reviewed by J. Hartman

"...it is always odd to discover the ways in which desire fuels the systems of the world." --The Mad Man

The term "sex" 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 -- until The Mad Man came along to show me how inadequate my definitions still were.

In his disclaimer at the beginning of the book, Delany makes it clear that this is a novel "about 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." So I thought I knew what I was getting into: I thought the book would focus on the possibility of seroconversion from oral sex -- an issue I'd heard Delany speak about -- and 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, entitled "Risk Factors for Seroconversion to Human Immunodeficiency Virus Among Male Homosexuals"; the study reported that the greatest risk for seroconversion came from unprotected receptive anal intercourse. I figured this novel wasn't going to cover any ground I hadn't seen before, especially when I read its opening lines: "I do not have AIDS. I am surprised that I don't. I have had sex with men weekly, sometimes daily -- without condoms -- since my teens, though ... it's been -- since 1980 -- all oral, not anal."

But I bogged down maybe eighty pages into the novel -- because 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 -- including "cream" (semen), piss, "cheese" (smegma), sweat, shit, and snot -- many of which I don't normally consider edible (much less of sexual interest), I was just too uncomfortable to continue, and I shelved the book.

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's received from his advisor, Irving Mossman. Mossman's letter refers to the "unbelievably nasty sex life" of the philosopher (named Timothy Hasler) whose life and work they've 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, "[I]f that was Mossman's idea of 'an unbelievably nasty sex life,' what in the world would he have thought of mine?"

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's earlier pornographic novel Hogg) Marr doesn't often describe himself as deriving any sort of sexual enjoyment from his encounters; it's 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's reading of Hasler's journals provides the key to the book: just as Hasler's commenting on everyone's feet leads Marr to realize that was Hasler's fetish, it's Marr's descriptions of the details of his own encounters that show us what he's attracted to. For instance, Marr is a size queen, but he never describes himself in those terms; until I figured that out, I didn't understand why he commented on the length of every penis he encountered, and frequently described new partners with phrases like "He was hung!" (Though such phrases are of course also simply among the standard tropes of erotic writing.)

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 -- mostly -- the attitude I'd 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.

Reviews and even the jacket flap of The Mad Man suggest the book is about "shocking, depraved sexual entanglements" and "sexual debasement." And yet, unlike in what I've read of Hogg, I see no suggestion that Delany intends us to make moral judgments about the characters' actions here. Though John Marr is, by his own admission, no saint, he's no demon either; he is a sympathetic character who happens to have relatively unusual sexual interests, specifically urolagnia and (to a lesser degree) coprophagia. (M any of the other characters in the book suggest that Marr's interests -- particularly urolagnia -- are fairly common among "cocksuckers.") My concern for authorial intent is perhaps old-fashioned, but I believe it's relevant in this case; I don't 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's, rather, a portrait of a fairly ordinary (though not typical, because one of Delany's points is that there's no such thing as typical) gay man in New York City in the '80s.

The Mad Man also upset my assumptions about "safer" or "protected" sex.

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's not his choice. To Marr, sex with a condom just isn't sex -- it loses all its appeal.

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.)

A friend of mine suggested that Marr's dislike of condoms is merely the same thing that a lot of straights say -- they're used to sex without latex and see no reason why they should change. But there's something more going on here. Partly it has to do with Marr's initial conviction (when it starts to become clear in the book that there's 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's life -- he sees his sexual encounters as one of the foci of his life, at least as important as the doctoral thesis he's working on and probably more so. At the start of the book, he's never had a terribly close ongoing Relationship as such; lots of fuck buddies, but he's 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 -- pretty much everything, in fact, besides sex and academic work; and of course since the book is by Delany, we're both directly and indirectly informed that there's plenty going on in Marr's life that we aren't 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.

At one point Marr believes he has in fact contracted AIDS, but he doesn't stop having sex. "[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 ... probably had it, too.... [T]he fact is, when those used to regular sex have regular sex available, they have it. It's 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...." The book is at least as relevant a description of sexual attitudes today -- when there are sex clubs (as described in a recent San Francisco Bay Times article) devoted specifically to "barebacking," condom-free anal sex -- as it was when it was written.

There's plenty more to this book than I've discussed. I haven't touched on the race and class issues that suffuse it, for instance; nor on the terms of verbal abuse that permeate it -- one character asks to be called "Piece o' Shit," another likes to be called "Dummy," and several half-affectionately use the terms "nigger" and "cocksucker." I haven't mentioned the title character. And I haven't 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.... But this review is long enough; if you want more about the book, you'll have to read it yourself.

The Mad Man 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 "the semiotics of desire." It's confusing yet enlightening, extremely detailed in physical description but lacking (for the most part) in emotional description, disturbing yet (at times) familiar. It's five hundred pages of what can only be termed pornography, written by a man who usually writes science fiction, swords & sorcery, and scholarly or autobiographical essays. There's 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.

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're uncomfortable with the topics in question.

I'll 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:

It occurs to me ... 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's because I don't think anyone can really understand what AIDS means in the gay community until she or he has some understanding of the field and function -- the range, the mechanics -- of the sexual landscape AIDS has entered into. And that means having a clear view of the sexual activity available; and that means understanding ... the camaraderie and good will that exists in so much of it -- as well as the barriers to social communication that fall....