On taking time to read Delany:

Find myself alternately idling & sprinting through this volume of Nevèrÿon.  Equal parts enchanted with the the time taken &, when I alternate out of enchantment, infuriated at the pastiche required to play out certain of the class analogies he's going for.  'I get it,' I say, and my eyes canter forward, even as I scold myself to stop being impatiently rash.

 

Tedium is a tool.

 

Delany was always one of those authors, like Andrew Holleran, who Was There.  He was appointed, by dint of his survival (&, points he would be quick to hone, his ethnicity & sexuality) by the gay literati to be among those authors who documented the gay Shoah-- if you hear what I'm saying.  Like Holleran, or even Burroughs, Delany was a reporter from the bomb crater of AIDS in New York.

 

I think anyone who lived through lockdown, doomscrolling reports of refrigerated trucks being stacked with corpses, can begin to appreciate the tedium of the geiger counter tic-tic-ticking.  I was never exactly promiscuous--  not for lack of trying, I was a teenager in the late 80s & early 90s  --but I was also shit-scared of AIDS.  Sure, I was living far from the glow of the cities of the red night, down in Dogwater, Alabama, but everyplace in North America was living with the fallout.  Every place was living with the knowing cowardice, the failure to understand sex & sexuality in America, that comprised the background radiation of Growing Up Gay in the 80s.

 

Tedium is a tool and consequently, the tedium of the intractability, the inevitability of death, must be instructive.  So I'm being very patient with Nevèrÿon, reading all its components in order of composition & publication, because I'm certain 'The Bridge of Lost Desire', a.k.a. 'The Tale of Plagues & Carnivals' is what I've been waiting for.  Because as much as AIDS was a bureaucratic disaster-on-purpose, a tedious ticking off of collateral casualties on an infinitely extensible document, it was Class War.

I'm trying to wise myself up, decades too late.

 

Because I know I don't "get it".  Not really.  If I did, I wouldn't glibly dash off a comparison between AIDS and the Shoah to my husband, when he asks why I'm eager to read what is, by all accounts, a deeply sorrowful book.  Because the comparison is more profoundly complicated, more self-negating than that.  The problem with the Shoah is that culturally, what can it be said to have taught, if Israel's vivisection of Palestine has been the result?

 

So too with AIDS: what has it taught us North American queers, if we just put up with all this daily carnage & hate because... at least the Supreme Court let us have gay marriage?  If we lie to ourselves by saying "Democracy must have worked out" because sure, it provided the legal framework for our repression, subjugation & elimination for a couple of centuries, but at least it finally Gave Us queers the right to be as unhappy & fucked-over as heteronormative married folk.

 

AIDS must have been worth it-- we got a lovely commemorative quilt and just enough respect to be considered a vital voting bloc by a party with a vested disinterest in genocide.

I pass my hand over the copy of 'Flight From Nevèrÿon' to my immediate left and hear the geiger counter of my heart, sketching out its reading of failure and decay.