Talking to strangers enriches our lives in countless ways

New Statesman​

11-06-2025

Photo by Lior Zilberstein/Millennium Images
It's a weird start, but go with me. First encounters with strangers are, by their nature, unexpected. That's what makes them so potentially electric. I was visiting an old friend in Berlin whom I hadn't seen for many years. On my final day I wanted to do what everyone who appreciates a good dance wants to do when there: go to Berghain, the city's most beloved club. At first sight, an enormous block of imposing concrete in the old east. It was a Sunday afternoon: no queue, just sweaty sexy people drifting out through the exit to be disarmed by the sunlight.
It takes me a while to warm up to my body as a subject in motion on a dancefloor, but once that's happened, almost nothing gives me greater pleasure. Except for the smoking area. I swear these are the most beautiful places in the world. Under the canopy of smoke, every single shimmering person is held in deep amorous conversation with someone else. It shouldn't be rare, but these days it is. You could blame the alcohol or the drugs, but I blame the dancing: every movement you make in answer to the hard, heavy music strips away something from your usual reserve, and gradually you feel yourself become unlocked, opened, until you're almost infant-like in your frame of mind.
Every hour I would head back out into the smoking area to encounter strangers. I met an army veteran from Belgium who said techno helps more than anything else with his PTSD, and a Russian facing arrest back in her country for speaking out against Putin's regime. It felt like none of the conversations I had that night were disingenuous or superficial. I felt I could do this forever – back and forth between these two states: dancing, then talking to strangers; breathing in, then breathing out – but I had a flight early the next morning to catch.
We need contact. That's not my line; I pinched it from the sci-fi writer Samuel R Delany's Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), a non-fiction book comprising two extended essays that first detail the author's experience of spending time in gay pornography theatres in Times Square between the 1970s and early 1990s. His argument is that public spaces in urban environments are vital sites for interclass contact, especially those designed specifically with desire in mind. For desire and knowledge, body and mind, are often imbricated, he writes, functioning as 'mutually constitutive aspects of political and social life'.
Delany defines contact as a particular kind of social practice. It is the discussion that begins with a stranger at the bar, or the one that emerges unexpectedly in the supermarket queue, or the bus stop or the nightclub – sudden sparks out of the dull impersonal drudgery of daily life. Contact can save our lives in small ways, by reminding us in an instant that almost all the time there are good people within touching distance, or in more significant ways: say there's a fire in your building, Delany suggests, 'it may be the people who have been exchanging pleasantries with you for years who take you into their home'. Unlike networking, to which Delany relates it, contact is spontaneous, non-competitive, non-capitalistic. Contact is how we retain the souls of our cities from annihilation by the corporatisation of all public space.
Delany's book is really a eulogy because by the time of writing, almost all the porn theatres had been demolished: replaced by vacant malls and offices, 'a glass and aluminium graveyard'. From 1985 onwards, New York began closing down institutions that were deemed to promote 'high-risk sexual activity', especially those used by gay men, such as bathhouses and the porn theatres of Times Square. Ostensibly, this was all done in the name of 'safety', a response to Aids, but really it was a cynical weaponisation of that term. 'Contemporary material and economic forces' work 'to suppress contact', Delany writes. Such forces promote the idea of the Other (gay or immigrant or working class) as an object of fear. I read it immediately after the UK Supreme Court ruled that the legal definition of a woman refers only to biological women. I feel that there are obvious parallels between Delany's argument and that ruling.
In the Times Square porn theatres, Delany passed whole days, talking and fucking and hanging out, all lit by the soft glow of the cinema screen. What happened to Times Square left him 'lonely and isolated'. The freedom to be gay, he explains, is no freedom if the institutions where you might embody and enact your sexuality are shut down. The freedom to be trans is no freedom if the public spaces you can attend are gradually eroded. Freedom is something which is interdependent; none of us is truly free until everyone is.
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Public spaces are for making contact. Contact is how we survive this world together – more than survive: experience life as genuinely pleasurable and meaningful. It is the antidote to xenophobia, to all kinds of othering. That's why I'm calling this column 'Contact'. I want to treat my life more like a nightclub smoking area, if you like – to go looking for contact, because I have a feeling that it is everywhere, so long as you render yourself open to it. So, hello, stranger. Nice to meet you.
[See also: We are all Mrs Dalloway now]
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