Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
If I had to pick one Great American Novel--I don't and neither do you, but like, gun to my head--it'd be Dhalgren, which wouldn't be what it is without Samuel Delany's extremely astute observations about sex as a social structure sitting alongside all the others. When I see people talk about Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, it's often as an anatomy of gentrification, and it is that. But it's also more than that.
Delany's thesis stems from his consideration of the closure of porn theaters where casual sex between men happened as someone who frequented those theaters. At first glance it looks like an argument for urban design that promotes informal "contact" across social classes over insular, competition-oriented "networking":
Networking is what people have to do when those with like interests live too far apart to be thrown together in public spaces through chance and propinquity.
[T]he amount of need present in the networking situation is too high for the comparatively few individuals in a position to supply the much needed boons and favors to distribute them in any equitable manner.
In no way [...] can [networking interchanges] halt or resolve [the class] war. At best they allow that war to proceed in a more humane manner that keeps "war" merely a metaphor.
But Delany cautions against thinking of this as a binary choice. There are benefits to networking, as he explains by way of his experiences with writers' workshops and science fiction conventions. It's just that these benefits are easy to overestimate, and a healthy environment must also allow space for contact if the goal is a diverse and equitable society. Contact both increases the general pleasantness of urban space and makes the boundaries between classes permeable.
Contact might be sexual or not. But availability of sexual contact is a contrast to what Delany sees as the conditions that give rise to homophobia and other social ills, a system in which "pleasure must be doled out in minuscule amounts, tied by rigorous contracts to responsibility," and any dissenters are branded "a prostitute or a pervert, or both." While the (mostly hetero) porn played in the theaters where the contact in question occurred isn't Delany's focus, it comes into this (so to speak) as well:
Generally, I suspect, pornography improved our vision of sex all over the country, making it friendlier, more relaxed, and more playful--qualities of sex that, till then, had been often reserved to a distressingly limited section of the better-read and more imaginative members of the mercantile middle classes.
Not that the films or their industry are above criticism, not that they're exempt from misogyny and the other bigotries of the culture they're part of, but they seem to have expanded that culture's horizons re: what sex can be. This doesn't mean compelling people to do the acts depicted in the onscreen fiction, as if fiction works like cartoon hypnosis, but rather broadening viewers' imaginations. Which maybe makes it easier to, as Delany puts it, "learn to find our own way of having sex sexy," which "allows us to relax with our own sexuality."
Sex, the kind that occurs between two or more people, is not very important to me in terms of how I organize my life; while not strictly asexual, I'm probably somewhere on that spectrum, such as it is (though I've seen people define being ace as basically this, so, who knows). But hopefully it's obvious that policies that reduce all social activity to capitalist transaction/competition and designate pleasurable experiences as frivolous and/or suspect wouldn't be any better for someone like me than they would be for a non-monogamous gay man or for anyone else uninterested in living inside the smallest and least-connected box, alone or as half of a compulsory child-generating pair.