Living the City: On Samuel R. Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

Abstract

Abstract: This essay attempts to read Samuel R. Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue as not just a recollection of exception to “development” projects in New York City but as a trenchant way to queer the city as an urban ontology. Delany challenges normative assumptions about how and where sexuality, gender, and race should be visible in urban space, by offering instead a cognitive map of “living the city” as a Black gay man. Delany also takes on what is otherwise unbearable in experiencing New York City over a quarter century, by addressing sexuality and the city as a formal experiment. The two parts of his project do not complement each other in any easy fashion; indeed, the pressure to split subjectivity in their juxtaposition forms a productive tension in how we might understand queering urban space as countercritique. In Delany’s work, living the city is not an escape from the unbearable contradictions of New York but is a way to think desire as both confrontation and as spacemaking. This is an architecture if not architectonic of what has not been in Times Square redesign.