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New Statesman
7 days ago
- Climate
- New Statesman
Who loves the sun?
Photo by Miriam Reik/Millennium Images Early on in life, I noticed something fundamental about myself that I have struggled to make sense of ever since, let alone find a way to explain to other people in clear and comprehensible words: a strange pattern that has travelled with me everywhere. It was the same in Istanbul, it is the same in London. It was the same when I was young, and the same now that I am middle-aged. It goes like this: on sunny days, I feel demoralised, down and depressed, but it is quite the opposite when the weather turns chilly, overcast and gloomy. Give me rain and plenty of grey and I am most upbeat. As soon as the sun peeks through the clouds my soul starts to plummet. This week as London sizzled and temperatures rose I wondered if there are others out there who have always felt the same way. I did not need to look far. Our dog, Romeo, a small Maltese with a huge heart, responds in a similar way to the hot weather. He visibly hates the sun and each morning crawls under a sofa with miserable, melancholy eyes, waiting for the evening to descend. We are nocturnal creatures. But this week, I told Romeo we must change our ways: we must rewire our brains, as the climate crisis is an acute reality that will be worsening with each passing day. I put him on his lead and we went out for a walk to find some inspiration. We saw people sunbathing, playing frisbee and socialising. We saw a man on a bike with a loudspeaker on his back playing Santana's 'Maria, Maria'. We returned an hour later with our tongues lolling out, sulking, in a state of despondency. Temporary reprieve Heatwaves. Hosepipe bans. Water companies systematically failing to invest in infrastructure while pumping sewage into our beloved rivers. Climate destruction is primarily the story of water. This week, an international NGO announced that Kabul was likely to become the first major city to completely run out of water. Seven million people live in the Afghan capital. I stayed at home. I read. I finished Damian Barr's brilliant book The Two Roberts and found it immersive, intelligent, immensely sensual. Nicola Sturgeon's Frankly is a memoir of profound power, honesty, emotional intelligence and humanity from one of our most influential politicians. It touched me, the journey of a shy child from a working-class family becoming Scotland's first female and longest-serving First Minister. Then I dived into Lyse Doucet's The Finest Hotel in Kabul. Everyone should read this book. It is important, insightful, subtle and simply unforgettable. A labour of love Mid-week, I was asked to visit Penguin headquarters in London's Embassy Gardens to give a talk to the employees at Viking. When I entered the room, there was a surprise waiting for me: a beautiful cake, and on it a drop of water with the title of my latest novel, There Are Rivers in the Sky. So many people contribute to the journey of a novel, from cover designers to printers to copy editors and then, when it's been released, booksellers and librarians. Many young people and women work in the publishing world, and they put so much labour and love into making books accessible in this age of hyperinformation and fast consumption. I left the office with much gratitude in my heart. On the wall I was touched to see a small quote from my work: 'Home is Storyland.' Stories to tell It was an immense honour to receive the British Academy President's Medal from Julia Black. On the way home I took a cab. The driver, an immigrant in the UK from Eritrea, was a gentle, mannered person. When he learned I was an author, his face lit up. He told me about his daughter, Betty: 'She will become a writer someday. I know she will.' Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe His wife died suddenly years ago, and he has raised their three children on his own. Betty is the youngest, and the only girl. 'She did not speak for a long time, and then she started writing stories,' he said. 'She loves books – she even talks to them sometimes.' It was very moving to listen to these words from a single father, a hard-working immigrant, doing his best not only to raise his kids but to support their creativity, their talents. We rarely share positive stories of migration. We seldom publicly acknowledge how much immigrants contribute to all areas of life in the UK – from medicine, the economy and the NHS, to small businesses and arts and culture. These stories matter. At home, Romeo was waiting for a walk in the evening, our usual time. [See also: Britain's billionaire tax problem] Related
New Statesman
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
What teenagers can teach us about love
Photo by Linn Heidi Stokkedal/Millennium Images, UK Here they come: a cross-section of the young in trackies and crop tops or sarcastic slogan tees, fresh-faced with scattered freckles and acne, or made up with thick eyeliner and dark, moth-like fake lashes. Depressed, hyperactive, in love, against it, serious and often very silly, here are all the forms of girl (and those questioning whether they want to be known by that term at all) I remember from my own early teens, now sloping into a large barn at the base of a valley in Devon, to answer my questions about love. For the last four summers I have taught on this residential creative writing week at an Arvon writing house with a cohort of Year 7s, 8s and 9s from a nearby state school. The activity weeks are their end-of-term treat. 'The cool kids do surf camp and the weird ones come here,' they tell me, which you can translate to mean we get the best of the bunch: the diary-keepers and the poets, those governed by electrical storms and pyrotechnic shows of feeling. The crème de la crème, as Jean Brodie would have put it. When I'm teaching I often think of Muriel Spark's extraordinary novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, about an unconventional Edinburgh teacher and the set of girls she attempts to model from childhood to adolescence. Spark describes what each member of the 'Brodie set' will become 'famous for' at secondary school, be it sex or mathematics. The kids I meet in Devon have an equally fine-tuned understanding of social dynamics – where they sit in the pecking order and what they are 'famous' for. It's staggering how much more open they are about sexuality than previous generations. The cooler you are, the less you experience homophobia around coming out, they say, explaining that, 'In rural areas, people just aren't exposed to that much diversity.' I especially wanted to hear their thoughts on romantic love, as there is all this pre-run wisdom and oracular capacity in young people, as if those experiences already lie dormant within them. (This is how it feels in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, too; Spark defies chronology to leap ahead and describe what will become of the Brodie set in adulthood, as if such events are encoded into their DNA.) So for an hour, I sat with 12 of them on sofas in the barn while they described all they know and anticipate about the matters of love. What is love? – Love is like a fish. A fish?! – As there are all kinds of fish, from goldfish to sharks, there's also all kinds of love. – It's like friendship, but you can be more vulnerable with a person you love. – And there's some things you can't do with your friends! [All cackle.]– But your love shouldn't all be for one person. That's not how it's meant to work. Why do we want to fall in love? And does it change us? – I want someone to love so I don't feel lonely. It makes you happier. Even having a crush makes me feel happier for a bit. – I mean, I'm a teenager, so I probably haven't got everything figured out yet, but I'm asexual and I think people falling in love is silly because you can't trust love. – Like in Romeo and Juliet. We're reading it at school and they fall in love immediately and get married the next day! Then they die. – Exactly: silly. Are teenagers or adults better at loving relationships? – Both are equally bad at it. Adults can't express their feelings and teenagers are awkward. – I think adults have more issues to work around in love. People have this perception about love being perfect, but you forget everyone has issues. – Some adults shouldn't even be adults. – Yes, some of them can't even do their taxes. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Are your parents your role models for love? – Definitely not! – Some married people might not be in love any more, and that's fine, but it affects the children. – Having divorced parents makes you more aware that love might not always be there. But you can still be friends and not bitter, like my parents. – Ooh a butterfly! [Everyone is momentarily distracted by a butterfly that flies in, then disappears up into the rafters.]– My parents aren't together and they don't get on. People always give that stereotype: 'You're going to end up like your dad.' But I'm really not. He says, 'What I've done is all for love,' and I've learned not to trust that. How do you do love well? – Don't try to solve all their problems. – Communicate. – Don't confuse love with wanting to be them. Sometimes I see a girl with cool eyeliner, and I think I love her, but actually maybe I just want her eyeliner. – I'm autistic so maybe this is specific to me, but if you feel you can mask less with someone, then you should be with them. Can love change the world? – Yes, if all the world leaders became gay and kissed. If they actually loved each other, then there wouldn't be war or homophobia. – But everyone already has love and they're still bad to other people and actually they often don't know how to love themselves. – When the power of love overtakes the love of power, the world will be at peace. [Communal 'Woaaaah!']– I can't take credit. It's Jimi Hendrix. [See also: Samuel Pepys's diary of a somebody] Related
New Statesman
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Ignore the pessimists – we are living through a literary golden age
Photo by Adam Hirons / Millennium Images, UK Literary culture is dominated by pessimists. They claim that the English novel is in a slump, the media is dying at the hand of tech oligarchs, and that culture is in a repetitive doom-loop. Every film is a sequel. Students don't read anymore. A generation of graduates are illiterate. Marshall McLuhan was right. There is a lot of truth in this perspective. Survey data shows there really has been a decline in reading this century. Studying literature at university is in steep decline. No-one doubts that there is a preponderance of screen time instead of book time. It is heartbreaking to see children still in their buggies addicted to tablets. Somedays, I feel the pull of the pessimistic argument. What was the last English book that was as good as Piranesi or An Inheritance of Loss? Why do we not have a new Sally Rooney, or a Percival Everett every year? But I think the overall picture is more complicated. Literature is doing just fine in quality terms, but we are at a tipping point. We have a chance to change all this, and pessimism won't help. Let's start with fiction. The last few years have seen some splendid British novels: Piranesi, Hamnet, Klara and the Sun, Shuggie Bain, and the Wolf Hall books. This year I have especially enjoyed Flesh by David Szalay. And Shibboleth by Thomas Peermohamed Lambert is a very funny new novel. International fiction is thriving: South America, Ireland, Korea, Japan and France have all produced great novels recently. This year, Helen deWitt, a true genius, is publishing a new novel. In 2022, Tyler Cowen listed seventeen major novels of modern times and concluded that we are not living through an especially bad time for literature. There is also children's writing. Sam Leith wrote in 2022 'we're going through a bit of a golden age for children's fiction.' He named Katherine Rundell, Piers Torday, SF Said, Jeff Kinney, Malorie Blackman, Philip Pullman, Philip Reeve and Michelle Paver. There are also writers like Alex Bell, Frances Hardinge, and Julia Donaldson. The bestselling shelves for non-fiction, however, have recently been full of trash. The recent Times list of the bestselling books of the last 50 years was, to say the least, dispiriting. But we don't lack excellent non-fiction. AN Wilson has just written a very good book about Goethe. Frances Wilson's new biography of Muriel Spark is truly excellent, as is Lamora Ash's compulsive book about Christianity, and Helen Castor's new biography of Richard II and Henry IV. Rural Hours by Harriet Baker remains underrated despite winning the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. There is also Question 7, by Richard Flanagan, The Marriage Question by Clare Carlisle, Parfit by David Edmonds, What We Owe The Future, by Will MacAskill. We should also be optimistic about the breadth and variety of what is happening online. Naomi Kanakia, an American novelist turned Substacker, has just had her work profiled in the New Yorker, along with John Pistelli, another Substacker whose new novel Major Arcana is a weird and wonderful account of modern culture. Kanakia has written about the many fictional experiments happening on Substack. Several critics and essayists have emerged on Substack whose work is interesting and original, people like Henry Belger, alongside the established writers like BD McClay. Hollis Robbins is an original and daring academic voice writing about AI. Closer to home, AN Wilson, England's last great man of letters in the George Henry Lewes manner, has a Substack too, which I read religiously. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe On any given day you can read first-rate nonfiction online in places like 'Construction Physics', 'Works in Progress', and from writers like Paul Graham, Noah Smith, and Scott Alexander. In Britain, there is excellent work being done by Saloni Dattani about science and Alice Evans about demography and women's rights. Are you not fascinated to know that Starbucks is a bank? Do you not admire Amia Srinivasan, Sophie Elmhirst, and Sam Knight? We have seen the tail end of a golden age of obituaries, too, notably at the Economist and Telegraph as well as at the New York Times. It is like the days of the periodical and Grub Street and the Westminster Review. This online culture has real signs of growth. There are now five million paying subscribers on Substack. Library apps like Libby are going through a small boom. BookTok is making all sorts of unexpected books, including classics, into bestsellers. In 2017 the UK publishing industry had revenues of £4.8bn. Now it is £7bn. There are far more independent bookshops now than in 2016 – 1,052 compared to 867. What we are starting to see, I think, is a tipping point. The decline of literature is coming to an end. The bounce back might be starting from a low point, but it's very real. On Substack, Beth Bentley has written about the popularity of reading in modern culture. Gen Z read more books than their elders, she reports. There are plenty of other signs that the decline is over. Celebrities and influences are running book clubs. One X user reported their builder listening to George Eliot on the scaffolding. Naomi Kanakia recently wrote about the growing fandom for literature on Substack among people who are disconnected from literary discourse and find it all bewildering. The fact is that the common reader is still out there. And they can be found in increasingly unlikely places. The Silicon Valley entrepreneur Patrick Collison said at the end of 2024 that he had read ten classic novels: Bronte, Dickens, Mann, Flaubert, Melville, Eliot, James, Conrad, Woolf, Grossman. Inspired by this, Matthew Yglesias started reading classic fiction too, finishing all of George Eliot's novels in the first three months of 2025. Kyla Scanlon recently used The Screwtape Letters to analyse the economy. This energy for literature is spreading. Many of my most enthusiastic readers are from Silicon Valley or other non-literary areas. They are reading Tolstoy and Shakespeare. If I want to talk about Iris Murdoch, I am usually better off at a party of STEM and policy nerds than a literature gathering. Indeed, it is only when I meet literary people that the mood starts sinking. One English literature lecturer, who I encountered at a party recently, has only read 12 of Shakespeare's plays (one third of the total works). Another professor has seriously argued that Taylor Swift is the literary equivalent of Mary Shelley. The editor of the New York Times book review section hasn't read Middlemarch and doesn't plan to. An academic at St Andrews published a piece saying that she thought it was better for students to read fewer books. 'Reading one novel in three weeks, but reading it well,' she said, 'is a perfectly good target.' Likewise, too many of the literary pessimists I spoke to about this piece haven't read many of the modern novels they assume aren't very good. If we want the rest of the world to take literature seriously, the literati needs to set a good example. The most striking recent instance of this happened on X. When the 4Chan list of the best books they had read in the last decade was published, Zena Hitz shared it, saying: 'Don't know how to break this to you but the 4channers are running circles around the pros, academics and critics.' Her replies were plagued with literary people complaining that the 4Chan readers hadn't read enough women. The very people who believe that not enough young men are reading literature (and that this is connected to the phenomena of their voting for Donald Trump) had little more than complaints and nit-picking to offer when faced with a new constituency of readers. Whenever I talk to someone who thinks we are living in a desperately bad literary time, they usually do have a favourite living novelist, someone like Tessa Hadley or Ali Smith or Rachel Cusk. These are not writers I care for, but take note that the doomers are simultaneously admirers. English literature is in good enough shape to inspire disagreements about who the good writers really are. Pessimism about literature is probably more about the question of whether we ought to care about novels anymore. Some 20 years ago, VS Naipaul declared the novel dead. Who can doubt his reasons: 'We've changed. The world has changed. The world has grown bigger.' Terrorism, the fertility crisis, climate change, housing shortage, the fact that we cannot build basic infrastructure without years of bureaucratic delay, the financial crash of 2008, the pandemic, the rising feeling of an inevitable war we're inadequately prepared for – what has fiction had to say about the cycles of disruption in this century? Perhaps a lot of the low-beat mood among literary people is not actually about the quality of modern books, but simply about the fact that literature simply isn't as significant or important as it used to be. One reason why literary people may feel that we are not living in a great period of writing is that the writing that is truly excellent is not the sort of writing they produce. This sounds harsh, but I include myself in this assessment. So, I think the overall situation is something like this: there is still plenty of good writing, plenty of literary energy, but it is not always in the same places it used to be, and the literary establishment isn't always well aligned to its audience. We are living through a significant disruption. Instead of responding with despair, we need to adapt. This is fully achievable. As the world continues to evolve in the direction of uncertainty – caused primarily by AI and geopolitics – literature will only become more significant. It is no coincidence that people are turning back to literature now. The spread of AI will make the most 'human' activities more valuable. The returns to taste will rise. That is what literature excels at. The best work stands out all the more starkly in a world of abundant slop. We have seen this before. People decide to watch less television, scroll less social media, and read classic literature and they are amazed at the benefits. Someone somewhere is always discovering that Tolstoy is gold compared to the tinfoil of Netflix. The literati are poised on the edge of a huge social change: there is no point in asking ChatGPT to read Frederick Douglass on your behalf. Discussing those works with ChatGPT, though, is very valuable. Reading literature will also be a means of connecting with other people. We have to choose what side of this transition we are on. Do we want young people to read the Bible and Homer or do we want to complain about their choices on Twitter? Middlemarch just went viral on Substack. I see people there reading everything from the Mahabharata to JM Coetzee to Catherine Lacey. Elizabeth von Arnim was recently popular on TikTok. Can we be optimistic about that? If not, we may find ourselves left behind while literature carries on in its new forms of success. The task for those of us who care deeply about literature is to make it relevant in this new world. Even now, people are trying to find their way to books that will matter to them. Readers from unexpected places are searching for the best. If they find us too often complaining about the state of things, they will turn elsewhere. It is easy for us to see the dross that fills the shelves. But we ought to be searching as hard as we can for the best work, wherever it can be found. It is easy to regret the loss of the literary culture we all grew up with. But we are faced with the challenge of making something new. It is all too easy to see what we will lose with AI. But as Hollis Robbins told me, 'You can't be pessimistic if you fully grasp the creativity of the human mind. So much sublime work has been lost; some of it will be found. How can anyone be pessimistic when there is so much rediscovery work that AI is helping us do?' The world is full of aspiring writers. We need to raise their ambition, push them to be greater, showcase their work, be honest about their failures. Someone is always discovering Tolstoy for the first time. We ought to care a lot more about that. Patrick Collison and Matthew Yglesias and thousands of others whose names we don't know are coming to us. We need to welcome them. We need to show them what we have to offer. We need to choose between literature and politics. What the pessimists and I agree on is that this is a turning point. Where we differ is that I think we need to evangelize for the future, not decry the present. We need to read and enthuse. We need to innovate. We need to be the light that draws others in. It is time for us to shine out like a candle, to be a good deed in a naughty world. [See also: English literature's last stand] Related
New Statesman
25-06-2025
- General
- New Statesman
Home is where the Hove-l is
Photo by Susan Benson/Millennium Images A week of a looming sense of unease is finally over. Some ten days ago, my landlords pinged over a text saying that they were sending some people to check the smoke and carbon monoxide detectors at some point between 10am and 4pm on Wednesday and that if I wasn't going to be in, there'd be someone with a key with them anyway, so don't think you can weasel your way out of this one, and anyway, it's for your own good. (Not their exact words. I give you the gist.) Now, my landlords are pretty good as landlords go. They don't bother me, and I don't bother them. I pay my rent on time each month and decide that maybe the mould and the bubbling paintwork in the corner of the kitchen can wait for a bit. To do anything about it would be to have to invite someone else into the Hove-l, and that would be… suboptimal. For, as I might have mentioned before, or you might have been able to guess, I am not the tidiest person, and the place is not – how to put this delicately – conventionally tidy. The squalor is not organic as such, so there is little prospect of the place being colonised by vermin, but there are still enough stray books, bits of paper, empty Haribo packs and God knows what else lying around for the casual observer to think that the person who lived here had gone beyond depression into a state not far off catatonia, and that some kind of intervention might be needed. I suppose I ought to admit that the bed itself, due to my habit of snacking on Tyrrells truffle and sea salt crisps (oh my God, these are heavenly) and Waitrose Essential Garibaldi biscuits, has resulted in a surface that is more crumb than bedsheet, but who other than me is going to notice? Anyway, top and bottom: I had to tidy the place up before Wednesday. Normal people would have either a) cracked on straight away, or b) not let things get into such a state in the first place. But I am not normal people and so I let the matter rest, so to speak. This had psychic repercussions: the looming sense of unease mentioned above, and also disturbances to sleep in the form of nightmares in which I was evicted; in one case, the agent doing the evicting looked uncannily like JD Vance. That woke me up. The thing is, I like living here. I have done so for nearly five years, which is the longest I have lived anywhere since being kicked out of the original Hovel after living there for ten years. The reasons I like living here are the location – handy for Waitrose and 24-hour shops that cater for the insomniac who fancies a packet of Haribo and some sour-cream flavour Pom Sticks, yet also in a leafy part of town which is actually like one of the posher bits of London, say, around Gloucester Crescent or something. On a summer evening, with the birds tweeting their goodnights in the soft twilight, it is magical. The view from one side is of this genteel rus in urbe location; there are houses opposite whose balconies and high ceilings, not to mention polished and tidy interiors, induce in me pangs of envy and regret, but then I remember I have something they don't have and never will: a view of the sea, and, therefore, if the conditions are right and I turn the lights out, a view, I like to think, of all creation to the far corners of the universe. Yes, I know you can have one of those if you look straight up, but there's something about looking out to sea, isn't there? There are two snags. The most obvious one is the size of the place. It is tiny. The lack of any windows in the bathroom makes it seem even smaller. Then again, how much does one person need? It's just more to tidy up. The other is the sense of insecurity that comes with renting. One can get thrown out at any time for any reason, and even if my landlord is a business that wants nothing more than to run smoothly and not go chucking its tenants out on a whim, the memory of being chucked out in previous lives lingers. Just like Shostakovich would have a suitcase packed by the door ready to go in case he got word the NKVD would be turning up in the middle of the night for a chat, so I do not have what you might call markers of permanence here. The starkest example being that there is not a single piece of art on the walls, and I like my art. But just as we are born unfurnished, so I rented this place unfurnished, and, should I have to leave, that is the condition I will have to leave it in. What I will do with the bed is anyone's guess. (It's a very good bed, and I should know.) Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Well, I managed to tidy up, or at least clear a path from the front door to the bedroom. Picking stuff off the carpeted floor was a challenge without a vacuum cleaner, but I did it. I even washed my bedding, but that was more for my comfort than anyone else's. The people who came round to check the appliances were lovely, but not really my type. [See also: Thomas Skinner's full English] Related
New Statesman
11-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Talking to strangers enriches our lives in countless ways
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. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe 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] Related
