Delany’s Runs

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

Abstract

This paper will focus on the empire-breaking potential of public queer sex in Samuel Delany’s 1984 novel, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. This novel, which describes a funneling and refracting of desire through compatibility algorithms and information technologies, also features park runs in which sex and pleasure can be derived freely and anonymously. These municipal cruising spaces, which are the site of queer sex of various kinds along with other fun behaviors, are surveilled by agents of a galactic-wide social media network called “the Web,” and, thus, present something of a illusion of state power that triggers new and novel ways for people and other non-humans to find pleasure in relationality. Though “the Web” itself may not constitute an empire per se, its interstellar reach and management of galactic information serve the function of a shady entity whose interests lie in enacting power across planets. Following work by Gershun Avilez and Robert Reid-Pharr, this paper will ask what sex in municipal public spaces brings to our understanding of the perils and pleasures of the differences forged across empires. What Delany offers us here (as elsewhere) is sex and sexual desire as sharp political weapons to be used against the state and its surveillance structures, even while fucking under the state’s eyes. In typical Delany fashion, however, the sense that might overwhelm the sensoria of these runs is taste. If taste is one of the senses less prone to scrutiny and inspection under the state—it certainly incorporates touch, which state power has often had a keen interest in forbidding, but is rarely policed in its own name—how might we see this relatively undertheorized sense and its potential for constructing queer bonds as central to the end of empire?

Author

• Omari Weekes, Queens College, CUNY