Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

I imagine nearly everything there is to be said about Samuel Delany's Times Square Red, Times Square Blue has probably been said. It manages to be a beautiful and also filthy portrayal of a city and a culture in shift. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue is about the decimation of a certain type of queer life, mirrored in the way a city changes. It seamlessly an era of New York City to the type of queer sex that was available, forcing the reader to connect the construct of a city to the people that actually inhabit it.

One thing I appreciate about Delany is that he's a very straightforward non-fiction writer. He is clear and transparent and conveys emotion without descending into hyperbole. It is, I suspect, a skill he developed in part by spending a significant amount of time at Times Square porno theaters, talking to people from all walks of life. Delany is smart without being pretentious, curious about being anthropological, and he invites readers in the way he invites his semi-anonymous sex partners in. The thread of the book that spoke the most to me was the care he exhibited. This care matches what I see in my own life, the way even things that are “just sex” are still points of human connection, chances to care for others. So often sex this type of sex is seen or understood solely in terms of gratification and I'm grateful to Delany for showing the opposite.

The book is sexual, but it's also about losing parts of a city, because the elements are intertwined. Delany draws a parallel between the lose of cruising spaces and the lose of other sites of cross-cultural / cross-class contact. As a current resident of New York City, the section that evoked some of the greatest yearning in me when his description of what connecting with landlords used to be like, before they were (largely) replaced by property management companies.

I can't say Times Square Red, Times Square Blue is something that you have to read to get a sense of queer history, but it does feel like an essential and important read for anyone who specifically wants to vividly connect with the history of queer New York.