Samuel R. Delany, born 1 April 1942 and raised in Harlem, is usually filed as a New Wave science-fiction writer, and he has the Nebulas and Hugos to go with that. Leave him in that slot and you miss the other half. For readers of BDSM, leather, and adult film, the point is that sex in his work is not decoration on the science fiction. It is part of how a city, a society, and an economy run. He wrote the ruined city in Dhalgren and the sailors in Equinox. Hogg does not offer a consent manual. It is about people who do not stop, and it is not a set of instructions. He does not keep sex in the bedroom. He puts it in the balconies of Times Square movie houses, in toilets at truck stops, and on the street during the AIDS epidemic. Public sex, in his pages, is how people of different classes and races share air and risk. The people in the scenes are adults.
To read the sex writing, separate the early science fiction from the novels he later called pornography. From December 1972 to December 1974 he and Marilyn Hacker lived in Marylebone, London, and he wrote two key books there: Equinox, first published as The Tides of Lust, a title he does not endorse, and Hogg. Hogg is one of the most extreme American novels about rape, coprophilia, incestuous abuse, and the economics of sexual violence. It is not a BDSM consent manual and it is not edge play. It is a nightmare about people who do not stop. It could not be printed at the time. It stayed unpublished until 1995, a delay of more than twenty years. Editors could handle his aliens. They could not handle Hogg. Equinox sits closer to porn as a genre: sailors, sailors’ sex, racialized desire, the sea as a machine for arranging bodies. Together the two books announce the turn after Nova. He was not going back to a career that left sex offstage.
Dhalgren (1975), his eleventh novel, sold more than a million copies. Praise came from inside science fiction and from outside it. The derision came mostly from inside. Bellona, the setting, is a smoking American ruin of gangs and of sex that will not stay in the bedroom. The explicit passages are not garnish. They are how that city thinks. Triton, later retitled Trouble on Triton, and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand are sexually explicit too, and both ask how a society’s menu of sex and gender connects to its political economy. His central nonfiction argument is in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), two essays. He sets contact against networking. Contact is the messy, cross-class, cross-race collision forced by a cheap movie house or a truck-stop toilet. Networking is what a cleaned-up city prefers: people of the same sort exchanging cards. For leather, the split matters. Public play spaces, zoning, and gentrification run on it, and they decide who can still find a place in the city. He is precise about blowjobs in the balcony, about which theaters tolerated what, about how HIV changed the risk math, and about why a Disney store is not a morally neutral replacement for a grindhouse.
The sex writing has a class sense and a race sense. Adults trade bodies in public rooms. Blackness is not a garnish. It is part of who is in the exchange. He writes age gaps, homelessness, and the eroticizing of filth, and he watches who has housing when the scene ends. He is not a safeword teacher. He is the novelist who refused to let gay male sex—leather, piss, and hustler economies included—be swept clean for the redevelopment of Times Square. The Mad Man is long, filthy, and tender: a Black gay philosophy student, hustlers, homelessness, and sex in the first decade of the AIDS epidemic. Piss, shit, and public contact belong to a social world with rules, jokes, and grief, not to a freak show. Phallos follows a gay man’s search for happiness and security in Syracuse under Hadrian, in the second century. A mythical beast mentioned at the start of The Mad Man is on the Phallos cover. Dark Reflections (Stonewall Book Award, 2008) is about repression, old age, and a writer’s unrewarded life. The three books talk to each other. They are not a trilogy.
Later, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2012) shows the other face of Hogg. If Hogg is a machine of violation, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders is a machine of duration. It is work, aging bodies, and sex practiced across decades, and it refuses to flatten extreme gay male experience into nothing but trauma or nothing but utopia. The honor he says he is proudest of is the 1993 Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from Publishing Triangle, a gay literary prize, not a rocket-ship trophy. Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection won the Best Novel Nebula back to back, for 1966 and 1967. He later became the 30th SFWA Grand Master and entered the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. The sex writing is the half he wants read. It is not an appendix beside the science-fiction prizes.
