The science fiction space, at least in its earlier years, would often struggle to give voice to marginalized groups, racial or sexual. However, authors like Samuel R. Delaney strove to develop more realized worlds, ones that would allow minorities to see themselves in the speculative works of the world. His short story, Aye, and Gomorrah, does an especially good job of this. Detailing the adventures of an unnamed protagonist part of a marginalized non-binary astronaut group, the Spacers, Aye manages to use the subtle nuances sexual and racial marginalization to craft a high fidelity exploration of the ways the politics of attraction could potentially evolve in a society that seems otherwise accepting.

As a work of science fiction, Aye, and Gomorrah accomplishes something relatively unseen in the space: a story told from the perspective of a minority that genuinely empathizes with the struggles that they would face from their societal position. Spacers clearly fill a slightly aspirational but clearly marginal role in Gomorrah’s society. While they may be sexually desirable to Frelks, this desirability lacks depth. They’re sexuality is positioned as an unattainable prize, something novel to be tinkered with, but ultimately not worth seeking much else from. The widespread Spacer prostitution that Frelks engage with only reinforces how transactional cross-group relationships are in Delaney’s work. The lack of deeper Frelk-Spacer relationships is further explained in two of the interactions in the text. First, the blond man in Paris laments that one of the Spacers may have been born a man, and that he would have been interested were they still one. Second, more painfully, comes the Frelk who the main character tries to form a friendship with in Instanbul. However, in breaking the sexual role she had established for them, unattainability, the Frelk pulls away. Insisting that she’d rather they leave and allow her to imagine the Spacer as the one that got away, Delaney reinforces that the Frelk are unable to see any value in committing any actual time or effort into getting to know the Spacer protagonist outside of the fantasies they’ve constructed of their relationships. This hurt maps exceptionally well onto real life experiences of racism and bigotry in interpersonal, and especially sexual, relationships.

Relating the experience back to Delaney’s own, as a gay black man in America, a slew of parallel desirability and fetishism politics begin to rise. As a black man in America, Delaney would be victim to stereotypes of black hypersexuality, as outlined by J. A. Roger’s “SEX, DRUGS, AND . . .RACE-TO-CASTRATE: A BLACK BOX WARNING OF CHEMICAL CASTRATION’S POTENTIAL RACIAL SIDE EFFECTS”, specifically in chapter III: “HISTORY OF BLACK MALE CASTRATION: DEMASCULINIZATION, DEHUMANIZATION, AND INVISIBILITY”. This black hyper-sexuality comes hand-in hand with a dehumanization in interracial relationships, one where desirability is solely based on fetishization, and thus prevents deeper bonds from forming. These dynamics amplified themselves within the less mainstreamed queer spaces and less socially progressive black spaces of the 60s, where internal stigmas would have further alienated people like Delaney. This isolation within marginalization blooms in Aye, and Gomorrah through the protagonist’s relationship with Frelks. One of the Frelks, admitting, “You don’t choose your perversions”, reveals their own biases and self-perceptions. Frelks may be their own marginalized social group, but in holding a more societally acceptable status than Spacers, still hold power over them. This power translates into the fetishistic, transactional interactions they share, one that doesn’t allow ‘non-traditional’ relationships to form across the members, one that parallels real-life dynamics.

The most empathetic aspect, however, is that the story is largely written with an understanding of how these dynamics feel from the person afflicted by them. In being a story written from the perspective of a person victim to society’s biases, the protagonist of Aye, and Gomorrah presents a more unfiltered take on what bias feels like. They’re humanized in a way that many stories of prejudice fail to do, by addressing the fact that a) oppression is often systematic (the normalization of Spacer prostitution as default interaction) and b) the fact that it’s fully realized human beings who have to experience its effects. The Spacers are allowed a full spectrum of feelings, where the protagonist has started to feel a loneliness within their place as a spacer. In attempting to reach out to a Felk unable to pay, for other Spacer services, the two characters are allowed to act the way they would as people once the traditional, prescribed order of interaction has been broken. Their conversation in the aftermath allows them to exist as people to one another, but also doesn’t allow any easy escapes from the effects of bias: the Felk still insists on them returning to the roles society has assigned them, despite the opportunity to feel something beyond that, a reaction that often comes from people who would need to shake their own position of comfort to expel a prejudice.

In all, Delaney’s work makes a holistic, deeply interesting dive into modern attraction through speculation of its future. In stripping the work of simpler biases, like sexuality, Delaney can mine a far more empathetic, resonant story by way of analyzing the nature of sex and its relationship with interaction, and how deeply fetishization can dehumanize a person.