Samuel Delany’s Lust Conquers All (Or At Least 50,000 Of You)

Okay, full disclosure: Samuel R. Delany has been one of our heroes since junior high. We totally loved him for his outsider status and for his refusal to be easily categorized as a human being or a writer. Plus, he wrote a lot of science fiction, and some of us were dweebs that way. But now our adulation has shot to a whole new level after hearing that during his heyday, Delany had, on average 10 - 15 sex partners per day. Per day, people! By his reckoning--and we aren't going to argue with Daddy D.--he's done the space boogie with 50,000+ folks in his life. That's, like, more people than there are in some of your hometowns! You'd have to get it on with the mayor and his wife multiple times to achieve that kind of record.

And while he was doing all these people, he was still cranking out stuff--not just white stuff, mind you, but solid literary stuff. Dude has truly disseminated in every sense of the word. The goodies are revealed in a documentary by Fred Barney Taylor (which is what happens to people sired by Flintstones fans) entitled "The Polymath, or The Life and Opinions of Samuel Delany, Gentleman", which has been making the festival circuit for months now but which we hadn't heard about until this interesting piece in yesterday's CityPaper. Among the choicer tidbits: "In 'The Polymath', [Delany] recalls taking a break from his writing routine to have sex with a New York City garbage man in a darkened movie theater — not the kind of thing you can imagine James Joyce doing on his lunch hour." Which may underestimate Joyce, but we get the point.

"Lust for Life" (citypaper.net)