Samuel Delany, _Times Square Red, Times Square Blue_

DELANY IS BEST known as a science fiction and fantasy writer, but he is also consistently brilliant and original as an essayist/critic. This book (now 20 years old) looks at the overhaul Times Square was undergoing in the 1990s, the sweeping away of an assortment of porn theaters, peep shows, and other marginal small businesses, the arrival of something more family- and tourist-friendly, blander, more corporate, more homogeneous--its Disney-fication, as it was sometimes called.

"Times Square Red," the first of the book's two essays, is in large part a memoir, as Delany was a frequent customer at the porn theaters over two or three decades. Not to watch the films (which he nonetheless has some brief and astute commentary on--see pp. 74-80), but for the sexual activity in the seats. Apparently, among the mainly-male audience, it was okay to open your pants and start masturbating, at which point some other gentleman might volunteer to complete the job for you, or fellate you. Money might change hands, or not, depending. Names might be exchanged, or not, depending. An audience member might only stop in briefly on his way home from work, or might spend the whole afternoon or evening there.

This sounds a little seedy, but Delany succeeds in making it seem almost utopian, in that ethnicity is not much of a consideration, nor class, nor education--anyone who can afford the modest price of admission may come in and take his or her chances. Scary things occasionally happen, there is a certain amount of odd behavior, but the milieu mainly operates smoothly on simple, shared rules. Delany has a wealth of anecdotes of this unusual but thriving community.

"Time Square Blue," the companion essay, is more academic, a kind of socioeconomic or sociopolitical analysis of the same scene described in the first essay. This essay is a bit heavier than its companion, but never dry.

Mainly, it aims to distinguish "contact"--the accidental, unplanned interactions that occur constantly in an urban environment, in grocery lines, restaurants, busses, and (yep) porn palaces--from "networking," an event (like a conference) designed to accelerate the growth of relationships among people with similar interests. Contact is a more random, less efficient way to form helpful relationships than networking is, but Delany makes a fascinating case that contact is actually just as productive of fruitful relationships--maybe even more productive, because it's a stew with more diverse ingredients, more happy surprises. It's also a good deal less frustrating that networking, possibly because networking means a lot of people competing for a small number of prizes, and plenty of people are just going to be disappointed.

The beauty of the old Times Square was that its heterogeneity made it a place rich in potential for contact. The new Times Square, by contrast, seems designed to prevent surprises, irregularities, accidents, unforeseen encounters. It's more like networking, and like networking, it disappoints; as an urban space, it fails.

"Times Square Blue" also includes a discussion of two perennial questions--"What makes us gay?" and "Why is there so much fear and hatred of homosexuality?" Delany's answers are, as one would expect, fresh and illuminating. I haven't room to recapitulate his arguments here, but to cut to the chase, one is made gay when one is interpellated (in the Althusserian sense) as gay, Delany argues, and fear of homophobia grows out of suspicion of pleasure, out of a fear that pleasure, rooted in desire, seeks and will achieve chaos if left to its own devices. The old Times Square may have looked like chaos, but it was actually a world with loose but functioning organization, serving a simple human need.