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"A Certain Age"
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The high laced workboots and the three layers of socks beneath them came off -- and out of them came a stench that, frankly, beats anything I've ever smelled before! The inner pair of socks had simply decayed around his feet ... I've seen people take baths where the water turned grey from the dirt. But five minutes after he got started I looked in to see how he was doing. He could have been sitting in a tub of India Ink!

I'm fastidious, I know, but -- yucch. The "shit-and-vinegar" stink of Dennis' feet was so pervasive, Delany tells us, that the room was going to be "unrentable for the next few days." And yet, and yet … there's something almost fairy-tale-like about the occasion. It's as though we're seeing Dennis emerge from the misery of a long and terrible spell. Delany tells their story simply and heartbreakingly, sequinning the text with glittering nocturnal quotations from "Brod und Wein," an early 19th century elegy by the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin. (At the time of the events, he was studying Paul de Man's reading of the poem.) They make a haunting overlay.

Nevertheless, "Bread & Wine" isn't satisfying. The story is too unsettling (and perhaps too strangely sweet) to lend itself to comic-book treatment. Important questions don't get answered. What have these two impossibly unlike men spent the past decade talking about? How does Dennis fit in on the Amherst campus? He was straight before he hit the skids; he told Delany early on, "You hear women talk about guys who just want to keep them for their bodies, and they don't like it ... Well, I wouldn't mind if some guy wanted to keep me just for my body. " He got his wish. Does he yearn for women now? Or does he still have sex with women? This is all too bewildering -- tell us more! The story goes on for a mere 44 pages, but it's the stuff of a long, ambiguous, rich and complicated novel.

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue By Samuel R. Delany New York University Press 203 pages Bread & Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York Written by Samuel Delany Drawn by Mia Wolff Juno Books 55 pages Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

Delany and Wolff have something else in mind, though. The book is subtitled "An Erotic Tale of New York," and it's intended simply as a story -- a real-life parable, perhaps -- about conjugal negotiation and fulfillment. And I can't deny that it's riveting. Still, what held me truly spellbound, and a little horrified, was the outlandish exhibitionism of it all, which continues even after the story proper ends, in a discussion the principals engage in about how well Wolff's drawings captured the events. Referring to a picture of himself climaxing messily in Delany's mouth, Dennis tells his lover, "Man, you ain't never wasted that much in your life! I got that T-shirt last year, it says: 'Mean people suck. Nice people swallow.' Well, you're one of the nice people. But I guess that's what you call poetic license."

My natural response to that piece of information is to clear my throat and say dryly, Well, that's really more than we needed to know. But is it? I don't know. Whatever its failings, "Bread and Wine" had the power to make me step back and examine my own discomfort. What bothers me about it? Obviously not the explicitness, which I like in pornography. The level of personal exposure? Maybe -- but I seem to feel a lot more embarrassed for Delany and Dennis than they do for themselves. Why should I care? Partly, I imagine, because I had to face some of the same issues Delany had to in writing about these two books. How much do I want to reveal about myself to a bunch of anonymous readers? Fairness demands that I tell you where I'm coming from; letting you think I was a straight man who'd never seen the inside of a porn theater would color -- or, rather, discolor -- everything I've written here. But at what point does critical responsibility cross the line into narcissism? Am I doing this because I'm obliged to or because I want to? And anyway, how much can I tell you about myself without becoming a bore?

Delany's strategy, meanwhile -- I assume it's a strategy -- is to remain blithely unaware that he might be making anybody squirm. Not his problem. But he does understand that this exhibitionism isn't a side issue. The embarrassment most of us feel at talking about these topics is precisely what's made it so easy for the Giuliani administration to padlock the theaters. Defense of the porn houses usually takes place on the elevated plane of civil liberties; Delany is one of the few public figures who's had the chutzpah to say he loved them. Some of his ideas may sound quixotic, but he's got a formidably clear head. Forty years ago, after all, how many gay men and women were willing to come out at all? Exhibitionism has its uses. Delany has done something in these two books that I admire even as, I admit, it gives me pause, something beyond just acknowledging his homosexuality. He's gone out on a limb and acknowledged his sexuality.
salon.com | August 10, 1999

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