The article entitled "To My Readers" begins, "I have AIDS. (Brodkey's series of articles about dying of AIDS was reprinted in revised form as a book, This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death (Henry Holt and Company, 1996)). This supports both the plot of the book and why Delany himself remained HIV-negative.Īllusions/references to other works ĭelany said that the novel was inspired by his outrage at an article on AIDS by Harold Brodkey that appeared in The New Yorker in the Jissue. As such, the novel has great value as a gay history of the passage between the seventies and nineties in New York, as well as portrayals of the complex and changing attitudes towards AIDS by sexually active gay men over those years.Īll three editions conclude with the article "Risk Factors for Seroconversion to Human Immunodeficiency Virus Among Male Homosexuals," by Kingsley, Kaslo, and Renaldo et alia, as published in the Lancet, Saturday, 14 February 1987, which statistically supports the theory that AIDS cannot be transmitted orally. Marr writes letters to friends containing passages that are verbatim transcripts of actual letters Delany wrote at the time some of the originals are collected in his 1984: Selected Letters (Voyant, 2000). Other scenes detail visits to the pornographic movie theaters in the 42nd Street area, where much gay activity occurred from the sixties until they were shut down in the mid-nineties. Scenes in The Mad Man occur during "wet night" at the Mineshaft, a gay bar that actually existed in New York's meat-packing district in the '70s and '80s and indeed held such a monthly event. The relationship between the intellectual Marr and a street person, Leaky Sowps, mirrors those in many of his previous novels, as well as his real-life partnership of 17 years (as of 2007) with Dennis Rickett, formerly homeless for six years, before they met. Also, it employs autobiographical elements from Delany's life, having to do with his more recent life as an academic. It also contains magic realist elements, such as the bull-like monster that appears in Marr's nightmares. As such, it combines a number of perspectives: a realistic portrayal of academic research, New York street life and both pre- and post-HIV gay activity, as well as explicit portrayals of fellatio, coprophilia, urophilia, and mysophilia. The Mad Man, spanning 501 pages in its first hardcover edition, is Delany's longest and most ambitious novel since Dhalgren (1975). In the course of unravelling the mystery of Hasler's death, Marr joins with a homeless man from West Virginia, who goes by the street name "Leaky." Scenes based on letters Delany actually wrote (see: 1984: Selected Letters) take place in a gay bar in New York, though the basic incident is fictional. As details emerge, Marr finds his lifestyle converging with that of Hasler, and he becomes increasingly involved in intense sexual encounters with homeless men, despite his growing awareness of the risks of HIV. In New York City in the early 1980s, a black gay philosophy graduate student, John Marr, is researching a dissertation on Timothy Hasler, a Korean-American philosopher and academic stabbed to death under unexplained circumstances outside a gay bar in 1973.
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