Times
Square Red, Times Square Blue (Sexual Cultures) by
Samuel R. Delany
An award-winning
science fiction writer, esteemed professor of comparative
literature at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and
celebrated essayist and memoirist, Samuel Delany is one of
America's keenest observers. He was also a longtime habitué of
many of the sex theaters in New York City's Times Square,
spending, by his own estimate, "thousands and thousands of
hours" at the Capri, Variety Photoplays, the Eros, and the
Venus. In the 1990s all of these theaters were shut down through
new restrictive zoning laws, part of a combined effort by the Walt
Disney Corporation and the administration of Mayor Rudy Giuliani
to gentrify the area, replacing these seedily memorable
institutions with antiseptic, innocuous architectural and cultural
creations in the name of health safety. But as Delany reveals in
his new book, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, the
decision to clean up Times Square had little to do with public
health, and everything to do with corporate greed.
In the two essays that comprise this eloquent,
provocative book, Delany grieves for the loss of this strip of
sexual release. Though he is careful not to romanticize or
sentimentalize the peep shows and porn theaters, he does
illuminate the way in which these venues crossed class, racial,
and sexual orientation lines, providing a delightfully subversive
utopia--and a microcosm of New York life. In the first essay,
"Times Square Blue," Delany details his shared erotic
and conversational encounters with working-class and homeless men
in the theaters (which primarily showed straight porn films) and
the genuine friendships that resulted; these immensely personal
reminiscences also provide a social history of late-20th-century
Times Square. Drawing on historical and theoretical resources in
the second essay, "Three, Two, One, Contact: Times Square
Red," Delany next builds a thoughtful and passionate argument
against the gentrification of the area and the classist,
characterless direction in which he sees New York heading. Read
together, the essays of Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
are both heartfelt homage to a beloved city and lament for a
quirky vitality increasingly phased out by encroaching capitalism.
--Kera Bolonik
Trouble
on Triton : An Ambiguous Heterotopia by
Samuel R. Delany, Kathy Acker
Trouble on Triton (as it is now retitled--the
publisher just called the first edition "Triton,") is
one of the finest SF novels ever written. It is also one of the
best books on the 1960s ever written, though it is supposedly set
much later. Delany uses the semi-utopian setting to convey much of
the spirit of the East Village in New York during the sixties,
when he played with a band, lived in a commune, had much
experimental sex and generally found himself. See Heavenly
Breakfast or The Motion of Light in Water to understand the
autobiographical background to Trouble on Triton. He creates an
extremely unsympathetic protagonist who is ill at ease in a
libertarian utopia because he is by natural instinct an uptight
conservative who's at a loss in a world where self-definitions
vary wildly.
This is also from the period when Delany was
first becoming profoundly influenced by modern poststructuralist
philosophy, and he tries to weave certain ideas (not entirely
successfully) into the novel.
This is a very, very intellectual book--not at
all an easy read. But if you can enjoy a satire on white male
piggishness written by a gay black genius, you'll enjoy this book.
It's never gotten the audience it deserves because its ideal
readers tend to be people who scorn to pick up an SF novel,
particularly one with such a deliberately (and mockingly) cheesy
title as Trouble on Triton. -- Anonymous Review
Samuel R. Delany's Autobiographical writing:
