June 21–28, 2001

cover story|summer book quarterly

Sex, Race and Outer Space

How being black and gay influenced groundbreaking science fiction author Samuel R. Delany.

by Walidah Imarisha

Chairman of the beard: Delaney, looking intense.

In the middle of a Center City diner, with a grumpy waitress and eavesdroppers at the next table, Samuel R. Delany talks about what it means to be not only black, gay and a writer, but all three… and more. Delany’s determination to discuss issues of sexuality, race and gender in the context of his liquid, complex writing sets him apart from authors who offer easy solutions. Delany’s writings are a reflection of life, where there are no easy problems, let alone well-defined answers.

At first glance you may not take Delany for a famous science fiction writer. With his full beard and head of snow-white hair, walking cane and all-black immaculate outfit, Delany, who is on a book tour publicizing the re-release of his groundbreaking Dhalgren, could very well be mistaken for someone’s grandfather.

In fact, he has been called the grandfather of black science fiction, although Delany says this is a misnomer because black authors were publishing sci-fi in 1937; even W.E.B. Dubois, he says, wrote sci-fi. "I am just the first black writer who came up through commercial science fiction."

Just as, when he was 10, Delany decided to change his name to Chip (which is what everyone calls him now), the 59-year-old author has changed styles so many times in his 30-year career that his fans aren’t sure what to call him. The author of nearly 40 books, Delany has written science fiction, literary criticism, social commentary, pornography, graphic novels, memoirs and hybrid forms of all of the above.

And he has returned to the professorial life, teaching classes at Temple University’s English department. Based in New York with an apartment in Philadelphia, Delany does the almost two-hour commute on a sporadic basis. But growing up in New York toughened him up, he says. "There are places within the confines of Greater New York that it takes longer to get to by public transportation than it does to get to Temple."

Delany began teaching last January with a graduate creative writing workshop and a graduate literature class. In the fall he’ll be teaching an undergrad science fiction course and a graduate course "where we’ll be looking at interesting pairs of works."

When asked what he thinks of Philly students, he says, "The best students are the ones who most want to learn. And the student enthusiasm at Temple is quite wonderful."

This may be due in a large part to the open candor Delany exudes in person as well as in his writing. Delany says that he has always written what he calls "promiscuous autobiography," a style that earned him criticism early in his career. It wasn’t until the feminist movement came along and redefined the boundary between public and private that critics began to accept it.

Delany’s recently-published 1984, a collection of letters from the title year (the name is an intentional poke at George Orwell), is a deeply personal look into the mechanisms of a writer, the fears of a gay man at a time when the weight of an AIDS epidemic was just beginning to settle on the nation. It is a look at layers of identity. And it is representative of all Delany’s work, regardless of genre or style: the embodiment of the idea that the personal is political.

"All art is political," he affirms. "I feel that all human activity is political. [But] you’re not going to get knocked over the head with my politics. I don’t like art that is propaganda, for the most part."

In the last 10 years, Delany has incorporated this into his writing even more, focusing on creating nonfiction, especially concerning gay issues, and less science fiction. He says this is partially because of his foray into academia.

"I write what people urge me to write, and there’s a lot of push in a college to write nonfiction," he explains.

Still, you wonder if Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue is quite what a university has in mind. The 1999 book is a personal memoir about the disappearance of pornographic movie houses and public sex venues in Times Square as the city attempted to "clean up" its image in the 1990s.

Delany’s books promote a nontraditional way of looking at sex. "There is no normal sexuality, because what is considered normal is so specific that statistically, the whole concept of normal sexuality evaporates." He adds with a smile, "And I think that’s a good place to start from."

Almost all the plots of his novels revolve around analyzing gender roles and stereotypes, as well as questioning sexual norms. One of his earlier books, The Einstein Intersection, published in 1967, describes a people who have three biological sexes. A later one, Trouble on Triton, focuses on a society in which you can have your sexual orientation as well as your gender changed by a simple outpatient procedure.

As both a black man and as a gay man, two groups that have been consistently sexualized and objectified by mainstream society, Delany finds that middle ground between pleasure and exploitation in his writing. "Sexualizing something isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as long as you don’t use that as an excuse not to deal with that situation."

Deal with it his work certainly does, whether it’s on a distant planet or in the middle of New York City. But that’s not the only demon he wrestles with through words. Times Square Red also discusses gentrification and the changing face of New York, something Delany says his family knows well. His grandmother, says Delany, was actually one of the first blacks to move into Harlem in 1902, when it was mainly a Dutch and German neighborhood. She rented a room in a house owned by a black man married to a white woman. The first recorded house opened to blacks was in 1906, and white neighbors protested and picketed, even erected walls around the house. Delany says the difference is that the landlords in the 1906 house didn’t live on the property.

"There, the white landlords suddenly decided to make an apartment house all-black. They kicked the white tenants out, tripled the rents and sought black people who worked in the neighborhood." To meet the high rents, people had to live crowded in apartments, and racial tensions rose.

Delany is third-generation Harlem, but he went to a Park Avenue private school, so he says he felt like he lived in two worlds. Coming from a very politicized family in the 1940s and 1950s, Delany says, "Politics, and in particular, the politics of race, was something I went to bed with, leaving my relatives talking about. It was what I woke to in the morning."

But his experiences going to school with wealthy white children and playing with the working-class black youth in his Harlem neighborhood made him realize that the issue was more than just race. It is the tension between this emphasis on race and an emphasis on humanity that has given birth to his current project: a memoir about growing up in Harlem called Stay Black and Die. The title is from the old defiant boast, "I don’t have to do anything but stay black and die." Appreciative of double meanings, Delany says that it can be read two different ways. For him, the title is an exhortation for black people to claim their accomplishments for their race as well as for themselves.

"Especially now when there is so much covert energy loose in the system to appropriate all the things black people do that are not egregious in some manner, to take the color label off of it, I just think it’s important at this point for black people to sometimes remind people that the ordinary and extraordinary things that we do are done by black people."

This is partially the reason Delany is considered one of the first black science fiction writers, because he is so vocal about his race in connection to the stories he tells. Recently Delany celebrated the re-release of Dhalgren, an epic science fiction tale that explores issues of race and sexual identity set in extreme urban distortion. This book focuses on the alleged rape of a white woman by a black man, it discusses the assassination of a black leader, and it has a race riot in it. Not quite mainstream subject matter.

So with all the work that Delany has put out, why aren’t there more characters of color in the predominantly white world of science fiction? Delany can tick off a list of writers of color who have cast as main characters everything from a black women transported to slavery times to a gay Asian man. He says that while the breed of sci-fi authors of color may be small, it’s growing. When asked if it was easier being a gay black writer in the science fiction world, he laughs and says, "I don’t know that it’s easy anyplace. But the science fiction community has always been supportive and are politically a pretty liberal community."

The suspension of disbelief that accompanies reading science fiction is also helpful to writers of color. "The distance from society in science fiction gives a reassurance to the reader, and they can then look at it in an objective way," he says. Regardless of that, Delany doesn’t feel that sci-fi is a "better" genre for writers of color or gay writers, or for addressing social issues. "I don’t think sci-fi does it better than any other kind of writing. I think it does it just as well. It really depends on particular talents of the particular writer."

Which is a perfect explanation why Chip Delany is able to transcend genres, to put his science fiction books on the shelf next to his pornographic novels and literary criticisms. And why, at the end of the day, he proudly wears the titles of black, gay and writer.