The Beautiful Room Is Empty [1988]), the logic of this retroactively narrativized identity is so embedded and emplotted in the novel's unfolding that the narrator's professed lack of self-knowledge ('The confusion and fear and pain that beset me…had translated me into a code that no one could read, I least of all…') makes sense precisely because he has become the adept cryptographer who can read meaning backwards into his earlier opacity. It is this opacity, then, that the novel reiterates even as it consistently affirms its interpretability in order to offer the reader a perspective of understanding, a -553- perspective that (if adopted) positions the reader to make sense of the protagonist's struggles through the knowledge that there is meaning to the unknowing character's struggles: the knowledge that he is gay.
While such a perspective might implicitly indicate that gender is 'constructed' through acts of knowing, or perhaps even more radically suggest that the reading of such 'gay' narratives might be an act of gender construction itself, the fixing of this gender as an effect of knowledge, as a quality that can be 'known,' undermines the possibilities for imagining gender as a continual process of 'constructing.' Since it's impossible for me to begin to discuss here the limitations that claims to identity impose upon ec-centric gender/ sexual practices, I will instead offer by way of example a text that makes no such claims to identity, Samuel Delany's brilliant Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984). Appearing two years after White's autobiographical novel, Delany's book does not fit any of the rubrics devised to assimilate contemporary fiction into 'knowable' gender categories. Instead Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is the first volume in an as yet unfinished science fiction diptych that addresses the political struggle between two rival groups whose competing cosmologies-/epistemologies set them at odds for the control of an interstellar network of life worlds. In this extraterrestrial con(text), Delany explores the problematic relations between gender and sexuality as critical elements in the constitution of an imaginary dynamic that organizes both the narrative's unfolding and the development of coherent characters within this unfolding. Narratively, the novel weaves between the dead world of Rat Korga, an industrial slave who was the only survivor of his planet's destruction, and the complex galactic network of Marq Dyeth, an industrial diplomat from a venerable 'nurture stream' on the planet Velm, which combines humans and nonhumans. Rescued from his world's holocaust by 'The Web,' a shadowy organization that controls the flows of information between worlds, Korga is paired by them with Dyeth because, as Japril, a Web operative, explains to Dyeth, 'Korga happens to be your perfect erotic object — out to about seven decimal places…. More to the point…out to about nine decimal places, you happen to be Rat's.' The novel's larger depiction of a contest for political control, then, hinges on the statistical perfectibility of this erotic preference between two human males whose coupling in turn -554- threatens to undermine the stability of interworld systems. By the end of the volume the two men have been separated by the Web when Rat's popularity on Dyeth's home planet gives rise to massive demonstrations and cultural chaos and we are left to await their reunion (?) in the sequel.
More than just the centrality of the sexual bonding between the male protagonists, however, the novel's thematization of sexual pleasures across and between sexes and species structures the very possibilities of telling the tale itself. While much of the narrative description is devoted to exploring the permutations of erotic practices on a variety of worlds, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand reads not so much as a chronicle of sexual activities as an inquiry into the ways the movements of and between bodies mark out — or indeed create — the distinctions we come to know as character, identity, and relationship. In part the force of this intricately structured questioning derives from a challenging innovation that Delany employs in order to reorient our habituated patterns of reading. By shifting the expected correspondence between the gender of pronouns and the anatomical sex of their antecedents, Delany's text foregrounds the 'unnatural' articulations of gender and sexuality embedded in our 'normal' grammatical usages. In other words, the reader of Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand finds that rather than 'he' designating a biological male of whatever species and 'she' designating a biological female of whatever species, with the former serving as a generic indicator of 'speciesness,' 'she' serves here as the universal generic pronoun and 'he' refers specifically to individuals of either biological sex of whatever species with whom one has had or with whom one desires to have sexual encounters. The text thus works against the reader to expose the usually ignored 'imaginary work' that engenders meaning as gendered: not only the transformation in the expected gender correspondence between pronouns and referents but also the new erotic significance attributed to pronoun usage itself invests the reading process with an unexpected element of decoding that continually causes the reader to resist ingrained patterns of attributing gender to markers of sexuality — a disorienting resistance for even the most astutely 'deconstructive' of readers. More than a 'gay' science fiction novel, then, Delany's book invites us as readers to consider and to learn to overcome some of the 'imaginary' lim-555- itations that circumscribe how we conceptually attempt to encompass the wide-ranging practices and pleasures available to us as embodied beings.
In his autobiographical memoir, The Motion of Light in Water (1988), Delany reflects on what he has learned as an African American male writer who lived through the bohemian years of the East Village in the 1960s, who is sexually attracted to other men, and who for many years was married and still remains close to the poet Marilyn Hacker. Commenting upon the significance of his self-reflexive undertaking, Delany remarks:
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 feasible 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 til 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.
In meditating upon his autobiographical motivation, Delany underscores the significance that 'fiction' has for him both as an individual and as a social activity. His utopian impulse leads him to conjecture that in the wake of the current historical conjuncture — in which the epistemological and epidemiological 'truth' of AIDS has problematized the elision between sexuality and gender for most gay men, as well as for many others — there will be a revolutionary era in which sexuality will flourish as an aesthetic, ethical, personal, and political expression. Yet the impetus for such a radical transformation, he suggests, will derive not from the spontaneous 'liberation' of previously (currently) repressed sexual energies but rather from 'the infiltration of clear and articulate language into the marginal areas of human sexual exploration.' Here Delany foregrounds the connection between imaginative and embodied experience that I have argued above constitutes a necessary element in creating an affirmative sense of 'constructing gender' as the engendering of new possibilities for how we move through, transform, and enjoy our life worlds. Indeed, much of my own autobiographical impulse in this -556- chapter derives, like Delany's, from the belief that in the processes of narrating our experiences for ourselves and for each other, we materially engage in processes of (re)producing realities that both reiterate the past and give new shape to the future.
In these few pages, I have somewhat arbitrarily chosen to focus on recent texts written by American gay male authors because these texts have provided seminal reading experiences for me as well as for many other gay men of my gen(d)eration. Yet these are by no means the only texts that have had this effect: indeed, for me, many contemporary novels written by American women of color — with their relentless questioning of the historical articulations of gender and race — have been equally inspiring. If I focus now on the former rather than the latter, it is because I know that in a volume like this one it is likely that the works of women of many races and ethnicities will have been addressed heretofore, while the works of men who are exploring the possibilities for sexual and emotional intimacies with other men will most probably remain eccentric. Thus, in many ways this chapter, like the texts I describe in it, is a 'fiction' that constructs gender, a 'fiction' that attempts to fabricate other possibilities for imagining forms of relationship and pleasure both in our writings and in our lives. Yet this is not to say that there is no 'truth' in what I say; rather it is to remark that the processes of producing the stories through which we represent our truths to ourselves and to each other are part of the processes through which we (re)produce our 'selves.' And so we are 'constructing gender' even now: I, as I write, and you, as you read. And so we keep (t) reading for our lives.
Ed Cohen
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