Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

Samuel Delany is best known as the author of science fiction novels such as Dhalgren. He is also the author of a brilliant memoir , The Motion of Light in Water.This book is ostensibly about the transformation of Times Square but it's also an extension and updating of Delany's memoir. Delany is not a disinterested observer.He's a participant in the activities he describes.That gives the book a power it would otherwise lack.Delany's focus is narrow. He is not writing so much about Times Square as he is about what I'll call "Porn World".That is the pornographic movie theaters,sex emporiums and bars that served the patrons of these places.The HQ of this Porn World is Times Square but its substation was around 3rd Ave and 14th St.(If you never saw it in the flesh , you may have seen it in Taxi Driver).Delany a brilliant highly educated intellectual, apparently loved these places.They were always doomed.There was no way the powers that be were going to allow Times Square a transportation hub and the nations premiere theater district to forever remain the domain of Jack The Stripper and Teenage Nurses.As for 14th St, once the East Village became hip and trendy and NYU needed land, that was it for the unusual forms of entertainment that thrived on the east side(along with a very low life drug culture).The book is made up of two essays .I enjoyed the first one more.It's basically a collection of musings and observations, usually interesting , sometimes funny.The second essay put me off at first.It is "theoretical ". However I had a slightly revelatory experience after I started reading it.I was looking at THE SPECTATOR and I came across an article where the author talked about meeting a former manager of Roxy Music and later one of the Sex Pistols through drinking in pubs.I said to myself, an example of contact rather than networking.In otherwords I picked up on a key concept from Delany and used it without even thinking about it .So what at first stuck me as an utterly abstruse essay turned out to be analytically useful.You could probably dismiss Delany as crazed and weird and maybe you'd be right but mixed in with the craziness is considerable wisdom.

It seems like a lifetime ago, but before there was a Duane Reade, Starbucks, and TD Bank on every street corner, New York was a different place. Working class people could afford to live in the Village, Chelsea, and Hell's Kitchen or Clinton. Your neighbors were not all bland finance types who went to Wharton (I went to Penn, and I feel this way). Native New Yorkers actually worked waiter jobs and tended bar! New York was filled with rough and tumble guys who spoke English with non-Rhotic accents, lived in Single Room Occupancy houses, and those people rubbed elbows with college educated residents of the Upper West and East sides. There was a gritty-ness to the urban feel of New York street life, which now only exists in fleeting pockets, and is quickly being suplanted by the shining marble lobbies and spotless glass vitrines of LEED-certified office towers and luxury condos. Did I mention the Starbucks on every corner?In the 1990s a short-lived Disney Store opened on 42nd street next to the Disney renovated Amsterdam Theater. The efforts to "clean up" Times Square came to be known (perhaps unfairly) as the Disney-fication of the district, but Sam (Chip) Delany chronicles in time capsule-like fashion the lost micro-culture that was displaced in the process. 42nd street or the "Deuce" as it was called, was populated by a heterogenous intersection of rich, poor, white, black, able-bodied, and disabled who partook in the subversive sub-culture of adult movie houses and peep shows. Chip successfuly shows how the mixing of the classes in the underground gay sex cruising, straight prostitution, and sundry commerce that took place on the Deuce, brought together New Yorkers from different walks of life, thus serving a civic function. The book offers tremendous insight into the changes that led to the demise of the Deuce: Real estate prices, suburban growth, home video, the crack and HIV epidemics and perhaps more signifantly, the righteous panics they induced. This book is must reading for any urban planners, architects, social historians or young New Yorkers, interested in understanding what New York was like only a few years ago.

Honest, brilliantly written....but honest, honestly is not always interesting....like this.

This is a pathbreaking blend of memoir and critical reflection that provides one burly queer Black award winning novelist's genealogy of certain facets of a lost midtown NYC gay male sex culture. Brilliant and provoking!

The author looks back nostalgically at what many would call the seedy demi-monde of Times Square as it existed in the 1960's, 1970's and a bit later. Turns out he admits his tastes in public sex and homeless men as partners, along with the drug addled and others who inhabit this world. He makes spurious claims that such places are the only opportunities for genuine "contact" and class mixing in society. He seems to have spent a great deal of time in these locales, and I perceive perhaps his need to justify how he has spent his life. I found this raunchy and degenerate.In the second part of the book, he spins out dense academic prose with a strongly Marxist bent to denounce the re-developers of Times Square who have displaced him and his "contacts". He mentioned in Part One that many of them died of drug problems, AIDS, or other diseases. Yet, he argues for such cesspools to persist, subsidized by the land and building owners. It is amazing that this book is selling.

Initially I thought it was going to cover the entire gay sex scene in and around Time Square before the renovation, not just the sex theater scene only, aside from that it was interesting to see how much things had changed, but I thought at least a chapter or two could have been dedicated to parks, restrooms, the backrooms of bars, leather bars, the wharf, the truck docks, etc.

It's Samuel R. Delany, so the writing is, of course, superb.All of us who have lived in big North American cities over the past few decades will have experienced the horrors (and occasional glories) of gentrification, but Delany's take is quite possibly unique. Delany's focus is on now-vanished pornographic theatres which, he says, were an important part of the gay experience in the 1970s and 1980s (or at least, an important part of the gay experience for a certain subset of gay men - those who engaged in more or less anonymous sexual encounters).Never less than courageous, whether as novelist, essayist, or critic, Delany here argues - and *shows* through his own experiences - that the theatres (largely based in Times Square) provided a vital semi-public space for a significant portion of the city's gay men.Times Square Red, Times Square Blue alternates between an academic voice, and an unashamed and frankly erotic personal memoir. As I think Delany would argue, sex is a part of life and it is important to include it when considering the lives people live in cities, or elsewhere.This mem1oir will no doubt offend some, and disturb others, but if you approach it with an open mind, you will encounter an aspect of the vanished New York City that, if any, have dared to publish before.

enjoyed the book. really good quality and no damages done during shipping.