The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village

by Samuel R. Delany

  At Dirty Dick’s I met Marilyn. She grinned at me. “How are you doing?”

  “Fine.”

  “You look like you’re having a wonderful time!”

  I tried to smile benignly.

  Later, the light came on above the jukebox. The policeman came in. The dancers drifted back against the wall. Then, the empty dance floor itself split in two. The halves rolled asunder, and, from the revealed darkness, an immense turtle, big as a double bed, crawled up from the fundament of the world, waddled down the aisle beside the bar stools, to the door, and—after the policeman—went out. Then the floor rolled together once more.

  The jukebox resumed; and with infinite cool, the dancers moved out over the resealed boards to begin their gyrations, not deigning to comment on the depths their steps rhythmically covered.

  The next morning I awoke in bed with a little redheaded fellow—we were in his basement apartment somewhere in New Rochelle, he told me. My memory is only of the night’s intense, almost herculean sex. But all that morning, as he made me coffee, as we showered together, as he gave me the money to take the train back down to the city, he kept telling me, “You were describing the strangest things last night—when we were coming up here, I mean. You were really saying some weird stuff. Man, that was some of the strangest stuff I’d ever heard about. I didn’t understand most of it. But it sounded so …” (It was not getting high that was so sixties; rather it was this kind of reaction to it.) Fortunately—for you, for me—I don’t remember any of what I’d said.

  34. One person we met at the bar was a dark-haired, good-looking Jewish young man named Mike, in his early twenties, who had inherited a vast, labyrinthine apartment from a vanished lover in the West Street area. Over several weekends he gave various loud parties, sections of which became orgies; and the traffic between his apartment and the bar, three blocks away, was a constant movement of blacks, whites, Hispanics, working and middle class—mostly men but including a countable number of women.

  Saturday night at one of these, Mike announced, “We’re going to the Baths! But you”—he turned and put his hand on a bemused Marilyn’s forearm—“are staying here. Don’t worry, dear, I’ll get him home before the sun comes up. I promise.” It was all rather drunken and confusing.

  I’d heard of the St. Marks Baths, but I’d never been there. Once Sonny had mentioned that sometimes he went there to sleep. Yes, sex went on. But if you went to the downstairs dorm, that was off-limits and people left you alone. Most of my extramarital sex had been pretty well confined to the streets, the trucks, and the back balcony of a small movie house on Third Avenue just below Fourteenth Street, Variety Photoplays. Sonny hadn’t made the baths sound very exciting.

  But three cabs full of young and not so young men were now heading over past the Cooper Union, to pile out on the corner of Third Avenue and St. Marks Place, to walk noisily by the St. Marks Theater (where I’d once acted for a summer in the New York Repertory Group) and the bronze plaque beside the Baths’ glass doors, explaining that on this site had stood the New York farmhouse of James Fenimore Cooper, author of The Last of the Mohicans, who had lived there with his wife and family from 1836 to 1838.

  We trooped into a grungy white-tiled lobby. At a small cafeteria in the front, in towels with keys on elastic bands around their wrists, three slender men sipped at coffee cups and dished. On the south side of the room was a counter with some screened-off windows. Somehow we all got lockers or rooms.

  Somehow everybody seemed to know where to go except me. And nobody bothered to tell me. Once I got out of my clothes and into my towel, quickly I found the first-floor dormitory Sonny had told me of, in which ponderous old men slept, wheezing and coughing. Downstairs I found the pool and the showers, and the steamroom with its benches and buckets of water and the dry-heat room with its high cedar walls. I couldn’t find anything very suggestive going on anywhere, though one blond guy came out of the steamroom to grope me in the shower for a minute.

  Upstairs, the dim passages between the tiny cubicles held more of what I thought seemed like cruising activity. Doors were open here and there, the men inside naked and ass up—in clear, if silent, invitation, however tentative I was about accepting.

  Then I stepped across the dark hall, in which a tired attendant sat on a stool, to enter the upstairs dorm.

  It was lit only in blue, the distant bulbs appearing to have red centers.

  In the gym-sized room were sixteen rows of beds, four to a rank, or sixty-four altogether. I couldn’t see any of the beds themselves, though, because there were three times that many people (maybe a hundred twenty-five) in the room. Perhaps a dozen of them were standing. The rest were an undulating mass of naked male bodies, spread wall to wall.

  My first response was a kind of heart-thudding astonishment, very close to fear.

  I have written of a space at a certain libidinal saturation before. That was not what frightened me. It was rather that the saturation was not only kinesthetic but visible. You could see what was going on throughout the dorm.

  The only time I’d come close to feeling the fear before was once, one night, when I had been approaching the trucks, and a sudden group of policemen, up half a block, had marched across the street, blowing their whistles.

  It had been some kind of raid. What frightened was, oddly, not the raid itself, but rather the sheer number of men who suddenly began to appear, most of them running, here and there from between the vans.

  That night at the docks policemen arrested maybe eight or nine men. The number, however, who fled across the street to be absorbed into the city was ninety, a hundred and fifty, perhaps as many as two hundred.

  Let me see if I can explain.

  34.1. In the fifties—and it was a fifties model of homosexuality that controlled all that was done, by both ourselves and the law that persecuted us—homosexuality was a solitary perversion. Before and above all, it isolated you.

  That there was a “gay bar society” was, itself, conceived of in terms of that isolation, and was marginal to it. Didn’t we all know that those gay men who took part in that society were all but asexual—those men who, certainly, had given up on bodily sex itself, reduced to passionate but unrequited friendships with impossible love objects that, nine out of ten times, would never put out. The abandonment of sex itself was the price, everyone was sure, that any sense of the social somehow exacted from homosexuals. It was tragic—but it was true.

  We knew it.

  What the exodus from the trucks made graphically clear, what the orgy at the baths pictured with frightening range and reality, was a fact that flew in the face of that whole fifties image.

  And it was the contradiction with what we “knew” that was fearful.

  Whether male, female, working or middle class, the first direct sense of political power comes from the apprehension of massed bodies. That I’d felt it and was frightened by it means that others had felt it too. The myth said we, as isolated perverts, were only beings of desire, manifestations of the subject (yes, gone awry, turned from its true object, but, for all that, even more purely subjective and isolated).

  But what this experience said was that there was a population—not of individual homosexuals, some of whom now and then encountered, or that those encounters could be human and fulfilling in their way—not of hundreds, not of thousands, but rather of millions of gay men, and that history had, actively and already, created for us whole galleries of institutions, good and bad, to accommodate our sex.

  Institutions such as subway johns or the trucks, while they accommodated sex, cut it, visibly, up into tiny portions. It was like Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts. No one ever got to see its whole. These institutions cut it up and made it invisible—certainly much less visible—to the bourgeois world that claimed the phenomenon deviant and dangerous. But, by the same token, they cut it up and thus made any apprehension of its totality all but impossible to us who pursued it. And any suggestion of that totality, even in s
uch a form as Saturday night at the baths, was frightening to those of us who’d had no suggestion of it before—no matter how sophisticated our literary encounters with Petronius and Gide, no matter what understandings we had reached with our wives.

  One might say, of course, that an orgy of three to five is one experience; and an orgy of a hundred or more is simply something very different, both materially and psychologically. To which I will counter that that is precisely the difference, at least psychologically, I am delineating.

  When newspapers would report, every tenth time it occurred, “Eight men were arrested last night for indecent behavior at the Christopher Street docks,” with no mention of the hundreds who’d escaped, it reassured the city fathers, it reassured the policemen who’d made the arrests, and it reassured the men arrested as well as the ones who had escaped that the image of the homosexual as outside society—which is the myth that the outside of language, with all its articulation, is based on—was, somehow, despite the arrests, intact.

  I must point out that that night was before the “sexual revolution” of the sixties had even begun to articulate itself.

  (What is the reason, anyone might ask, for writing such a book as this half a dozen years into the era of AIDS? Is it simply nostalgia for a medically unfeasible libertinism? Not at all. If I may indulge in my one piece of science fiction for this memoir, it is my firm suspicion, my conviction, and my hope that once the AIDS crisis is brought under control, the West will see a sexual revolution to make a laughing stock of any social movement that till now has borne the name. That revolution will come precisely because of the infiltration of clear and articulate language into the marginal areas of human sexual exploration, such as this book from time to time describes, and of which it is only the most modest example. Now that a significant range of people have begun to get a clearer idea of what has been possible among the varieties of human pleasure in the recent past, heterosexuals and homosexuals, females and males will insist on exploring them even further. I sincerely hope this book—not as nostalgia but as possibility—helps. Indeed, as Harvey Fierstein has already said: the AIDS situation and our accommodations to it are that revolution, nascent and under way.)

  Still, what I suspect existed was a much vaster social split between those who did and those who didn’t. It was a chasm that, in terms of the language that passes back and forth across it today, was, at that time, relatively absolute. The chasm, without any glimmering articulation at all, allowed a material intensity, among the antisexual (who were certainly having sex themselves, but within the most proscribed and Judeo-Christianized limits possible) and the sexual, that is probably hard to conceive of today.

  I am not trying to romanticize that time into some cornucopia of sexual plenty. Its densities, its barenesses, its intensities both of guilt and of pleasure, of censure and of blindness, both for those who wanted a multiplicity of sexual options and for those who wanted clear restrictions placed upon those options, were grounded on an all but absolutely sanctioned public silence—on the forbidding of sexual discussion and the suppression of sexual writing. Only the coyest and the most indirect articulations could occasionally indicate the boundaries of a phenomenon whose centers could not be spoken or written of, even figuratively: and that coyness was medical and legal as well as literary; and, as Foucault has told us, it was, in its coyness, a huge and pervasive discourse. But what that coyness means is that there is no way to gain from it a clear, accurate, and extensive picture of extant public sexual institutions. That discourse only touched on highly select margins when they transgressed the legal and/or medical standards of a populace that firmly wished to maintain that no such institutions existed.

  What I am trying to do for that night in 1963 is describe an encounter—a fragment of an encounter.

  I was afraid—as I had been afraid my first night at the trucks.

  But I moved forward into it.

  And some time after sunup, I left through the glass doors, walked over through Tompkins Square Park, and returned to Fifth Street, where Marilyn and Sue were already asleep.

  35. I’d given Terry one of my six author’s copies of The Jewels of Aptor when it first appeared. (My mother got another. And the other four …?) Now I gave her a copy of Captives of the Flame. The next Wednesday evening I walked, with Marilyn, across Fourth to the narrow coffee shop on Third between MacDougal and Sixth Avenue, the Cafe Elysée, that Bill and Terry were now managing. We passed the Night Owl on the far corner, and started down the block. “What’s that?” I asked Marilyn.

  She laughed. “I think Terry must have decided to do some advertising.”

  On a four-foot black placard set in front of the cafe and turned to face any tourists wandering from MacDougal, were attached Terry’s copies of The Jewels of Aptor and Captives of the Flame. Lettered above them in white was:

  SINGING TONIGHT

  THE AUTHOR OF

  followed by the two books, fixed to the plaque, with curly white lines around them, AND printed neatly between. Lettered below, boldly in white, was:

  SAMUEL R. DELANY!

  It all looked very incongruous—if not mindless. But as we stepped inside the narrow space, where the candles on the small tables had not yet been lit, Terry said, “Don’t say it. I know—but we have to make do with what we got. I figured it was just weird enough that it might get a couple of people to come inside.”

  “It’s your place,” I said, and put my guitar down.

  Billy was sitting at one table, laboriously writing something out with a ballpoint on a folded piece of paper. When I glanced over his shoulder, he looked up. “A guy called Dylan was in here earlier; he wanted to know if he could sing tonight. Since we don’t have someone for a second set, I said sure.” Billy got up and I went with him outside, while he squatted in front of the placard and, with two bits of scotch tape, below my grandly lettered name, added the piece of paper on which, from maybe three feet away, you could just make out:

  AND BOB DYLAN

  I’d actually seen Dylan perform once in a small group concert up at Riverside Church at which my friend Ana had also sung. His harmonica and guitar performance had been charming, energetic, and wholly and classically traditional. And among the audience of forty-five or fifty people that had turned out for the tiny auditorium space that held, perhaps, seventy-five, there were clearly about ten or twelve who were particularly enthusiastic about him, and had come specifically to hear him—among the dozen-odd performers that afternoon—and for whom he was clearly playing.

  Billy and I went back inside. Billy stepped up to the performance area, with its single chair in the skew spotlight, and tapped the mike. There was a slight booming outside above the door, where the speaker projected the sound into the street to attract the warm-weather tourists.

  When there were any.

  As of yet there were no customers.

  “You can go on and do a set, just to put some sounds in the street,” Billy said. “Don’t kill yourself. I just like to hear you play.”

  “All right,” I said. “Lemme just get a glass of water,” and I stepped in back of the counter, at the small sink filled a cylindrical glass with water, handed it to Marilyn, expecting her to drink and hand it back to me so that I could take a drink. But instead, she just held it.

  So I started to get another glass for myself.

  Just then the door flew open, and a breathless young man in a denim jacket and on the fleshy side, rushed in with his guitar case, plopped himself down in the performance chair, bent to open the case, and pulled out his guitar. Pushing on a couple of steel finger picks, he plucked two, five, half a dozen notes—

  “Hey,” Billy said, “wait up there—”

  I’d recognized the midwestern youth from the Riverside concert as Dylan.

  “Now look,” Billy said, stepping up. “I told you you could sing, but we got another performer who’s supposed to go on first.”

  Dylan shook his head, stood up, and said someth
ing I couldn’t hear.

  Terry stepped up beside Marilyn and me.

  What altercation over later hours, further appointments that had to be kept, or requests for schedule changes went down I don’t know, because just then a passing fire engine set off a yowl of feedback in the microphone. Billy silenced it with a cupped palm.

  Dylan picked up his guitar and, a moment later, they were again talking by the door.

  “… well, then, don’t come back!” Billy said, at last, a little loudly, a little flustered.

  And with his case, Dylan rushed out the door as breathlessly as he’d come in.

  Shaking his head, Billy put his hands on his hips, looked at us, and really said, “Bob Dylan! Who does he think he is …?”

  Then he went outside, squatted before the placard. Through the glass door, I saw him tear off the taped-up paper strip.

  In that age when popular music did not speak for its young people, folk music occupied a position hard to explain today. The people who went out into the mountains and forests of America (or, indeed, any other country) to collect it were scientists—anthropologists. The people who learned it and sang it as close as possible to the traditional manner in which it had been sung by the people who’d made it up, were dedicated artists. (And the possibility that I might spend my life as a fine folk musician, performing in folk clubs, giving concerts, and making albums, was as exciting to me as the possibility of being a writer or a physicist.) At the same time, you could write your own—about anything you wanted.

  Two years later Dylan was to make a revolutionary crossover, when he decided that the American youngsters who bought millions of pop music records a month were just as much “folk” as the banjo-twanging miners of Appalachia, and electrified his music, not in an exploitative gesture to make folk music acceptable in suburbia (that had been done many times before), but rather to create a music that spoke for people who simply had been allowed no voice till now by a culture engine that drummed only banal love lyrics into the ear twenty-four hours a day. The result was that American music—folk and pop—would never be the same.