Distinguishing between “contact” and “networking,” Delany argues that while
both are necessary ingredients in urban relationships, a healthy, diverse and erotic culture
of a democratic metropolis needs be sustained by promoting daily interclass contact and
intermingling in a public space. While contact is interclass, welcomes and engages
difference, and involves people from different communities, networking is intraclass,
orienting towards professionalized, indoor, and competitive relationships. Contact is
centrifugal, crossing sanitary boundaries; networking is centripetal, fearing contagious
and diluting differences.
Contact occurs on “the looser streets of the neighborhood;”
networking happens within the institutionalized space of “hotel or conference center
spaces.”
To Delany, gay porn theaters allow for a space of contact and interclass
communication, but New York City’s redevelopment project erodes that space by
orienting citizenly relations towards the standard norm of bourgeois networking.
Contact, in Delany’s conception, makes our relationships with one another in the
city richer, more fulfilling, and through layers of subtle understanding, makes the
denizens less susceptible to the hate politics of waving the moral banner of “family
values” in cleansing and driving out the abject elements that deviate from and threaten
the beneficiary of the white, middle-class, heterosexual family arrangement. Building a
bridge to Bakhtin, if networking repels and contains the “low” body, contact embraces
and welcomes it as part of our daily surroundings. Contact brings the once degraded
bodies into the living mode of the body collective, breaking down racial, class, gender,
and sexual boundaries so that an alternative cosmopolitan sphere may come into being.
In Delany’s words, a healthy democratic metropolis requires that “we speak to strangers,
live next to them, and learn how to relate to them on many levels, including the
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Convention