Moose Media Musings: Dhalgren and Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

As of a week or so ago I finished a reread of Dhalgren, the 1975 book by Samuel Delany. It’s a good book, and you should read it. There’s lots of books about cities that, for me, sort of fail to capture what being in a city feels like — the way that when you are in one, you are an unpredictable point of contact with multiple other categories of person who maybe only know the categories you belong to through their encounter with you, for better or worse (and importantly it can be either or both).

When I followed up the scifi novel with Delany’s 1999 nonfiction book Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, consisting of a collection of anecdotes and stories about the gay hookup scene of New York as Delany experienced its changes due to NY’s own infrastructural changes (Blue) and a more intense theorization of what those changes are and do and how it might be otherwise (Red), I was delighted to see thinking about cross-class contact (a term very important for Delany) made explicitly central. I found myself occasionally at odds with Delany’s political perspectives, but in ways I found productive. The whole theorization of Contact and Networking as seperate creatures where those in power tend to infrastructurally correct for the latter at the expense of the former strikes me as exceptionally useful in the moment of writing this (as, for example, real world policing of gender expression continues to escalate in cruelty, and various websites tighten their grip on crushing what they see as unacceptably pornographic content out of their online geographies).

My copy of Dhalgren has an intro by William Gibson that I quite liked. Having read my first Gibson this year, learning that he likes Dhalgren really clicked a lot of what I like about his work into place for me.

You should read both of these books, if you have not. You should read them both especially if you care about cities as a thing that exist, and if you are a queer that exists in them. I recall a period of time in my life where recommendations for Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino were an omnipresent part of talking to people about pieces of art, with the way that book thinks The City As A Thing Worth Thinking central to those discussions. I don’t dislike that book, really, but I wish even one in ten of those recommendations had been for Dhalgren. I think it is a meatier and more troubling (positive, productive) object.

There’s also something truly delightful to me about a novel that can spend pages of meditation on how human habits respond to infrastructural pressures outside their capacity for comprehension, followed up with the protagonist equipping his signature low-tech cyberpunk claw gauntlet.
The story in Times Square Blue about the sewer worker who hated his beautiful hands made me cry.