New York's 42nd Street was once known for its peep shows, street-corner hustlers and cinemas. Since the 1980s it has been overcome by the notion of safety - from safe sex and safe neighbourhoods to safe cities and safe relationships - and given rise to a Disney store, a children's theatre and large neon-lit cafes. It has, in effect, become a family tourist attraction for visitors from Berlin, Tokyo, Westchester and New Jersey's suburbs. Samuel R. Delany sees a disappearance not only of the old Times Square, but of the complex social relationships that developed there: the points of contact between people of different classes and races in a public place. In this book he argues that public rest rooms, peep shows and tree-filled parks are necessary to a city's physical and psychological landscape. He contends that, starting in 1985, New York City criminalized peep shows and sex cinemas to clear the way for the rebuilding of Times Square, and paints a portrait of a society dismantling the institutions that promote communication between classes, and disguising its fears of cross-class contact as "family values".

Author Biography

Samuel R. Delany is a renowned novelist and critic, whose award-winning fiction includes Dhalgren (1975), Babel-17 (1966), The Mad Man (1994), Dark Reflections (2007), and Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2012). In addition to receiving the William Whitehead Memorial Award and the Kessler Award for his lifetime contribution to lesbian and gay writing, Delany was chosen by the Lambda Book Report in 1988 as one of the fifty most influential people of the past hundred years to change our conception of queerness. After more than thirty years of teaching, first at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and later at Temple University, where he served as Director of the Graduate Creative Writing Program, Samuel Delany now lives with his partner in Philadelphia.