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An Interview With Samuel R. Delany, Literary Legend And Intellectual Historian Of Times Square Cruising Spots
By
Jesse Jarnow
Published Nov 20, 2019
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Jim Wells/AP/Shutterstock
By
Jesse Jarnow
Published Nov 20, 2019
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Had Samuel R. Delany only ever written Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, he would be remembered as one of Manhattan’s great urban historians and memoirists.
Republished in a 20th anniversary edition by NYU Press, Times Square Red is both a thoughtful remembrance and a serious study of Times Square’s infamous porn theaters and the gay hookup scene therein during their pre-AIDS 1970s-‘80s heyday. Mild-mannered and vivid, it is a surprising post-modern successor to Jane Jacobs’s *Death and Life of Great American Cities—*a profound argument for the street level community of small businesses and variety of life that existed in Times Square before its well-chronicled clean-up and Disneyfication in the early ‘90s.
When Times Square Red, Times Square Blue appeared in 1999, Delany was nearly four decades into a career as one of science fiction’s most groundbreaking writers. A leading light of the early ‘60s New Wave, Delany’s radical depictions of race, sexuality, and gender broke down barriers and created future worlds that envisioned new and ever-blurrier pluralities. Born in Harlem in 1942 and (besides a few short breaks) a New Yorker until his turn-of-the-century emigration to Philadelphia, his depictions of hologram-drenched urban decay created a bridge to the grimy street-level cyberpunk futures of proclaimed Delany-heads such as William Gibson. It is almost impossible not to feel the connections between the “unlicensed sector” of 1976’s Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia and the alternative corners of Manhattan occupied by Delany.
Though there’s very little sci-fi in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, the theoretical essay that compromises the book’s second half might also be read as an urban studies backstory to the futuristic panopticon Times Square (and Manhattan) have become in the 21st century. And while there might not be sci-fi, there is certainly frequent sex—perhaps one reason why it’s become his best-selling book alongside Dhalgren, the lyrical 1974 masterwork set in the reality-bending and mostly abandoned city of Bellona. But alongside Times Square Red, Times Square Blue’s hand and blow jobs, there are both provocative arguments and charmingly observed tidbits of lore and history—like the fact that 35mm films disappeared from porn theaters by 1986.
Times Square, 1984.
Mario Cabrera/AP/Shutterstock
Most of all, it offers a nuanced view of New York’s gentrification that goes beyond ascribing it to some combination of Rudolph Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg, and “broken windows”-style policing. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue traces out the forces and logic of the 42nd Street Development Project, predicting what some now call the “new urban blight” of empty luxury apartments and storefronts too expensive to rent. It is a clear-headed and intimate view of a New York that is irretrievably gone. Now 77, Samuel R. “Chip” Delany spoke with Gothamist about Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, what used to occupy the New York Sightseeing Visitors Center, and Grindr.
What do you think of what’s happened to Times Square since you wrote the book in 1999?
I know nothing about Times Square since then, really. Most of the time I haven’t been in New York City. In the spring, I did a program where I did go to New York and I talked about some things that happened in the theaters, and we did that one where the old Capri once stood [on 8th Avenue, between 45th and 46th], it’s not there anymore.
During that last visit to Times Square, were there any landmarks that you recognized?
Not really. We stood in front of where Stella’s used to be, and the Capri Theater had been entirely pulled down and turned into a parking lot.
Delany reads at the site of the Capri, May 2019
To what degree did your experiences in the movie theaters and New York’s other liminal cruising areas inform the fiction you were working on at the time, specifically your ideas about a heterotopian society in Trouble On Triton?
In Triton, it was pretty oblique, although the "runs" on some of the distant planets were modeled after the movie theaters. They were simply large indoor cruising areas built for the purpose. There was actually some of that in the ‘80s, with places like what, today I gather, is the New York Sightseeing Visitors' Center [777 8th Avenue; see linked photo] which used to be the Night Shift Theater with two screens and a bookstore upstairs and a two-story cruising area, some of which was modeled like Central Park, some of which was modeled like a gay bar, and some of which was modeled like a gym.
It had another name back then, but I just don’t remember what it was. I had sex there. It may have even been called The World (and was not bright yellow and red), though the marquee was there, probably without the Statue of Liberty.
Two of the characters in [2012’s] Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders spend time managing a theater like that, but it’s not in New York. It’s somewhere on the coast of Georgia, and it used to be an old opera house, and they’ve taken over the management. It gets a reputation for being that type of theater.
In the second part of Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, you differentiate between randomized and interclass urban “contact” and more focused “networking,” which the culture has seemingly shifted to in the age of social media. Are there still places where that kind of contact thrives?
It depends what you mean by contact but, yeah, you still meet people on the street all the time. You see people you haven’t seen in 25 years. You run into people walking through Central Park. But because I have not walked through Central Park for several years, I can’t tell you how friendly and how full of contact it is during the day, or what’s going on during the nights. There was a time when the Ramble after dark was a very kinky place, when all of Central Park West was a very cruise-y place. I don’t know how that’s persisted.
Do you have any thoughts on how the new generation of hook-up apps, like Grindr, have changed things?
The only one I’ve ever really used myself is Scruff. I have most of them on my phone. My friends said I’ve got to get them, and very sweetly, at a conference down at UPenn, put them on my cell phone. I tried Grindr once and, besides having to walk so long—because I don’t do very much walking anymore—I had a very nice sexual encounter. But there were some things that made me decide, “I’m not going to do this again,” although the guy I met was very nice and we had fun. There were other problems. Basically it was the strangest bathroom I’d ever been in. My assistant has heard this story a dozen times.
But I think they’re good things. I was at a party not too long ago where some girl was looking through what was available on Tinder, and found it interesting to look through that. The technology does change things, I think it changes things absolutely, but I don’t know how. I don’t have any way of evaluating that change myself right now. I’m not an expert in technology. I’m just a writer that puts down some of the things that he saw.
Follow Jesse Jarnow on Twitter @bourgwick.
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