Longer Views

by Samuel R. Delany

  As I thought about it, it occurred to me that, in similar environments, I’d actually observed many hours of fetishistic behavior by any number of men over the years, though most of those had involved work shoes or engineers’ boots in specifically S&M contexts—so, therefore, I knew something quite real about that behavior. But, at the same time, I’d spent perhaps less than a single hour talking about that behavior with any or all of the men involved—including Mike.

  That meant there was a great deal I didn’t know.

  What could I explain?

  What could I not explain?

  Even though I’d responded sexually to Mike, I could no more speak for him than I could speak sexually for any of the very few women (eight, by my count) I had gone to bed with—or, indeed, for any of the many thousands of men.

  The Freudian dimorphism in the psychoanalytic discussion of fetishism is one of the empirical disaster areas in the generally brilliant superstructure of Freudian insights: men can be fetishists but women are kleptomaniacs. And within the last two years I have heard at least one psychoanalytic critic state all but categorically that no one has ever found a female fetishist.

  Those of you who have read my autobiography of a few years ago (The Motion of Light in Water [1988], New York: A Richard Kasak Book, 1993) may remember that my own fetish is men’s hands—especially the hands of men who bite their nails. Nor do I have any problem analyzing my particular perversion as a fetish. This critic’s pronouncement put me in mind of a gathering of artists and artisans some fifteen years ago in Greenwich Village, that included a lean, good-natured redhead, who was both a carpenter and a leather craftsman and whose hands were large, work-soiled, and (to me) sexy—and his petite, blonde wife. In the course of an afternoon, where the group was jesting with one another loudly about sex, I heard the redhead’s wife declare, “Someday Todd’s going to wash his hands, get them completely clean—at which point I’ll probably leave him forever!”

  To say my ears perked up is to use a wholly inadequate metaphor for my response. At the time, I was still trying to understand my own sexuality in these matters; minutes later I’d contrived to question the young woman as to exactly what she meant. And, while the others joked on at the other side of the table, we spoke in some detail about her own attraction for men’s hands soiled from work, and how this attraction had been—and currently was—constituted into the range of her sexual life: we exchanged childhood experiences, jokes, and current observations. Granted that there were idiosyncratic differences between her object and mine, nevertheless by the end of the conversation I simply had to say: if I had a fetish, then so did she.

  And unless she was prevaricating, to say it is impossible that she exists simply will not do. Nor can I think that all those leather dykes have merely snitched their jackets, studded belts, wristbands, chains, and engineer’s boots.

  In other places I have written that singular, empirical examples—and that is all the particular orders of narrative I indulge here can give—are the place from which to start further, operationalized investigations. They are not the place to decide one has found a general fact. And I mean it—here, too. Certainly I would like to see such operationalized study begun. And my utopian hope is that in such stories as these such study might begin. That is why I’ve told the tales I have.

  But this suggestion of an egalitarian fetishism brings us to a truism in the field of gay studies that, like any truism, it might be time to review. It is one that again and again, in other discussions, I have felt must stand at the head of any number of talks and articles on matters gay. Let me quote from the last time someone else quoted me on just this point.

  Here is Teresa de Lauretis, writing in her introduction to a 1991 issue of a special number of differences, devoted to Queer Theory:

  Delany opens his introduction [to Uranian Worlds] with the words: “The situation of the lesbian in America is vastly different from the situation of the gay male. A clear acknowledgement of this fact, especially by male homosexuals, is almost the first requirement for any sophisticated discussion of homosexual politics in this country.” [De Lauretis goes on:] And, as if he were reading my mind or telepathically sharing the thoughts I put into words in this introduction, he adds: “Gay men and gay women may well express solidarity with each other. But in the day to day working out of the reality of liberation, the biggest help we can give each other is a clear and active recognition of the extent and nature of the different contexts and a rich and working sympathy for the different priorities these contexts (for want of a better word) engender.”

  Then de Lauretis goes on to quote my co-introducer, Joanna Russ, in her delineation of precisely what some of those differences were in terms of literary availability.

  Paradoxically, it is because I wrote that—and because I still stand by it—that I want to tell another, worrisome tale.

  It is a simple one. It happened on a chill, early spring afternoon, during my middle twenties, when I sat on the rim of the fountain in Washington Square with a hefty young woman about my age, who wore glasses, black jeans, a leather jacket, and who went by the name Hank.

  We talked—talked from the breeze-laced height of the day till the sky above us deepened to indigo, sharing our sexual histories. We were not talking of my adventures on the docks or in subway johns or about my frustrations at trying to establish a more lasting relationship in such a context; we did not discuss her bar life or the cycle of seemingly endless hurts that were serial monogamy.

  Rather we talked about the burgeonings of our sexual awareness, in the family, in school, in the street, and in the times we moved from one to the other, now in our early summer camp experiences, now on our visits to cousins in the country, or with playmates away, at last, from overseeing adults. We talked mostly of happenings that occurred before ages thirteen and fourteen, and of experiences that certainly seemed, for both of us then, directly constitutive of who, sexually, we had become. Both of us, again and again, were astonished at how many experiences we shared, how many of the separate lessons that we’d learned were clearly congruent, and how much of the stuff of the initial awareness of the sexual—from the body out—seemed all but identical for the two of us. But, given the time we had our conversation, no one had yet told us that we were supposed to be all that different. Hank remarked on the similarities. So did I.

  For better or for worse, the solidarity I feel with many lesbians is still based on such experiences. What my understanding of that vastly differing context explains for me is why those conversations are rarer for me with women than with men. An understanding of that vastly differing context allows me to translate from women’s experiences to mine—when such translation is possible. An understanding of that vastly differing context explains for me why so frequently no translation takes place at all. But what that context does not do in any way is validate the notion for me of some transcendental, irreducible sexual difference between men and women, either in terms of sex or gender, straight or gay, a difference that becomes the ground for any and every social difference one might want to elaborate from it. Indeed, it is precisely my understanding of the specific complexity of the context that makes an acceptance of that irreducible and transcendental difference impossible for me.

  Certainly the identification I speak of is always partial, problematic, full of mistakes and misreadings. . . . But that is my experience with any identification I feel with any other, male, female, gay, straight. . . .

  Thus even the similarities are finally, to the extent they are living ones, a play of differences—only specific ones, socially constituted. Not transcendental ones.

  Thinking about discussing this with you tonight, I was wondering at the same time about the inside/outside metaphor that common sense so frequently asks us to use—but which has come under an intensive critique in recent years.

  For, in terms of the progression of my didactic narrative argument, we are about to take up the phrases “inside language” and “outside
language.”

  I did not tell Hank all my stories.

  Doubtless, she did not tell me all hers.

  I told her, for example, none of the stories I’ve so far told here. And the stories I did tell—it occurred to me when I was reviewing the incident for inclusion in this account tonight—were, none of them, included in the autobiography I wrote twenty years later . . . though I still remember them very well! Which is to say, they still remain largely outside language.

  Diana Fuss has written, introducing the fine volume she edited, Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (New York: Routledge, 1991): “The figure of ‘inside/outside’ cannot easily or ever finally be dispensed with; it can only be worked on and worked over—itself turned inside out to expose its critical operations and internal machinery” (p. 1).

  Fuss begins the argument I have quoted from the “philosophical opposition between ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual,’” heterosexuals representing the inside and homosexuals the outside. But I think there’s a finer economy of inside and outside where her point is just as valid: that is the notion of sexuality itself as always occurring partly inside language and partly outside it.

  I am not speaking of a hypostatized language as an unarticulated totality, beside which some sex acts occur in an ideal silence apart from the word, while others are swaddled in a constant, approved, and privileged discourse. I speak rather of language as an articulated and variegated set of discursive fields, many of them interpenetrating, but many of whose distinct levels bear a host of economic relations one to another. Some of those levels are privileged, some are not; some are notably more ephemeral than others. These levels fall into hierarchies of reproducibility, accessibility, and permanence. And some never leave that most ephemeral state—that internal speech of the individual we call unarticulated thought. In that sense, of course, all human activity is inside language. But by the very same set of distinctions, all human activity takes place inside certain orders of language and outside certain others—and that is the force of the metaphor behind what I’ve said about activities inside language and outside language till now, as it will be behind what I have to say in the discussion to come.

  As comfortable as I am calling the tales I tell here “true,” these tales are nevertheless quite coded—coded as to their selection, as to their narrative form, as to their referents, their texture, and their structures; and the conventions that code them were more or less sedimented well before the incidents that prompted the accounts took place. Despite their sedimentation, however, these codes have also shifted with history: such tales certainly could not have been told, say, thirty-five years ago at a formal, public, university gathering—inside this particular order of language.

  No less coded—and no less true—is this last of my tales. Its coding today may even be the most self-evident, the most obvious.

  One bright, November afternoon, as I was passing just across the street from the theater I was telling you about before, a young man in his early twenties, slight and half-a-head shorter than I, came up to me. Pretty clearly Irish American, he was wearing a jean jacket and a broad smile. His hands were in his pockets, and, in the sunny chill, he breathed out white wisps. “Hey, you want to get together with me? I seen you comin’ around here a lot. Somebody told me you write science fiction. I like that stuff. I read it all the time. Makin’ it with somebody who writes about spaceships, and time machines, and flying saucers and stuff, that’d be pretty cool.”

  I laughed. “Sorry,” I told him. “Not today.” And went on about my business.

  A few days later I passed him again, and again he approached me: “Hey—when are you an’ me going to get together?”

  Smiling, I shook my head and walked on.

  Days later—the third time I passed him—he called me over to a doorway he was standing in and, when I came, bombarded me in an intense whisper with a detailed and salacious account of what he could do for me. He finished up: “And I ain’t expensive either. Man, I’m a street person. I can’t afford to charge high prices—isn’t that a bitch? I just want to make enough to get high.”

  “Look,” I said. “First of all what’s your name?”

  Let’s say he said it was Billy.

  “Billy,” I said, shaking his offered hand, “I was about to get something to eat. I’ll buy you a sandwich. But that’s all.”

  “Sure,” he said. “It’s a start. Maybe something’ll develop.”

  “Nothing’s going to develop,” I told him, “except a sandwich. But come on.”

  At a hot-plate bar two blocks south on Eighth Avenue, I had a pastrami on rye, while Billy had a roast beef on whole wheat, which he ate with two or three fingers of both hands pushing and working inside his mouth, for seconds at a time, to tear the food apart. No beer; he just wanted a soda. While he drank it, he listed the titles and summarized the plots of the last dozen science fiction novels he’d read. I allowed as to how he had good taste. Wiping at his mouth with his napkin, he apologized: “You know, I used to be a pretty neat eater, would you believe it? But I guess living out here, I’m turning into kind of a pig. It’s my teeth. They give me a lot of trouble, and a lot of things I can’t really chew. How come you won’t give me a tumble?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  He sat back in the high, wooden booth seat and countered: “Do you really want to tell me?”

  I laughed. “You seem like a smart kid. You’re actually pretty good-looking—and you keep yourself clean. I’d never have thought you were living rough.”

  “I wash in the bathroom at Port Authority every morning.” He winked at me. “I do sort of okay out here.”

  “Billy, the truth is, I just don’t find you sexually attractive. And if I’m going to pay for it—even the price of a bottle of crack—it seems to me I should be getting something I’ll enjoy.”

  “You’d enjoy it,” Billy said, with a nod of mock smugness. “I’d see to that. But I get your point.” Then he narrowed his eyes. “You say I look good; so how’d you know I was a crackhead?”

  “How did you know I was a science fiction writer?” I asked. “It’s a fairly small world out here.”

  “Mmm.” Billy nodded.

  But two weeks later, the next time I ran into him, Billy approached me with:

  “I’m hungry. You wanna buy me a sandwich?” Which I did—the second of perhaps a dozen over that winter and into spring. During our meals I got the pieces of a story, tedious in the similarity of its details to any hundred like tales of like young men and young women: relations severed angrily and violently by a Brooklyn family because of his drug involvement; a penally checkered career throughout his late adolescence; his last two years (he was twenty-four) living on the street—most of that time, in Billy’s particular case, sleeping in the upper tier of the Port Authority Bus Station’s Gate 235, which, because the gate was not in service that year, became the rotational sleeping space of some dozen young people (all but Billy, in those days, black) in an uneasy and often violated truce, both with each other and the Station authorities. Some of those details bespoke a level of organization, however, notably higher than most street druggies maintained—especially those on crack. Billy always kept two shirts and a pair of pants in the dry cleaners around on Ninth Avenue, one of which he took out every three or four days. Sometimes I gave Billy science fiction novels to read.

  As such friendships will, this one tapered off to where we just called hello to each other on the street when we passed; later, from time to time, we only nodded, or raised a hand. Then, one summer’s day as I was walking up Eighth Avenue, I saw Billy sitting on the single step in a doorway, plaid sleeves rolled up his forearms, still neat and clean enough so that most people would not guess immediately he was homeless.

  As I nodded, he looked up at me, elbows on his knees and one hand holding his other wrist. “Well,” he said. “I got it.”

  That halted me. I searched about for a reasonable response. Billy was no
t above feigning illness to put the touch on you. For three months, about six months before, he’d had a low-grade ulcer which, while he’d treated it with Mylanta and Emergency Room prescriptions, he’d not been above working up into something more serious to hustle a few dollars from sympathetic passers-by. But this seemed outside Billy’s usual range of fictions. I asked: “Any idea how you picked it up?”

  “Oh,” he said, “sure. Needles. I’d never do anything sexually that would give it to me.” He nodded. “Sharin’ needles.”

  “Well,” I said, at a loss to think of an appropriate rejoinder. “You’ve got to take care of yourself.” Then I walked on . . . while I realized the fact that Billy had not asked me for a handout as I moved away was probably the surest confirmation of the truth of what he’d just told me.

  I saw Billy a couple of other times—even had another sandwich with him. “I had the pneumonia,” was how he put it, at the hot-plate bar; he dug inside his mouth. “They said, at the hospital, if I got it again, that would be it. They also said, since they knew I had it now, if I showed up with pneumonia again, they wouldn’t take me back. Can they do that? I guess, if you don’t got any money, they can do what they want. Right?”

  All I could say was that, honestly, I didn’t know.

  Work had already taken me out of state; the next few times I saw Billy were in my sporadic trips back to the city. October a year ago, when the weather took a final leap into Indian summer warmth, briefly I was in New York and walking up Eighth Avenue. In the same doorway where I occasionally used to find Billy sitting, I noticed a gaunt man, his shoulders near nonexistently thin. His eyes and temples were sunken. The lower part of his face was swollen so that he seemed a sort of anorexic Neanderthal. He wore a baggy blue t-shirt, and his legs came out of a pair of even baggier Bermudas like sticks. He looked up to catch me staring at him—and I thought to look away. But, slowly, he smiled and said: “What’s the matter, Chip—don’t you recognize me?”