all, it isolated you."39 The law sought to enforce and maintain that isolation — the artificial, double column separating the everyday from the unspeakable.  

Dirty Dick's catered to a wide swath of queers: teenaged dykes, Puerto Rican drag queens, truck drivers and other blue collar men, lesbians, uptown businesswomen, and Delany and his wife Marilyn.40 The mythology of the place held it that straights stood on one side of the dance floor while gays cruised the other, with everyone coming together to dance. "But such a cut-and-dried schema" was nothing more than a tale to reassure newcomers.41 Nevertheless, when the jukebox light flashed its warning that the police were near, the dancing gay couples would drift apart to take up residence against the walls.42 The cops entered, divided the columns, collected their pay.   

(At one point, during a peyote trip, Delany hallucinates the floor of Dick's splitting in two.43)  

Summarizing Gayle Rubin's 1984 essay "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Politics of Sexuality," Berlant and Warner note how erotic injustice and sexual oppression work through "coercive relations between specific 'populations' and the institutions created to manage them."44 Eventually, cops stopped getting paid off. They increasingly volunteered for the vice squad. In "Public Sex," Pat Califia describes the machinations the law went through, in the 1970s and early 1980s (and beyond, it would turn out), to render semi-private spaces — gay bars, bathhouses, and porn theaters — public. These spaces were not considered private under the law because, theoretically and actually, people could, and did, witness others having sex within them, and "the presence of a third party makes sex an indecent rather than a protected, and private act."45 Often, that supposedly offended third party was the vice cop. Most state and local laws, at the time, classified queer sex publics as "indecent," or "unnatural."46 Vice squads and the courts criminalized the queers and perverts within with charges of public lewdness, and police "justif[ied] these raids and crackdowns by claiming that families, children, and uninterested heterosexual men are stumbling into group gropes or being harassed by gangs of hostile [queers]."47 National (heterosexual) membership was swaddled in the zone of privacy.    

The sweeps escalated. In 1995, after the passage of the Zoning Text Amendment and its mandate that all adult businesses (porn theaters, book stores, strip clubs, peep shows) would have to move to the waterfront or shutter, New York City began demolition of the Times Square district in earnest, forging the present-day tourist trap "glass and aluminum graveyard."48 Not only was this a "violent reconfiguration of [the city's] own landscape" that makes residents' lives less livable, but it was also "a legal and moral revamping of its own discursive structures, changing laws about sex, health, and zoning . . . willing, and even anxious, to exploit everything from homophobia to AIDS to family values and fear of drugs."49 One specific example, in which America's "nostalgic family values covenant" was used in the "privatization of citizenship and sex," is when "adult video stores were forbidden to display their sexual material to the passing pedestrian public" and were instead required to change their stock to at least "60 percent . . . 'family fare'" movies.50This law was enacted to "protect the zone of heterosexual privacy . . . by the spectacular demonization of any represented sex."51   

Delany explains that until 1985, "public sex was largely a matter of public decency — that is to say, it was a question of who was or who wasn't offended by what went on in public venues. Since '85, under a sham concern for AIDS, the [sex] acts themselves have been made illegal."52 This "sexual purification" succeeded in disappearing "a complex of interlocking systems and subsystems" in the district's "beneficent" queer culture.53 The social forces at play in reshaping the city's infrastructure succeeded in achieving "a social norm and ideal [within] an extremely narrow context for living" that "diminished expectations for queer life."54 They institutionalized scarcity. They successfully widened the gap between the acceptable and the unacceptable, "set[ting] gay liberation back to a point notably pre-Stonewall."55  

Purifying sex to sequester it in privacy effectively "blocks the building of nonnormative or explicit public sexual cultures" — cultures that would not seem so aberrant if heterosexuality did not lay claim to intimacy as a protected zone of personal discretion.56 Delany's Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999) speaks to the death rattle of the district's beneficent queer culture, making its case with the authority of one who lived that life and helped to create it.   

The book is positioned as two abutting essays that are intended to be read through one another so as to think about (not explain!) the other. The first, "Times Square Blue," vernacularly memorializes the people that populated Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue, the sex that was encouraged in the district's porn theaters, and the "relationships" that occurred among strangers and acquaintances in those publics where mutual pleasure was exchanged.57 "Times Square Red" is the more academic (yet experimental), rhetorically dense essay that theorizes encounters of "interclass contact" (social practices that promote communication between the classes) and networking as primary forms of sociality. "When social forces menace the distinction between private and public, people are most likely to start distrusting contact relations."58 Thus, the thrust of the book as a complex singularity is to offer what Delany, borrowing from Pound's Cantos,  imagines as a "sociological and diachronic periplum" — a kind of "temporal coastline" that archives the shores of a queer life well-lived in public so that we might create gay sexual outlets and cruising grounds anew.59 

A Complex Singularity or, Delany's Whole  

Why does the sexual commons, as spaces where people can be in erotic relation outside of private (corporate owned) property and public (state controlled) property, still contain radical possibility for Delany? He is committed to conceiving of "new establishments — and even entirely new types of institutions — that would offer the services and fulfill the social functions" provided by infrastructure that, historically, supported public sex.60 His three theses in "Times Square Red" clearly speak to this:     

Though Delany writes from his own positionality as a Black, gay man enmeshed in "ideologies" and "discourses" that he defends, desires, and "happily inhabits," he invites his readers, through each encounter with his ceaseless, imaginative drive, to collectively critique and thereby change those privileged ideologies and discourses into "new sites and new forms" fit for us all to access differently today.64

What we are being guided toward, by reading Delany's pornographic work, is double vision. "As isolated perverts," we are told we are only "beings of desire" supposedly outside of society, outside of language.65 But "the parallel column," Delany explains, "containing the discourse of repetition, of desire, whether satisfied or unrequited, forever runs beside one of positive, commercial, material analysis. Many of us, raised on literature, have learned to supply the absent column when the material is presented alone. And a few of us have begun to ask, at least for the column of objects, actions, economics, and material forces when presented only with, in whatever figurative form, desire."66  

To read Delany's aesthetically serious materializations of public sex is to see the complex singularity as one entity, without a split column that hides the legitimate from the illegitimate; the "socially acceptable" from the desire-and-deceit laden narratives; the everyday from the unspeakable. It is awesome to behold in its "frightening range and intensity . . . a clear, accurate, and extensive picture of extant public sexual institutions."67 Though language "creates very little," it nevertheless "stabilizes."68 Delany believed that the realization of sharp and articulate language to describe the full range of sexual possibilities will manifest emergent sexual revolutions and that "cut[ting] through fragmenting darkness [will] allow us to see the politically enabling whole. Such illumination will provide us with access to a world that should be, that could be, and that will be."69 This is a queer "world making project where 'world,' like 'public,' differs from community or group because it necessarily includes more people than can be identified, more spaces than can mapped beyond a few reference points, modes of feeling that can be learn[ed]."70 Delany composes sexually excessive encounters not to libidinally saturate, but to perpetually pronounce pleasure into being so that we might "value a whole range of social relationships."71 He bares the astonishing totality.    

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Kirin Wachter-Grene (@kirinwgrene.bsky.social) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Liberal Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the guest-editor of two special issues of The Black Scholar (At the Limits of Desire: Black Radical Pleasure [2020] and Edgeplay: Black Radical Pleasure II [2023]). Additionally, her work has appeared in Social Text, Feminist Formations, Legacy, Palimpsest, and African American Review, among other venues. Her first book, Black Kenosis: The Erotic Undoing of African American Literature, which is focused on Delany's fiction, is forthcoming from Fordham University Press. 

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