Status Updates From Times Square Red, Times Squ...

Finished the first of two essays which is mandatory for my Queer Life Narratives class and I’m honestly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. In Time Square Blue Samuel Delaney shares personal stories about his various sexual encounters in the bustling pornographic theatre scene of the 1960s-early 90s.

It is language (and/as social habit) that cuts the world up into the elements, objects, and categories we so glibly call reality—a reality that includes the varieties of desire; a reality where what is real is what must be dealt with, which is one with the political: the world is what it is cut up into—all else is metaphysics.

What homosexuality and prostitution represented for my uncle was the untrammeled pursuit of pleasure; and the untrammeled pursuit of pleasure was the opposite of social responsibility.

Large businesses and offices must alternate with small businesses and human services, even while places to live at all levels, working-class, middle-class, and luxurious, large and small, must embraid with them into a community.

There is a conservative, stabilizing discourse already in place that sees interclass contact as the source of pretty much everything dangerous, unsafe, or undesirable in the life of the country right now—from AIDS and “perversion” in all its forms, to the failures of education and neighborhood decay, to homelessness and urban violence.

Some old-fashioned Marxism might be useful here: Infrastructure determines superstructure—not the other way around. And for all their stabilizing or destabilizing potential, discourse and rhetoric are superstructural phenomena.

But what I see lurking behind the positive foregrounding of “family values” (along with, in the name of such values, the violent suppression of urban social structures, economic, social, and sexual) is a wholly provincial and absolutely small-town terror of cross-class contact.

Two orders of social force are always at work. One set is centripetal and works to hold a given class stable. Another set is centrifugal and works to break a given class apart.

Foucault gave us an analysis of power/knowledge. Desire/knowledge is just as important to understand—and, possibly and provisionally, in the current climate, even more so. Networking situations are self-replicating structures of knowledge and desire. Desire is what holds them stable and replicates them...

Watching the metamorphosis of such vigil and concern into considered and helpful action is what gives one a faithful and loving attitude toward one’s neighborhood, one’s city, one’s nation, the world.

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.

Were the porn theaters romantic? 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.

There is a vexing conceptual difficulty that one must face when considering how we might best structure our ever more complex societies, how we might manage the unruly bodies of even more unruly citizens.

"Tolerance—not assimilation—is the democratic litmus test for social equality."

"It is naive to think that these developers, who make a city space safe for one class of women by actively driving out another class [sex workers], have any concern for women *as a class*. The Times Square developers’ concern for women and women’s safety extends no further than seeing women as replaceable nodes with a certain amount of money to spend in a male-dominated economic system."

"As in the name of “safety,” society dismantles the various institutions that promote interclass communication, attempts to critique the way such institutions functioned in the past to promote their happier sides are often seen as... at worst, a pernicious glorification of everything dangerous: unsafe sex, neighborhoods filled with un-desirables..."

"Was commercial film pornography sexist? Certainly. Was it anywhere near as sexist as the legit films playing across the nation’s screens in the same years? Not unless you simply took sexist and sexy as synonyms."

"I don't see any reason that a woman... couldn't take any (or every) role I've already described or will go on to describe for any (and every) male theater patron...though it does unmitigated violence to the West’s traditional concept of “women.” But I believe it is only by inflicting such violences on the concept that we can prevent actual violence against women’s bodies and minds in the political, material world."