Drawing: Samuel R. Delany

Here's the drawing of one of the writers I most admire, the exemplary Samuel R. Delany. I initially thought that this drawing of him was from the Afro-Futurist/SF conference that was really a festschrift for him, but according to the notes on the back of the piece, it turns out that I drew it when he was delivering the university's annual Leon Forrest lecture, which preceded the mini-conference by a day. (Last year's speaker was another writer I tremendously admire and have also drawn, Toni Morrison. I even presented the drawing to her in person around the time she published Jazz, when she gave a lecture at MIT.)

Some notes from his talk, "The Politics of the Paraliterary" (he presented a selection, I believe, from The Black Discourse, a cross-genre/gender work); he was making a very sophisticated argument about the nexus of race and racism, and homosexuality and homophobia/heterosexism. The quotes below should be read not as his settled views, but as fragments from a larger, highly provocative argument:

• The one-drop rule sought to fix the racial vector in one way--black tainted white but not the reverse
• The untrammeled pursuit of pleasure [is thought to be] the opposite of social responsibility
• [According to social norms, and his uncle] pleasure must be doled out rigorously, with a contract.
• Desire is never outside all social constraints.
• Race is a construct that has no opposite.
• Race is mediated by heredity, not geography; you can't have heredity without sex.
• Race is the thing in the body that is inherited.
• The thing that is inherited is the thing that can be polluting.
• The sign of pollution is often homosexuality.
• [For racists] To lift or end racism is to allow pollution to run wild.
• To lift the stigma of homosexuality is to opt out of the pollution issue altogether.
• [According to their argument, then] Race exists to pollute procreation.
• [And accordingly] Homosexuality brings it to a halt altogether....