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Delany catalogs his old haunts with affection: the Variety Photoplays and the Metropolitan downtown, the Cameo and the Capri and the Venus and the Eros a block west of Times Square along Eighth Avenue. The only one of these places I ever saw the inside of myself was the Eros, which was the only one that showed gay movies (and, later, videos), but its grunginess repelled me; I was more comfortable in the gay porn houses farther uptown, which at least seemed cleaner (though it was hard to tell in the dark). But Delany barely mentions either these places or the popular gay sex clubs downtown, and at first this omission puzzled me. It would never have occurred to me to visit the straight porn houses. What could they offer a gay man?

Reading "Times Square Blue," the first of the two longish essays the volume comprises, I found out. There was as much action in the straight theaters as in the gay ones. More, maybe. Many of the men in the audience (there were practically no women) were gay, and a lot of the straight (or "straight") habitués didn't care who was giving them a blow job while they had their eyes locked on the screen. Some of the characters Delany recalls were truly unsavory, such as the stud-turned-crackhead he came to think of as Joey-Who-Needs-a-Bath, with whom he had a regular $10 Thursday morning date. ("'You want to suck me? You want me to just jerk off? Or what?' ... Joey had developed a sore on the back of his left hand that was probably infected and was suppurating through its bandage. So I said: 'Why don't you jerk off?'")

Or the sadly demented Mad Masturbator he met one Saturday at the Variety Photoplays, who couldn't stop his compulsive pumping even to go to the john and suddenly peed on himself while they were talking. ("Jesus, I'm sorry ... I got an empty milk carton I usually do it in. Then I pour it out, later, outside. They don't like it when I go on the floor like this ... I get sores on my cock sometimes when I pee all over myself like that and I don't wash my hands.") These men must have appealed to his novelist's imagination, and his novelist's talent brings them to life.

It becomes clear from Delany's descriptions of these encounters and quite a few others that many of the "thousands and thousands of hours" he spent in the porn houses were more social than sexual. Some of the connections he made there deepened into lasting friendships. I doubt that he could have formed the same bonds in the gay theaters, despite his unusually developed social skills: He is a burly black man with a great big beard, and in my experience the clones who frequented the gay houses were looking mostly for other clones. But they weren't to Delany's taste anyhow. The gay places drew a middle-class gay clientele, while the straight theaters -- as "Times Square Blue" attests -- attracted guys from the working class down. And these are the men Delany is drawn to, socially and sexually.

Encounters across class lines are the central subject of the volume's brilliant second essay, "Three, Two, One, Contact: Times Square Red," which Delany has written in a style that, following the conversational colloquialism of "Times Square Blue," seems almost hilariously abstruse. He loves the jargon of post-structuralist theory (the "red" of "Times Square Red" refers, I assume, to the essay's Marxist assumptions), but he wields it -- just about uniquely, in my experience -- with a Solomonic grace. He seldom allows his argument to drift away from the reader (though I wish he would provide some definitions for the less theoretically grounded when, for example, he proclaims that superstructure can impinge on infrastructure), and he has a good habit of anchoring his observations with homely examples. Addressing ongoing issues of interclass communication and conflict, he offers anecdotes about himself and his landlord.

Cities, he argues, afford opportunities for two types of social interaction. The first, which he calls networking -- nonjudgmentally, he claims, but I don't believe him -- occurs within preselected groups (at work, at school, at writers' conferences) and is pretty much limited to members of a single class. Then there are the more random encounters of city life: the conversation you strike up with the person next to you in the checkout line at the grocery store, or the guy who has just gone down on you at the Variety Photoplays. This type of interaction, which he terms contact, provides far more opportunity for communication between members of different classes, and Delany declares his biases in axiomatic form in the very first sentence of his essay: "The primary thesis underlying my several arguments here is that, given the mode of capitalism under which we live, life is at its most rewarding, productive, and pleasant when large numbers of people understand, appreciate, and seek out interclass contact and communication conducted in a mode of good will."

"Pleasant" is a word that comes up a lot. It carries the weight of Delany's value judgments (many of them indebted, as he acknowledges, to the work of Jane Jacobs) about urban spaces and the kind of intercourse they do or don't encourage. And at the root of his enraged protest over the exclusionary vision that has decimated the 42nd Street community lies an unpleasant sensation of loss: "What has happened to Times Square has already made my life, personally, somewhat more lonely and isolated. I have talked with a dozen men whose sexual outlets, like many of mine, were centered on that neighborhood. It is the same for them. We need contact."

On a theoretical level, at least, he is thinking about more than his own gratification. At one point he imagines a series of public sex institutions for women, "equipped with a good security system, surveillance, alarms, and bouncers (as well as birth control material)," where "the management would make clear that, within its precincts, all decisions were women's call, with everything designed for women's comfort and convenience." That proposal alone pegs Delany as a utopian thinker. But he is also disarmingly dry-eyed. His summary of what crack did to the Times Square neighborhood in the '80s is bleakly unvarnished. And he is unsentimental almost to the point of brutality. "Were the porn theaters romantic?" he asks. "Not at all. But because of the people who used them, they were humane and functional, fulfilling needs that most of our society does not yet know how to acknowledge."

Delany probably couldn't rise to this level of conviction if he weren't such an exhibitionist. Of course, most writers are, on some level -- writing is performance, after all -- just as readers are, by definition, voyeurs. But he's more flamboyant than most of us, both on the page and off. With his regal bearing, his portly stature, his dapper cane and his colossal white beard, he must have cut quite a figure in the porn palaces. Despite his (uncharacteristic and unconvincing) assertion that "a certain reticence is appropriate when discussing it," he doesn't shy away from letting us know that "on a scale of small, medium, and large I fall directly on the border line between the latter two." That's nice. But it doesn't hold a candle to the sexual self-exposure he volunteers in "Bread & Wine," the alarmingly raw comic book he has just collaborated on with artist Mia Wolff.

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