Times Square Red Times Square Blue by Samuel R Delany

This one sometimes took me to the same place as reading about what can be a happier life for humans in a hunter-gatherer group. It is the place of emotional frustration for me. The feeling that things could, without a lot of effort, maybe even less effort, be a lot more pleasant. The restrictions of civilization when mixed up so deeply with global capitalism create a reality that we live in that we take to be normal. But who determines “normal”? The current situation, current meaning during my experience, does not feel normal to me. It feels empty and dark and lonely and without much hope of real human connection that is not somehow connected with money. 

This book is all about connection from the most basic to more complex. Much of it centers around sex. Sex with people in public situations and in places of business fexible enough to permit it or even have it somehow built into the business model. Delany describes these places. They were mostly movie theaters and most of them were old rundown places that had shown pornography. Delany describes himself as, for years, a frequenter of such places where he would engage in oral sex with other men. 

Delany is an urban man. Raised in Manhattan. He has the spirit of a city about him and love of the random encounter, sexual or otherwise. I can only report with a great deal of shame what this book clearly showed me about myself. I was already spoiled by the isolation of suburbia before arriving to live in NYC in my early 30s, over 30 years ago. I could just be a temperamentally shy awkward man or that could have been learned in the safety and isolation of suburban life, and this was in Ohio; a conservative place in a conservative time. I never even visited a major city until age 18 when I hitchhiked to NYC by myself. Being honest about my behavior in the city, I now see that I used it as more to escape, hide out, ti become anonymous, and not be looked at too closely since my social skills and impulses were so low. Maybe if I had grown up in the city with more variety of people about, I would not have developed such lonerism. Maybe I would have found a more welcoming community where my impulses could be channeled to play with like-minded individuals rather than half buried in shame, hiding out until it’s all over. Maybe I could have connected with others better. 

I had been to several of these movie theaters he writes about. I remember Variety Photoplays on 3rd ave and the Metropolitan a couple blocks away on 14th St.. Both sites have gone to demolition and new taller buildings some years ago. I mess them, as well as the Cameo on 8th Ave midtown. 

I wasn’t as into the scene as energetically as Delany but I’m not gay, but somewhere on the bisexual scale and from Ohio, etc.

So much of this is about The Enclosure. A major part of the story of modern civilization is about Enclosure, locking away, fencing off what was once collectively free and making it owned and somehow involving a fee of labor or currency for continued usage. First there is free land where plants, animals, and human animals roam free and live from this land the best they can. But then someone wants to own this land and the people end up having to pay some way or other to survive rather than scratch a living out of the land. Or they can still scratch a living but must give the owner a percentage of their efforts to be permitted to continue surviving.  

The sex in the book is to illustrate the varieties of connection. The prime theme is that connection is better than networking. He morns the destruction of the public sex venues in the renovation of Times Square, because they can facilitate “interclass connection” through basic human sexual interest. His stance is basically anti- big capitalism as destructive of small local business that has an intimate connection to the community and street life and that  brings the safety of people around a healthy and diverse street life. 

I think he is missing some big critical part of the Enclosure. He talks about the buildings, the difference between infrastructure and superstructure, which is the skyscrapers that replaced the small, the rundown and the local with big business national brands. 

But this didn’t happen just in the 1990s the process was already going on for decades. It seems to me that most these theaters themselves were an earlier manifestation of local live theater or whatever entertainment being destroyed by the products of the Hollywood movie business already connected to Wall Street investment dazzling us with its powerful superstructure of dreams. The theaters becoming redundant with television and later even porn theaters less in use when one could watch porn at home via VHS cassettes. By the 1980s the theaters were the realm of those interested is some same sex teasing or action or the men who situationally couldn’t watch tapes at home. Of course now this is all on the internet. 

This Enclosure was very late to the city. The suburbs were built that way, with the places the public could go almost entirely limited to commercial venues such as the shopping mall which became the only place for kids to hang out and try to connect. 

There are a lot of people now who have fled the suburbs for a better life in the revitalization cities. But they are pre-conditioned for the Enclosure that is part of the revitalization. Unaccustomed to and unaware of earlier city life, they are most comfortable with the Starbucks and other familiar brands and they bring this brand familiarity and loyalty with them. 

Delany discusses women a bit and how the open, anonymous sex venues are not used by them. He envisions a sort of hostel set up where women could bring strangers or acquaintances in a public setting safer than bringing someone into the privacy of a home. Some women can and do enjoy hookups with strangers, so perhaps that is possible some time in the future as the restrictions of the ideology of the patriarchy, and its women followers, continue to crumble. 

There is a big fat novel Delany wrote about the theater sex called The Mad Man. I read that some years ago. It is rather unique I think.