The Mad Man

The Mad Man is a sexually drenched literary novel by Samuel R. Delany, first published in 1994 by Richard Kasak. In a disclaimer that appears at the beginning of the book, Delany describes it as a "pornotopic fantasy".

Plot summary
In New York City in the early 1980s, John Marr, a black gay graduate student, is researching a dissertation on Timothy Hasler, a Korean-American philosopher and academic stabbed to death under unexplained circumstances outside a gay bar in 1974. As details emerge, Marr finds his lifestyle converging with that of Hasler, and he becomes increasingly involved in intense sexual encounters with homeless men, despite his growing awareness of the risks of HIV.

Major themes
The Mad Man, spanning 501 pages in its first hardcover edition, is Delany's longest and most ambitious novel since Dhalgren (1975). As such, it combines a number of perspectives: a realistic portrayal of academic research, New York street life and both pre- and post-HIV gay activity, as well as explicit portrayals of fellatio, coprophilia, urophilia, and mysophilia. It also contains magic realist elements, such as the bull-like monster that appears in Marr's nightmares. Also, it employs autobiographical aspects distinctive to Delany's work, having to do with his more recent life as an academic. The relationship between the intellectual Marr and a street person, Leaky Sowps, mirrors those in many of his previous novels, as well as his real-life partnership of 17 years (as of 2007) with Dennis Rickett, formerly homeless for six years, before they met. Scenes in The Mad Man occur during "wet night" at the Mine Shaft, a gay bar that actually existed in New York's meat-packing district in the 'seventies and 'eighties, which actually held such a monthly event. Other scenes detail visits to the pornographic movie theaters in the 42nd Street area, where much gay activity occurred from the sixties until they were shut down in the mid-nineties. Marr writes letters to friends containing passages that are verbatim transcripts of actual letters Delany wrote at the time; some of the originals are collected in his 1984: Selected Letters (Voytant, 2000). As such, the novel has great value as a gay history of the passage between the seventies and nineties in New York, as well as portrayals of the complex and changing attitudes towards AIDS by sexually active gay men over those years.

Allusions/references to other works
Delany claims the novel was inspired by his outrage at an article on AIDS by Harold Brodkey, which appeared in The New Yorker over two issues, starting in June, 1994. Brodkey's article began with some scientifically preposterous statements about contracting the syndrome. Only slightly revised, and just as preposterous, Brodkey's article was reprinted as a book, This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death (Henry Holt and Company, 1996): "I have AIDS. I am surprised that I do. I have not been exposed since 1977, which is to say that my experiences, my adventures with homosexuality took place largely in the 1960s and 70s, and back then I relied on time and abstinence to indicate  my degree of freedom from infection and to protect others and myself . . ." Once past its "Proem," Delany's novel opens with the identical statements, but placed in the negative: "I do not have AIDS. I'm surprised that I don't . . ." As critic Reed Woodhouse (in Unlimited Embrace: A Canon of Gay Fiction, 1945—1995, University of Massachusetts Press, 1998),wrote, "What one hears in Delany's sentence is the sound of the gauntlet being thrown down, for he wants to completely reverse the story Brodkey tells: the story, that is, of an 'innocent victim' who may have played around a little but very long ago and certainly not doing those things. John Marr, by contrast, is presented as a 'guilty victor', so to speak, in that he has done all those things (though not, it is true, unprotected anal intercourse) and has yet survived."

Delany discusses some of the background behind the novel in "The Phil Leggiere Interview: Reading The Mad Man", which appears in his essay collection Shorter Views.