Out Spotlight

Today's Out Spotlight is a man of firsts and unconventionality. Creating and writing things yet seen or thought he is a master at his genre. He is not the first openly gay Science Fiction writer, but the first prominent African American SciFi writer. Today's Out Spotlight is Samuel R. Delany. Author, professor and literary critic. His work includes science fiction but memoirs, literary criticisms, and essays on sexuality and society as well.

Samuel R. Delany, also known as "Chip", was born on April 1, 1942,to a prominent African American family in Harlem. His mother, Margaret Carey Boyd Delany, was a library clerk in the New York Public Library system. His father, his namesake, was a successful undertaker at Levy & Delany Funeral Home. Delany was the grandson of a freed slave, a cousin to someone killed by the Klan. His famous aunts Sadie and Bessie Delany's (who lived to over 100, wrote their own book, and organized a picket line at a movie theater showing Birth Of A Nation in 1924 ) adventures were the basis for the adventures of his characters Elsie and Corry in the opening novella "Atlantis: Model 1924" in his book of semi-autobiographical stories Atlantis: Three Tales.

Delany attended the Dalton School and the Bronx High School of Science. Delany and poet Marilyn Hacker met on their first day together in high school in September, 1956, and although Delany who identified himself as gay as a teenager, were married five years later in August, 1961. Their marriage lasted twelve years, having a daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany.

Delany was a published science fiction author by the age of 20, while attending City College of New York. His first novel, The Jewels of Aptor, was was written when he was nineteen and published in 1962. His subsequent trilogy, The Fall of the Towers, was completed while he was still twenty-one. The Ballad of Beta-2 was published in 1965. Babel-17 , which established his reputation, has an artist as the protagonist and explores the nature of language and its ability to give structure to experience. It also established a female protagonist long before Sigourney Weaver was in Alien.

He won the science-fiction Nebula Award for Babel-17, as he did for The Einstein Intersection, which features another artist-outsider and addresses issues of cultural development and sexual identity, a theme he continued to developed in his later works. More Nebula Awards came for his short fiction in both 1967 for Aye, and Gomorrah… and Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-precious Stones. In 1970 and 1971, still married to Hacker, co-edited a quarterly, QUARK, of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction.

Five years into their marriage, with Hacker remaining in New York, Delany took an extended trip to Europe, and spent several months in Turkey and Greece. That trip found their way into several pieces of his work at that time, including the novel Nova and the short stories "Aye, and Gomorrah" and "Dog in a Fisherman's Net".

After returning from Europe, Delany and Hacker moved to San Francisco, and then to London, before returning to New York. It was during that time that he began working with sexual themes and wrote two pornographic works, one of which,Hogg, was considered to be completely unpublishable due to the nature of its content. It would, in fact, be twenty years from the time he finished the book before it was ever printed.

Neither he or Hacker believed in monogamy. In the documentary of his life, he recalled being 19, living in New York's lower East Side, and indulging in anonymous sex with multiple partners during the day while still having dinner ready for his wife when she came home from work.

Sporting the trademark long white beard that he has worn since the 1970s, and looking more like Santa Claus, than the sexual rancanteur talks about being.

His unapologetic candor is could be disarming, but at the same time almost folksy when he manages to make anecdotes about having sex in the back of trucks with a half a dozen men sound nostalgic. He freely confesses that he's enjoyed thousands of sex partners during his life.

He seems, at times, like he would be the antithesis of the safe sex campaign, he does address his rather cavalier attitude towards sex. Considering his history, it is a minor miracle that he never contracted AIDS, but he explains that he rarely engaged in sexual behavior that involved penetration. "I would not or could not advise anyone to follow my lead or example," he admits about his unconventional life.

In Delany's case, his sexuality is so entwined in his writings that a difference can be barely be drawn between the two. His science fiction probably features the most frank and adult treatments of sex, in all its manifestations, to ever appear in the genre.

His work offers "not only the beauty of well-turned phrases and the spark of provocative ideas, but an illumination won from the exacting exploration of self and society." In science fiction, literary criticism, comic books, memoir, or pornography, to read Delany is to discover. He show what as readers didn't already know, and freshens eyes for what has always been accepted as familiar.

Dhalgren, until recently, was considered Delany's most controversial novel. It is the story of a young bisexual man searching for identity in a large, decaying city. The main character of his novel Triton, written in 1976, undergoes a sex-change operation, and examines bias against women and homosexuals.

His critical writings, such as The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction and The American Shore earned him the Science Fiction Research Association's Pilgrim Award.

His Neveryon series Tales of Neveryon; Neveryona; The Tale of Signs and Cities; Flight from Neveryon ; and The Bridge of Lost Desire; is set in a magical past at the beginning of civilization. These tales concern power and its abuse, while taking up contemporary themes which included topics such as AIDS. His complex Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is regarded as his stylistic breakthrough.

In Heavenly Breakfast he writes of his adventures in the 1960s Greenwich Village. In 1988, he published a memoir, The Motion of Light in Water which was one of the several autobiographical/semi-autobiographical accounts of his life as a black, gay, and highly dyslexic writer. He won for the Hugo award winning autobiography. He continues with the novels They Fly at Ciron and The Mad Man, and Silent Interviews: On Language,Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics, a collection of written interviews as well as, Bread and Wine : An Erotic Tale of New York City.

Since 1988, Delany has been a professor at several universities. He continues to publish criticisms, interviews, and essays in addition to the SciFi writing. In one of his non-fiction books, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, which can be enjoyed as both a sociological dissertation and as out-and-out porn, he draws on personal experience to examine the relationship between the effort to redevelop Times Square and the public sex lives of working-class men, gay and straight, in New York City. In 2007, his novel Dark Reflections was a winner of the Stonewall Book Award.

Also in 2007 Delany was the subject of a documentary film, The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman, directed by Fred Barney Taylor. The film debuted on April 25 at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival. The following year, it tied for Jury Award for Best Documentary at the International Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.

Also in 2007, Delany was the April "calendar boy" in the "Legends of the Village" calendar put out by Village Care of New York.

Since January 2001 he has been a professor of English and Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia, where he is Director of the Graduate Creative Writing Program.

After winning four Nebula awards and two Hugo awards over the course of his career, Delany was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2002.

"My ideal sex life has always been where I've always had one central person, who one really cherishes and one is really committed to. To have several sexual partners above and beyond that, and a public sex life, and a good solid masturbatory life as well. I think that, for me, that's when I'm generally the most happy."
- Samuel R. Delany

The Royal Tour

TODAY
May 9th, 2010
'Prince of Persia' - UK Premiere
Date: May 9th, 2010
Where: Westfield London
Watch Live Online at DenofGeek.com

The world premiere of Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time takes place in London from 5pm UK time. That's 12 NOON EDT, 9AM Pacific in the US. Here’s how the schedule looks…

5.00pm: Cast and crew of the film arrive and walk the red carpet

5.40pm: Parkour demonstration

5.50pm: On-stage introduction of Jake Gyllenhaal, Sir Ben Kingsley, Mike Newell, Jerry Bruckheimer and Gemma Arterton. This will be hosted by Alex Zane

6pm: The on-stage introduction ends, and off they all go to watch the film


May 17th, 2010

'Prince of Persia' - Los Angeles Premiere
Date: May 17th, 2010
Where: Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, Hollywood

May 20th, 2010
Jimmy Kimmel Live
Date:May 20th, 2010
Time:12:05AM
Channel: ABC
Kimmel is not official confirmed but tweets are saying he will be back to talk to Jimmy on the 20th.

Sometime in May:
Regis & Kelly
Check your local listings for station and time.

There will be plenty more chances to catch Jake. Stay tuned for updates.

Happy Mother's Day to All.