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Only this new hell is the bright, fastidiously clean, one-size-fits-all, commercial shopping center filled with the same stores, advertisements and products you can buy in any small town mall.
In Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, just out from New York University Press, Delany cogently argues that the gentrification and Disnification of Times Square -- which was achieved through re-zoning and enforcement of new "safe sex" health codes -- had far less to do with the officially stated goals of containing AIDS and promoting public safety than it did with fulfilling a well-established, four-decades-long master plan of real estate development. But, more to the point, he says, this redevelopment -- which has replaced small independent businesses with large chains and expensive hotels and displaced Times Square denizens, many of whom had lived or worked there for decades -- was a disaster for the city. For Delany, the old Times Square was not a dangerous cesspool of exploitation and crime. Rather, it was a small, people-centered neighborhood (some of whose businesses were directed at fulfilling individuals' sexual needs, though many were not). Its resources were crucial to the functioning of the city as a whole and fostered an environment that allowed people who would usually never have contact with one another to meet, interact and even form friendships. This is the idealized "civitas" that Jane Jacobs proposed in her 1961 classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and which, Delany claims, is quickly disappearing from our urban centers. Hardly the view of Mayor Giuliani or civic-cleanup campaigners.
Chip, as Delany is known to his friends, is a striking figure amid the noonday suits and the summer-clad tourists. His jeans and workshirt, his short, stocky stature, his close-cropped hair and long white beard set him apart, as d s the short, smart cane he carries for support. Bristling with intelligence, he has a direct, inviting manner that makes it as easy to imagine him frequenting the adult theaters on the Deuce (which he has done since the age of 15 in 1957) as it is to envision him lecturing in front of a class at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where he is a professor of Comparative Literature. (He is also, as it happens, the nephew of the Delany sisters.)
With Delany is his partner, Dennis Ricketts, a tall man with a shaved head and a T-shirt that reads "The Less Hair I Have the More Head I Get." Delany's new graphic novel, Bread and Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York (just out from Juno Books) uses illustrations by Mia Wolff to recount how he and Dennis, a New Yorker from a working-class Irish background, met seven years ago, when the latter was homeless and selling old books from a shopping cart on 72nd Street and Broadway.
Delany tells us that "a tour of 42nd street now could easily consist of pointing out the skeletons of theaters that are no longer here. By my informal count, three dozen theater spaces -- of varying sizes, most were small and built before World War II -- have been permanently demolished. Even in a city the size of New York, when you destroy three dozen theaters, you really change the cultural ecology, no matter whether those theaters are being used or not. That is a loss that cannot be regained."
Man of the Crowd
Delany obviously relishes the jostling, even rude mobs rushing to get back to their air-conditioned offices; this hustle, according to Delany, is the lifeblood of New York. "After World War II," he says, "42nd Street was a 24-hour street: stores were always open, streets were busy. It was only in the mid-1970s that Times Square became a place where things opened at 10:00 in the morning and closed at 9:00 at night." What's important to remember, he observes, is that as a "24-hour street it served a wide range of people. There were all-night bookstores, cafeterias, theaters for people who worked the graveyard shift and needed a place to go after work. More important, it allowed citizens to have a wide range of options for living their lives. It accommodated many different kinds of temperaments. And it produced a landscape that is particularly conducive to creativity. When I have access to all-night bookstores, copying places or restaurants, I use them. It becomes part of my creative process."
In Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Delany emphasizes the importance of street life, claiming that city dwellers have traditionally relied upon "contact" socializing -- chatting while waiting at the grocery store, bumping into a neighbor while walking your dog -- to build livable communities, often across class and race backgrounds. But now casual contact is being replaced by "networking" -- people with similar interests meeting intentionally to further those interests, which tend to be professional and motive driven. According to Delany, it narrows the common discourse, cutting us off from the broader -- and more democratic -- aspects of urban living. At worst, he contends, it limits us as citizens.
Delany's life and creativity have been fed by New York's limitless and democratic energy for five decades. At the age of 57 he has published 19 works of fiction, three memoirs (including Bread and Wine) and seven books of literary and cultural criticism. While Delany's novels and stories have often been sold as science fiction (he has won four Nebula Awards), they are, in essence, philosophical inquiries into the nature of time, culture, citizenship and identity -- the last two questions of great interest to him as an openly gay, African-American writer.
Delany's publishing history is as tangled as his interests. His first novel -- The Jewels of Aptor (1962) -- was a present to his then-wife, p t Marilyn Hacker, who as an editorial assistant at Ace Books often complained about the poor quality of submissions. It was accepted under a pseudonym ("we were so moral back then," he says). Eight more books from Ace followed over the next six years, including his first Nebula winners, Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection, in 1966 and 1968, respectively. Delany has in subsequent years remained so prolific that many of his novels have gone through multiple editions and publishers, falling in and out of print.
Over the past seven years, Suzanne Taminin at Wesleyan University Press has spearheaded a program to reissue Delany's fiction and nonfiction, and WUP now publishes 11 Delany titles, including the sword-and-sorcery novels of his much-praised Neveryon series (1979-87). In a perfect illustration of Delany's "contact" theory, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue was picked up by Eric Zinner at NYU Press as the premier title for its new Sexual Culture series after series editor José Munoz, a professor at NYU, ran into Delany on 42nd Street and asked to reprint a lecture that Delany had just given at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at CUNY. In similar fashion, Bread and Wine found a home at Juno Books after Delany met the artist Mia Wolff through friends and learned she was looking for a story to turn into a graphic novel.
New York shines through all of Delany's writing, not just in his latest two books or Manhattan-based work like The Madman (1996) or Atlantis: Three Tales (1995) but even in such intergalactic tales as the Neveryon novels and Dhalgren (1975), which are infused with the intensity and momentum of New York, and reflections on AIDS and gay life. In that latter novel, a nameless drifter with mysterious erotic connections to a young boy and an enigmatic woman enters a decaying, enervated city that is on the brink of mass violence and destruction. This dystopian vision -- a fantasy New York, overwhelming and filled with adventures both scary and sensual -- is at once unsettling and enticing.
Only this new hell is the bright, fastidiously clean, one-size-fits-all, commercial shopping center filled with the same stores, advertisements and products you can buy in any small town mall.
In Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, just out from New York University Press, Delany cogently argues that the gentrification and Disnification of Times Square -- which was achieved through re-zoning and enforcement of new "safe sex" health codes -- had far less to do with the officially stated goals of containing AIDS and promoting public safety than it did with fulfilling a well-established, four-decades-long master plan of real estate development. But, more to the point, he says, this redevelopment -- which has replaced small independent businesses with large chains and expensive hotels and displaced Times Square denizens, many of whom had lived or worked there for decades -- was a disaster for the city. For Delany, the old Times Square was not a dangerous cesspool of exploitation and crime. Rather, it was a small, people-centered neighborhood (some of whose businesses were directed at fulfilling individuals' sexual needs, though many were not). Its resources were crucial to the functioning of the city as a whole and fostered an environment that allowed people who would usually never have contact with one another to meet, interact and even form friendships. This is the idealized "civitas" that Jane Jacobs proposed in her 1961 classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and which, Delany claims, is quickly disappearing from our urban centers. Hardly the view of Mayor Giuliani or civic-cleanup campaigners.
Chip, as Delany is known to his friends, is a striking figure amid the noonday suits and the summer-clad tourists. His jeans and workshirt, his short, stocky stature, his close-cropped hair and long white beard set him apart, as d s the short, smart cane he carries for support. Bristling with intelligence, he has a direct, inviting manner that makes it as easy to imagine him frequenting the adult theaters on the Deuce (which he has done since the age of 15 in 1957) as it is to envision him lecturing in front of a class at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where he is a professor of Comparative Literature. (He is also, as it happens, the nephew of the Delany sisters.)
With Delany is his partner, Dennis Ricketts, a tall man with a shaved head and a T-shirt that reads "The Less Hair I Have the More Head I Get." Delany's new graphic novel, Bread and Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York (just out from Juno Books) uses illustrations by Mia Wolff to recount how he and Dennis, a New Yorker from a working-class Irish background, met seven years ago, when the latter was homeless and selling old books from a shopping cart on 72nd Street and Broadway.
Delany tells us that "a tour of 42nd street now could easily consist of pointing out the skeletons of theaters that are no longer here. By my informal count, three dozen theater spaces -- of varying sizes, most were small and built before World War II -- have been permanently demolished. Even in a city the size of New York, when you destroy three dozen theaters, you really change the cultural ecology, no matter whether those theaters are being used or not. That is a loss that cannot be regained."
Man of the Crowd
Delany obviously relishes the jostling, even rude mobs rushing to get back to their air-conditioned offices; this hustle, according to Delany, is the lifeblood of New York. "After World War II," he says, "42nd Street was a 24-hour street: stores were always open, streets were busy. It was only in the mid-1970s that Times Square became a place where things opened at 10:00 in the morning and closed at 9:00 at night." What's important to remember, he observes, is that as a "24-hour street it served a wide range of people. There were all-night bookstores, cafeterias, theaters for people who worked the graveyard shift and needed a place to go after work. More important, it allowed citizens to have a wide range of options for living their lives. It accommodated many different kinds of temperaments. And it produced a landscape that is particularly conducive to creativity. When I have access to all-night bookstores, copying places or restaurants, I use them. It becomes part of my creative process."
In Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Delany emphasizes the importance of street life, claiming that city dwellers have traditionally relied upon "contact" socializing -- chatting while waiting at the grocery store, bumping into a neighbor while walking your dog -- to build livable communities, often across class and race backgrounds. But now casual contact is being replaced by "networking" -- people with similar interests meeting intentionally to further those interests, which tend to be professional and motive driven. According to Delany, it narrows the common discourse, cutting us off from the broader -- and more democratic -- aspects of urban living. At worst, he contends, it limits us as citizens.
Delany's life and creativity have been fed by New York's limitless and democratic energy for five decades. At the age of 57 he has published 19 works of fiction, three memoirs (including Bread and Wine) and seven books of literary and cultural criticism. While Delany's novels and stories have often been sold as science fiction (he has won four Nebula Awards), they are, in essence, philosophical inquiries into the nature of time, culture, citizenship and identity -- the last two questions of great interest to him as an openly gay, African-American writer.
Delany's publishing history is as tangled as his interests. His first novel -- The Jewels of Aptor (1962) -- was a present to his then-wife, p t Marilyn Hacker, who as an editorial assistant at Ace Books often complained about the poor quality of submissions. It was accepted under a pseudonym ("we were so moral back then," he says). Eight more books from Ace followed over the next six years, including his first Nebula winners, Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection, in 1966 and 1968, respectively. Delany has in subsequent years remained so prolific that many of his novels have gone through multiple editions and publishers, falling in and out of print.
Over the past seven years, Suzanne Taminin at Wesleyan University Press has spearheaded a program to reissue Delany's fiction and nonfiction, and WUP now publishes 11 Delany titles, including the sword-and-sorcery novels of his much-praised Neveryon series (1979-87). In a perfect illustration of Delany's "contact" theory, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue was picked up by Eric Zinner at NYU Press as the premier title for its new Sexual Culture series after series editor José Munoz, a professor at NYU, ran into Delany on 42nd Street and asked to reprint a lecture that Delany had just given at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at CUNY. In similar fashion, Bread and Wine found a home at Juno Books after Delany met the artist Mia Wolff through friends and learned she was looking for a story to turn into a graphic novel.
New York shines through all of Delany's writing, not just in his latest two books or Manhattan-based work like The Madman (1996) or Atlantis: Three Tales (1995) but even in such intergalactic tales as the Neveryon novels and Dhalgren (1975), which are infused with the intensity and momentum of New York, and reflections on AIDS and gay life. In that latter novel, a nameless drifter with mysterious erotic connections to a young boy and an enigmatic woman enters a decaying, enervated city that is on the brink of mass violence and destruction. This dystopian vision -- a fantasy New York, overwhelming and filled with adventures both scary and sensual -- is at once unsettling and enticing.
Reinventing SF
Born in 1942 in Harlem, the son of a funeral director and a library clerk, Delany attended the Dalton School, then Bronx Science High School before enrolling at City College. He was just 20 when Ace brought out The Jewels of Aptor, and he soon joined the ranks of Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ and Harlan Ellison, whose books helped remake science fiction in the 1960s. Intellectually adventuresome -- he is apt to deck his plots with calculus, physics and invented languages -- and filled with discussions of gender, sexuality and social issues, they radically broke from the hackneyed genre conventions of rocket ships, robots and robust babes. (His more recent novels, like Return to Neveryon, contain references to Roland Barthes, Thomas Wolfe and Carl Popper.)
In 1961, he married Hacker, with whom he raised a daughter, Iva Alyxander. They remained married for 19 years, during which he had affairs with men and Hacker came out as a lesbian. Since that time Delany has lived in London and Europe, though he has always returned to Manhattan -- he has occupied his rent-stabilized, fifth-floor walk-up for 21 years -- as a permanent home.
On 42nd Street toward Eighth Avenue, where most of the redevelopment and gentrification has taken place, Delany points out a boarded-up storefront, the site of one of his first jobs in New York. "It was called Bob's Bargain Books, a four-story building literally crammed with what were called 'men's magazines.' " Walking down the block, Delany and Ricketts reel off a list of now-vanished adult bookstores and theaters (both legit and porno) with names like The Gaiety, The Adonis and The Playpen. Some of the buildings are vacant and awaiting destruction or refurbishing; others are completely new.
When Jane Jacobs wrote of the need for cultural cross-pollination and democratized public spaces, she was not talking about red-light districts; in fact, she even complains about what she called "pervert parks." And many people -- tourists and home-grown New Yorkers -- who feel safer and more comfortable with the spanking-clean, less grungy Times Square, might seriously disagree with Delany's analysis. While Delany's theories come out of his experience as an urban gay man who places a different value on sexual experience and community, one wonders if his elegy for the old Times Square boils down to a lament for the sexual encounters that no longer take place there.
"Well, sex was certainly happening in some of these places," he says, a remark that prompts a chuckle from Ricketts. "But there was much more. Friendships were made, relationships were formed between people who would never talk to one another in other social circumstances. This is what living in a city can mean -- what it has meant."
"There is not much that is personal here now," he adds. "It is less and less possible to make connections with people because the scale is so large and nothing is reasonably priced. In the 1960s and '70s, the adult entertainment theaters were two to three times less expensive than the legitimate theaters. This allowed men of all classes and economic means to attend them."
Some of the most moving material in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue are the stories Delany tells of close friendships -- sexual and platonic -- that were formed in this neighborhood. There is J y, a young, somewhat unstable man who he meets in a movie theater and with whom he has intense conversations over a period of months, or Hoke, a gay city sewer worker who is terribly uncomfortable with his body and Delany's attraction to it. These snapshots of lives lived on the edge are both surprising and haunting, memorable and illuminating. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue and Bread and Wine are testaments to the endless possibilities of cities and human beings. After all, where else but in a city like New York can two such men -- a writer who is also a university professor and a homeless man -- meet and fall in love?
Bronski is the author of The Pleasure Princ iple: Sex, Backlash and the Struggle for Gay Freedom (St. Martin's Press, 1998). He lives in Cambridge, Mass.
