18. Samuel R. Delany

“Like many young people, I’d assumed the world—the physicality of stores, restaurant locations, apartment buildings, and movie theaters, and the kinds of people who lived in this or that neighborhood—was far more stable than it was.” -Samuel R. Delany

The last few years, I’ve become increasingly nostalgic. This nostalgia centers largely on the years that I grew up, the 1980s and 1990s, although it is not simply a longing to recapture an innocent moment of youth. To be sure, that’s a part of it. But it’s as much a desire to have lived my adult life in those decades as it is to return to some sort of golden childhood. Those were, after all, the last years before the internet became central to the way we live our lives, the last years before the threat of climate change became inescapable, the final decades before cities became largely overrun by a culture of suburban sameness. In my nostalgic fantasies, I relish the now-dead opportunity to walk the streets of a pre-Bloomberg New York, to walk any streets with a still-functioning internet-free brain, to live, above all, in a world still fresh with possibility.

But nostalgia is a troubling phenomenon. It imagines the past as better than it was. In doing so, it tends to erase historical reality, particularly that of marginalized groups who now enjoy greater rights and freedoms than they did in that supposedly superior past. But it is a mistake as well to look at history as marching toward some kind of enlightened ideal. We make progress in some areas, while we move backwards in others. Or we make progress in some areas, and we make what we call progress in others, which is actually its opposite. As we hail (or at least accept) the latest technological breakthroughs, they continue to serve increasingly monstrous aims: pushing economic inequality to new extremes, birthing an ever more homogenized culture, besieging our privacy and ability to think independent thoughts.

All of which is to say that, although it is hard for me to be sure, having only been alive since 1980, the world seems to have fundamentally altered over the last two decades in a way that is different from the way that things have always gradually changed over the years. Samuel R. Delany’s observation serves as the obvious rejoinder to such thinking, arguing as it does that the young inevitably take stability for granted, and only after growing into adulthood do we see that things are not nearly as static as we had always thought. But Delany wrote these words in 1998. They are taken from the introduction to his book Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, a diptych consisting of two very different essays reflecting on the Forty-Second Street Development Project, a planned act of violence that led to the closing of the numerous theaters where Delany enjoyed a rich run of queer encounters of all kinds over many decades.

But it seems likely that even Delany couldn’t have imagined the total-Bloombergian nightmare that would soon overtake the city, in which unprecedented levels of rezoning helped create a massive ongoing housing crisis and turned New York into a playground for tourists and newly-arrived suburban-minded residents. He probably didn’t forsee Amazon and Google’s monopolies on both consumer goods and free thought, or the extent of climate change’s rapid destructiveness. In Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, he takes a clear-eyed view of then-present circumstances, mourning the lost past, but refusing to indulge in undue nostalgic longing. Today, it is more and more difficult for many of us to face our doomed situation. Under such circumstances, backward longing becomes practically inevitable; the pull of nostalgia an increasingly irresistible force.