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7 The Black Leather in Color Interview Questions by Thomas Deja BLIC: When you started writing science fiction, it was still basically a white, male heterosexual preserve. As a gay,black man, how did you feel about being the odd man out? Do you think it may have changed theway your career progressed in anyway? Whydoes it still seem to be a community of white guys? Samuel R. Delany: Of course, there are no "heterosexual" male preserves . There are social groups where gay or bisexual men feel safe acknowledging themselves—first to one another, then to pretty much everyone. And there are other social groups where they don't. By heterosexual preserve, you simplyindicate the latter. The gay and bisexual men are there. But the homophobia in the group is high enough to make them wary of acknowledging their presence— sometimes even to themselves. Possibly because I had an extremely supportive and wide-rangingextended black family, I've rarely felt myself the odd man out in any group I've entered—even though I probably was.Again and again. Or,possibly, because of my sexualityand because of my interest in writingas an art (I didn't come out sexually in my family at all when I wasa youngster, and would have been scared to death to, but they all knew I wanted to write and thought that wasgreat) I'm so used to being the odd man out Ijust don't notice it anymore. You decide where, on the spectrum between the two, the explanation lies. Certainly it's changed my career. The artist is always the odd woman or odd man out in any group—even in a group of other artists. (That last is the most painful lesson we always learn and then relearn.) If that's an anxiety-producing situation for you, and you're an artist—then you're 116 Shorter Views bound to have an unhappy life; and that's certainly going to influence how you present yourself,how you're perceived, and how you're treated by those around you. Why is SF still so overwhelmingly white? I wish I knew.There're lots of African-American SFreaders—many more today than there were when I entered the field in '62, by hundreds of percent. I meet them at conventions . I meet them at academic conferences. I meet them at bookstore signings. Why haven't the writers followed? (They're four of us writing regularly in English: Octavia Butler, Steven Barnes, Charles Saunders, and myself—and most recently Nalo Hopkinson. In the related field of Horror there's Tananarive Due. And, writing in French, out of Canada, there's Haitian-born Jean-Claude Michel.) Again, I don't know. I know what it's not, though; it's not editorial bias. If anything, the white editors I've talked to today are aware enough of the black readership that they'd jump at the chance to sprinkle some good SF stories with a black perspective around their magazines or book lists. Am I over-optimistic? Perhaps. But not by much, I'd wager. When submissions by black writers hit the twenty percent mark—or get above that—then we may well have some problems. But right now they're nowhere near that number. BLIC: How did you discover the leather culture? SRD: The leather world has always been the most visible part of the gay male world, next to the area that laps—or overlaps with—the world of cross-dressers. The real question for many if not most gay men might better be: How did you manage to find the rest of the gayworld, once you found the world of leather and/or drag queens? Among the first three of four times I got picked up and taken home, back when I was eighteen or nineteen (nine years before Stonewall), a guy in his thirties started talking to me on Central Park West and invited me back to his place, a fewblocks away. Clearly,he explained, he wasinto sadomasochism and thus things would be somewhat unusual once we got there. But since I was new to the whole cruising scene, I wasn't all that clear on what the usual was.So I went with him. At his place, he had some leather lying around, ajacket on his coat hook, a vest over the back of one chair; he himself had gone cruising, I recall, in a brown, threepiece suit. He told me...

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