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…
Site Archives
Contemporaries Essays, Samuel R. Delany's Improbable Communities
Contemporaries Essays, Samuel R. Delany's Improbable Communities
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,…
Contemporaries Essays, Samuel R. Delany's Improbable Communities
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…
Contemporaries Essays, Samuel R. Delany's Improbable Communities
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…
Contemporaries Essays, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre at 50
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (TCM) has been widely recognized as a groundbreaking and politicized contribution to the horror canon and to the slasher subgenre in particular. This month, on its…
Contemporaries Essays, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
The Grim Meat-Hook Realities of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
“We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that Sixties. Uppers are going out of style. This was the fatal flaw in…
Contemporaries Essays, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
Chainsaw Meridian
The familiar sound of a spade slicing through terrain. A series of off-centre, inconsistently focused holiday snapshots; glimpses of the night before. Shadows stretch westward, the sky glows amber, its…
Contemporaries Essays, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
// Texas / Chain Saw / Atmospheres //
In the paragraphs that follow, preferably in John Larroquette’s voice, please read / pronounce / hear the word “slash” whenever you see / read the punctuation that follows this colon:…
Contemporaries Essays, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
“Becoming Philosophical” in the Slaughterhouse: Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Industrial Cosmic Horror
“One could not stand and watch very long without becoming philosophical, without beginning to deal in symbols and similes, and to hear the hog-squeal of the universe.” – Upton Sinclair,…
Contemporaries Essays, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
My Apron is a Chainsaw: Leatherface and His Family Beyond the Masculine Proletariat
October 2024 marks fifty years since audiences were first terrorized by one of the inaugural slasher monsters, Leatherface. According to the critics’ consensus, Leatherface and his family of unemployed slaughterhouse…