​​Delany’s Sex Commons

• In Event: Delany and Sex at the End of Empire

Abstract

In honor of the 25th anniversary of Lauren Berlant’s and Michael Warner’s essay “Sex in Public,” which traced the privatization of sex and the changing public sex cultures of New York City at the turn of the millennium, this talk considers how “sex is mediated by publics” in Samuel R. Delany’s representations of urban, interclass contact. Berlant’s and Warner’s three different definitions of “public” (“social spaces and practices directly related to sex;” “social spaces and practices organized around sex”; and “tacit scenes of sexuality…that protect the zone of heterosexual privacy”) are used to trace the erotics of queer worldmaking as Delany lived it and imagined it in the gentrifying city. Specifically, this talk will focus on two of Delany’s New York City-based works: Times Square Red, Times Square Blue and The Motion of Light in Water to consider critically how his writing has always testified to, and envisioned the more accessible forms of erotic living and nonstandard intimacies that Berlant and Warner called for. My focus here is a call to challenge the seeming irrelevance of sex, especially in the face of societal breakdown and despondency, in the service of reanimating explicit public sex cultures.

Author

• Kirin Wachter-Grene, School of the Art Institute of Chicago