Delany Needs To Retract His NAMBLA Statement

So, apparently, on July 3rd, an interview with Samuel R. Delany was published in the New Yorker. Now, I've defended Delany in the past, and taken some flak for it, so this article caught my attention.

It basically was a personal look back behind the curtain, giving people a glimpse at what Delany’s personal life is currently like. And the man is 81, so his life is pretty slow these days. But the article also confirmed some things I already knew.

Now, as much as I love Delany’s pre-spider writings (and by that I mean everything he wrote prior to Valley of the Nest of Spiders, because Hogg is just awful, and I’ve said so), I do have a bone to pick with him regarding this pro-NAMBLA statement which he made back in the 90’s. The New Yorker article touched on this, but only briefly. I’ll read you the quote, because it says it far better than I can summarize:

“His tolerance could go alarmingly far. Delany once praised a newsletter published by NAMBLA, the pedophile-advocacy group, for its “sane thinking” about the age of consent. Unlike Allen Ginsberg, he never belonged to the organization. Yet he has refused to retract the comments—in part because of his own sexual experiences with men as an underage boy, which he refuses to characterize as abusive.”

He never belonged to NAMBLA? I’ve been trying to find out whether he ever belonged to that organization for a long time, but this article finally confirmed it. He was never a member. That’s interesting. But he did give a ringing endorsement of its newsletter.

Now, I’ve said this before in various sci fi circles, and I’ve certainly jawed about it at Internet trolls, but I don’t know if I’ve ever said this in this blog before. So in case I haven’t, here it is: Samuel R. Delany needs to retract his statement about NAMBLA and he needs to retract it immediately.

I don’t expect him to do this just because I asked for it, of course. Professor Delany doesn’t know me from Adam. But I do hope this gets the conversation going. Last year I interviewed Chris Barclay on the Starship Fonzie podcast, and Mercedes Lackey, who had just been named the 38th Damon Knight Memorial Grandmaster the year before, had gotten into some trouble at the Science Fiction Writers’ Association Annual Convention. While praising the works of Delany, she slipped and referred to him as “colored.” Not “person of color,” just “colored.” And for that, she was expelled for the remainder of the convention.

Now, she apologized, was basically forgiven, and is still rightly venerated as a Grandmaster. I should also hasten to add that Delany himself weighed in, publicly forgave her, and stated that he, himself, had no problem with the word, “colored.” Lackey is also still a member in good standing of SFWA. But she did get into some trouble at the time. So I asked Chris Barclay the same question that the Internet trolls of various camps were asking: If we’re willing to kick a Grandmaster out of a convention over one unintentional slip-up like this, one which was clearly done without malice, why shouldn’t we re-evaluate Mr. Delany’s NAMBLA statement, which is demonstrably worse? Especially since he was the target of the slur?

I thought Chris’ response was really well thought out. He pointed out, first of all, that the ones asking the question are not doing so to rationally examine something, they’re doing so to deliberately and maliciously hurt us in the science fiction community. So, they’re not coming from an intellectually honest mindset in the first place. And secondly, if they really want to know, they can ask Delany himself since he’s on Facebook and Instagram.

The tightrope I’ve walked regarding this is to draw a sharp distinction between writing words and doing deeds. In other words, sure Delany has written scenes in Hogg that are gross and pedophilic. But we don’t call James Patterson a murderer because he writes about murder. We don’t call J.K. Rowling a witch because she writes about witches.

But you know what? I’m sick of walking a tightrope. I shouldn’t have to! Delany needs to retract his 1990’s NAMBLA bullshit, and he needs to do it today!

Let me draw an analogy for you:

Let’s say there’s some high school freshman, 14 or 15, and he and his super-hot 35-year-old English teacher decide to have a fling. You know, like Nicole Kidman and Joachim Phoenix in the movie To Die For? Or maybe Pacey Witter and his teacher Tamara Jacobs in Dawson’s Creek? Oh, wait, Stiffler’s mom. Remember Stiffler’s mom? In the movie American Pie? Yeah, something like that. There isn’t a single male of that age, in that situation, that wouldn’t believe he was lucky as hell to lose his young virginity that way. His friends would probably be all super-jealous of him, and he’d probably grow up to be an adult who convinced himself that it really wasn’t all that wrong.

But of course, it would be wrong. It doesn’t matter how beyond his years the boy seems. It doesn’t matter how responsible the older woman is about contraception. The law recognizes that no kid that age can make a good value judgment about who to get into bed with. Like in that Nicole Kidman movie, she convinced the kid to go murder for him. Right? Because he was whipped.

And if that’s true for a heterosexual relationship, that’s true for a homosexual relationship as well.

So if Delany is holding out on his retraction because his version of Stiffler’s mom when he was a kid was a man, and he ended up liking it because he was gay, that doesn’t matter.

It’s still wrong.

There’s a true crime podcast out there called Obscura, and it’s published two episodes which deal with this issue, with Delany and the scandals involving Marion Zimmer Bradley. For those who don’t know, Marion Zimmer Bradley, the author of Mists of Avalon and one of the co-founders of SCA, the Society for Creative Anacrohism, turned out to be an abusive bitch. Her husband, Walter Breen, was clearly a horrific pedophile. Their daughter, Moira Greyland, published a book detailing her horrors called, The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon, and it’s a gut-wrenching read.

For the record, I side with Moira. What happened to her is simply unforgivable. I also don’t fundamentally disagree with anything that has been talked about on the Obscura podcast. (Though I disagree with the light it's cast in.) But there are more episodes coming, and the host of that show says openly that those episodes will cause anyone to look askance at SFWA and science fiction in general.

Will they?

I have no idea what’s going to be said in those episodes. But I have a realistic fear that things might get blown out of all proportion by the remnants of the Sad & Rabid Puppies, the O&A Army Pests, Josh Moon’s Kiwi Farms, or even the Q-Anon deplorables. The claims don’t need to be 100% accurate to do a great deal of damage.

A retraction by Delany could diffuse the situation before its even begun.

It’s long past time to see that happen.

Eric

**