“Filthy!”: an Introduction to Samuel Delany’s Late Paraliterary Style

"On his shoulder where she'd brushed was a streak of gray-brown powder, which she beat away with her free hand, revealing clean, red-brown skin and its feathering of hair. 'My lord! You are filthy!1

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 oral sex. This contradicts the "gamble" Delany makes that one is not likely to contract the virus from oral sex. And while he had "talked with numerous people who were fairly sure you could get the virus orally," B.J. was the first Delany had "spoken with who claimed to have gotten it that way."2 After B.J. leaves, Delany turns to his other dinner companion Jeff — a straight colleague from Temple University — and states: 

Oh you know — I just thought what I really should have asked B.J. Was he ever in an orgy or orgy-like situation, around the time or in the months before he seroconverted, either on a job or during a film shoot, where someone who had taken a load of cum in his mouth might have licked out his asshole within five, ten, or fifteen minutes.3

To which Jeff responds, "Jesus Christ, Chip — I have never heard people talk about sex the way you guys were talking about it! [. . .] I mean, never — in my life. Over a hundred partners a year... I didn't even know there was sex like that."4 The story in "The Gamble" is instructive on how (and why) Delany writes about sex in such descriptive detail. As he states in his 2020 Windham-Campbell Lecture, "the specifics of what does result in seroconversion cannot be talked about unless the writer resorts to highly specific sexual acts."5 To write otherwise would be complicit in murder. The decision to write explicitly about sex pushes the Grand Master of Science Fiction to become a "pornographer," which Delany sees as another way of "telling the truth."  

Since at least The Mad Man (1994) pornography has been central to Delany's narratives — science fictional, non-fictional, or otherwise. As contributor Kirin Wachter-Grene notes, "the critically lauded SF writer cannot be distinguished from the avuncular pervert as if [his] work can be separated into two distinct columns." To read Delany's late pornographic texts as minor to his earlier masterpieces misses what contributor Rebekah Sheldon finds in Phallos: a "magical reproduction of queer life." Julian Lucas detects this in his recent New Yorker profile on Delany, where he notes that the writer "hadn't abandoned science fiction to wallow in pornography, as some contented; he'd stopped imagining faraway worlds to describe queer lives deemed unreal in this one."6 When fascists openly call for the eradication of trans people from public life, what contributor Y Howard writes especially resonates: "too much is never enough in documenting histories of sexual minoritarian lives." This excess — or what Y Howard calls sexcess — in Delany's late(r) writings make it possible to see a queer commons. 

And yet, much of Delany's more pornographic work remains out of print or is self-published. Bread and Wine, from which the image above appears, is currently backordered and difficult to find. A small press originally published Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders in 2012, but the book is currently self-published with Amazon, or what Delany calls the Big A. His late paraliterary fiction depends on independent publishers, a business made even more precarious in the era of media conglomerates.7 Delany, however, reminds us that just because a certain "sexual landscape is not articulated in certain orders of language [. . .] does not mean it doesn't exist."8 While this cluster might imitate the meta-commentary of Phallos, where academic discourse redacts the "filthy" or "sexcess" in Delany's writing, the pieces collected here tell us where we might find such work. Just around the corner (or page), Delany waits for us to discover what contributor Christopher Breu calls "the pleasures of contact in a classless society."

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Blake Stricklin (@blakestricklin.bsky.social) is a Lecturer of English Literature at the University of Houston-Victoria. He is the author of American Paraliterature and Other Theories to Hijack Communication (Anthem Press, 2021), and has published work in the Journal of Modern Literature, Symplokē, Burroughs Unbound: William S. Burroughs and the Performance of Writing, and the American Book Review.

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