Week 10: Ideas in stories (stories by Harlan Ellison and Samuel R. Delany)

           The stories from this week presented a variety of interesting ideas. I read “Repent Harlequin!” Said the TickTockMan and I have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison, and AYE and Gomorrah by Samuel R. Delany. The stories are beautifully written. They utilize a sense of mystery that keeps the reader engaged and in a way even distracts from the ideas they’re trying to push with the stories.

            AYE and Gomorrah is the clearest example of this. There is a straightforward connection between what happens in the story and what the author is highlighting about our lives, or their life at the time. In the story, the Spacers genital has been modified by the government because the spacers will be exposed to radiation in space. The way that spacers and frelks are treated mirror how the gay community was treated then and for sure could strongly relate to how many people think of transgendered or gender queer people now. When people make comments and assumptions about what the Spacers used to be and speak freely about the spacers’ genitals and guess if it used to be male or female genitalia.

            Frelks obsess over Spacers who cannot return their feelings. Both groups of people end up deemed as unfit for proper society in some forms. This leads to the isolation that could mirror how society treated gay people in 1967.

            One of the things that I found interesting about the story was its title and the way that it ties it to the city Gomorrah that was accounted as being destroyed for the sins of its people. It’s infamous for the sexual “perversions” and homosexuality of its people. I think that this can add meaning to the story in a couple ways.

You can take into account the fact that Gomorrah would have been home to many people who weren’t heterosexual and when it was destroyed so was their home. This can be tied to the Spacer’s lack of home as they symbolize a portion of the LGBT+ community in the story.

Another way that I thought about it was simply tying the way that this society viewed the sexual perversions of the frelks. They damned it to a degree in the way that the city of Gomorrah was damned to its fate. However, in the story, actual homosexuality appears to be commonplace and accepted.

The story pushed its ideas by presenting it in an unreal way. We’re dealing with space-sexuals instead of being directly asked to question how our society treats people who identify within the LGBTQAI+ community. It distracts us with questions of what’s going on.

One last thought, while I was reading one of the things that I found myself extremely curious of was what exactly had been done to the spacers to change their genital so drastically to be completely androgynous. While in discussion in the class we questioned to a degree why someone would be attracted to that or so fascinated by it. But in a way, at least from my experience, the mystery that the author created around the subject was enticing enough to captivate my attention. My subconscious was fixed on it. I thought it was really interesting that in a way the author, by not answering a lot of questions about the spacers – even more generally – placed the audience to a degree in the place of the frelks. Ignoring the sexual fascination they have with spacers, that interest in the spacers, and what their lives are like, is what motivates the reader to finish the story.