{"id":21363,"date":"2025-05-25T15:08:03","date_gmt":"2025-05-25T22:08:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/?page_id=21363"},"modified":"2025-05-25T15:09:17","modified_gmt":"2025-05-25T22:09:17","slug":"review-the-mad-man-by-samuel-r-delany","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/hodgepodge\/nonfiction\/reviews\/review-the-mad-man-by-samuel-r-delany\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: The Mad Man, by Samuel R. Delany"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

I wrote this review in 1999; it was published in Mary Anne\u2019s erotica magazine, Clean Sheets<\/cite>. You can see the review\u2019s original context<\/a> on archive.org, but this page is a better-formatted (and very lightly edited) version of it that I posted in 2025.<\/i><\/p>\r\n

\r\n
\r\n

\u201c\u2026it is always odd to discover the ways in which desire fuels the systems of the world.\u201d \u2014The Mad Man<\/cite><\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

The term \u201csex\u201d can mean many different things to different people. It took me a while to really understand that, but I thought I had finally reached a pretty broad and inclusive set of definitions\u2014until The Mad Man<\/cite> came along to show me how inadequate my definitions still were.<\/p>\r\n

In his disclaimer at the beginning of the book, Delany makes it clear that this is a novel \u201cabout various sexual acts whose [likelihood of transmitting HIV] we have no hard-edged knowledge of because the monitored studies that would [show] the relation between such acts and Seroconversion (from HIV- to HIV+) have not been done.\u201d So I thought I knew what I was getting into: I thought the book would focus on the possibility of seroconversion from oral sex\u2014an issue I\u2019d heard Delany speak about\u2014and maybe a little SM, and not much else. The novel contains, as an appendix, a reprint of a 1987 study printed in the British medical journal The Lancet<\/cite>, entitled \u201cRisk Factors for Seroconversion to Human Immunodeficiency Virus Among Male Homosexuals\u201d; the study reported that the greatest risk for seroconversion came from unprotected receptive anal intercourse. I figured this novel wasn\u2019t going to cover any ground I hadn\u2019t seen before, especially when I read its opening lines: \u201cI do not have AIDS. I am surprised that I don\u2019t. I have had sex with men weekly, sometimes daily\u2014without condoms\u2014since my teens, though \u2026 it\u2019s been\u2014since 1980\u2014all<\/em> oral, not anal.\u201d<\/p>\r\n

But I bogged down maybe eighty pages into the novel\u2014because I was too turned off by the sex scenes. After detailed descriptions of the narrator\/protagonist (a young Black grad student in philosophy named John Marr) and other characters consuming a variety of human secretions\u2014including \u201ccream\u201d (semen), piss, \u201ccheese\u201d (smegma), sweat, shit, and snot\u2014many of which I don\u2019t normally consider edible (much less of sexual interest), I was just too uncomfortable to continue, and I shelved the book.<\/p>\r\n

A couple of months later, I decided to give it another try. And shortly came across a passage that began to shift my way of thinking about the book, a passage in which Marr thinks about a letter he\u2019s received from his advisor, Irving Mossman. Mossman\u2019s letter refers to the \u201cunbelievably nasty sex life\u201d of the philosopher (named Timothy Hasler) whose life and work they\u2019ve both been studying. Fifty pages after that letter arrives, Marr discovers that Hasler was simply a gay man with a foot fetish and an active imagination. Marr comments, \u201c[I]f that was Mossman\u2019s idea of \u2018an unbelievably nasty sex life,\u2019 what in the world would he have thought of mine?\u201d<\/p>\r\n

And I began to see the book in a new light. For one thing, that passage made clear that the acts Marr engages in are really sex, not just experiments (as I initially guessed). This was hard for me to see mainly because (as with the narrator of Delany\u2019s earlier pornographic novel Hogg<\/cite>) Marr doesn\u2019t often describe himself as deriving any sort of sexual enjoyment from his encounters; it\u2019s only much later that he says explicitly that he does enjoy them, and until then he seems to engage in a variety of sexual acts for no obvious reason. Marr\u2019s reading of Hasler\u2019s journals provides a key to the book: just as Hasler\u2019s commenting on everyone\u2019s feet leads Marr to realize that was Hasler\u2019s fetish, it\u2019s Marr\u2019s descriptions of the details of his own encounters that show us what he\u2019s attracted to. For instance, Marr is a size queen, but he never describes himself in those terms; until I figured that out, I didn\u2019t understand why he commented on the length of every penis he encountered, and frequently described new partners with phrases like \u201cHe was hung!\u201d (Though such phrases are of course also simply among the standard tropes of erotic writing.)<\/p>\r\n

So the book called into question my definitions of sex. I know this marks me as naive, but before I read it, it had never occurred to me that someone could derive sexual enjoyment from, for instance, drinking piss. This is not\u2014mostly\u2014the attitude I\u2019d always associated with SM watersports (in which the shame of violating the urination taboo is the source of the turn-on); this is just someone who likes to ingest anything that can come out of a penis.<\/p>\r\n

Reviews and even the jacket flap of The Mad Man<\/cite> suggest the book is about \u201cshocking, depraved sexual entanglements\u201d and \u201csexual debasement.\u201d And yet, unlike in what I\u2019ve read of Hogg<\/cite>, I see no suggestion that Delany intends us to make moral judgments about the characters\u2019 actions here. Though John Marr is, by his own admission, no saint, he\u2019s no demon either; he is a sympathetic character who happens to have relatively unusual sexual interests, specifically urolagnia<\/a> and (to a lesser degree) coprophagia<\/a>. (Many of the other characters in the book suggest that Marr\u2019s interests\u2014particularly urolagnia\u2014are fairly common among \u201ccocksuckers.\u201d) My concern for authorial intent is perhaps old-fashioned, but I believe it\u2019s relevant in this case; I don\u2019t believe Delany intended the book to be a portrait of someone drawn willy-nilly into a dark world of depravity and ugliness. I believe it\u2019s, rather, a portrait of a fairly ordinary (though not typical, because one of Delany\u2019s points is that there\u2019s no such thing as typical) gay man in New York City in the \u201980s.<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

The Mad Man<\/cite> also upset my assumptions about \u201csafer\u201d or \u201cprotected\u201d sex.<\/p>\r\n

Late in the book (the action of which occurs roughly from 1980 to 1990), Marr mentions having attended a safer-sex demonstration; he even says that it was pretty hot. But, he adds, though sex with latex may be a valid choice, it\u2019s not his choice. To Marr, sex with a condom just isn\u2019t sex\u2014it loses all its appeal.<\/p>\r\n

We each choose what we consider to be acceptable risks, all the time. Delany suggests that unprotected fellatio is too low a risk to be concerned about. My understanding is that the few statistics that have been collected show mixed results; unprotected fellatio (and unprotected cunnilingus, for that matter) are believed to have resulted in some seroconversions, but not many. (Delany has also pointed out that many of those who seroconvert have a vested interest in lying about what they do and how often they do it, making it difficult to collect reliable data.)<\/p>\r\n

A friend of mine suggested that Marr\u2019s dislike of condoms is merely the same thing that a lot of straights say\u2014they\u2019re used to sex without latex and see no reason why they should change. But there\u2019s something more going on here. Partly it has to do with Marr\u2019s initial conviction (when it starts to become clear in the book that there\u2019s an epidemic going on) that he must already have AIDS, considering the quantity of his sexual encounters. And part of it is simply the importance that sex has in Marr\u2019s life\u2014he sees his sexual encounters as one of the foci of his life, at least as important as the doctoral thesis he\u2019s working on and probably more so. At the start of the book, he\u2019s never had a terribly close ongoing Relationship as such; lots of fuck buddies, but he\u2019s never really been in love, that we know of. He just likes being a cocksucker. (Though of course since the book is mostly about his sex life, Marr intentionally glosses over many other aspects of his life\u2014pretty much everything, in fact, besides sex and academic work; and of course since the book is by Delany, we\u2019re both directly and indirectly informed that there\u2019s plenty going on in Marr\u2019s life that we aren\u2019t told about.) In choosing an acceptable risk level, Marr must weigh giving up one of the most important things in his life against possibly losing his life; he decides that the benefits of continued unprotected sex outweigh the risks.<\/p>\r\n

At one point Marr believes he has in fact contracted AIDS, but he doesn\u2019t stop having sex. \u201c[S]oon I was [back to] my usual three or four contacts two or three times a week. My justification? That everyone I was having unprotected sex with around the city \u2026 probably had it, too\u2026. [T]he fact is, when those used to regular sex have regular sex available, they have it. It\u2019s no more complicated than that. You can put it off a few hours, a few days, a few weeks. But beyond that, you are out of the precinct of morals and into the land of hormones\u2026.\u201d The book is at least as relevant a description of sexual attitudes today\u2014when there are sex clubs (as described in a recent San Francisco Bay Times<\/cite> article) devoted specifically to \u201cbarebacking,\u201d condom-free anal sex\u2014as it was when it was written.<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

There\u2019s plenty more to this book than I\u2019ve discussed. I haven\u2019t touched on the race and class issues that suffuse it, for instance; nor on the terms of verbal abuse that permeate it\u2014one character asks to be called \u201cPiece o\u2019 Shit,\u201d another likes to be called \u201cDummy,\u201d and several half-affectionately use the N-word (written out) and \u201ccocksucker.\u201d I haven\u2019t mentioned the title character. And I haven\u2019t noted that there are extensive passages containing no sexual elements; that besides the extremely explicit sex scenes the book contains discussions of sexual ethics, character development, philosophy, a modicum of plot, and even a romance\u2026. But this review is long enough; if you want more about the book, you\u2019ll have to read it yourself.<\/p>\r\n

The Mad Man<\/cite> is a complicated book, and it evoked complicated (and conflicting) feelings in me. It made me wonder about sex, and fear, and death, and what Delany would probably call \u201cthe semiotics of desire.\u201d It\u2019s confusing yet enlightening, extremely detailed in physical description but lacking (for the most part) in emotional description, disturbing yet (at times) familiar. It\u2019s five hundred pages of what can only be termed pornography, written by a man who usually writes science fiction, sword & sorcery, and scholarly or autobiographical essays. There\u2019s nothing overtly fantastical about it (notwithstanding the introductory bit about a gigantic half-human beast in the park), yet science fiction figures prominently in the story, and in his disclaimer Delany protests strenuously that the novel is a work of fiction and says that treating it as anything else would be rank error.<\/p>\r\n

It is, in short, a complex book. It brings up fascinating ideas, worth thinking about and making part of the public discourse on sex; but be warned, much of the book is very difficult to read if you\u2019re uncomfortable with the topics in question.<\/p>\r\n

I\u2019ll close by quoting a paragraph (from near the end of a seventy-page letter Marr writes to another character) that I suspect sums up much of what Delany wants readers to see in the novel itself:<\/p>\r\n

It occurs to me \u2026 that it may only seem that a few lines [of this letter] concern [AIDS]. But, reading it over, I see every line of it is about the disease. That\u2019s because I don\u2019t think anyone can really understand what AIDS means in the gay community until she or he has some understanding of the field and function\u2014the range, the mechanics\u2014of the sexual landscape AIDS has entered into. And that means having a clear view of the sexual activity available; and that means understanding \u2026 the camaraderie and good will that exists in so much of it\u2014as well as the barriers to social communication that fall\u2026.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\n

\u00a91999 by J. Hartman<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"parent":21361,"menu_order":20,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-21363","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/21363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21363"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/21363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21373,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/21363\/revisions\/21373"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/21361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}