You guys weren’t part of the NYC gay scene during that period. I was, during part of it. I don’t doubt his number at all.
Let’s put it into perspective. I imagine it’s perfectly possible to suck off dozens of guys in one night at a gay bathhouse or theater if that’s your thing and you’re not repulsive. Not that I’m speaking from personal experience, mind you. You could meet your weekly quota in one night. Repeat for 50 years and you’ve got thousands of partners.
As for whether this is supposed to be cool and liberated, I think it’s compulsive myself. Surely sucking off one or two anonymous strangers per night should be enough for anybody.
Gee, and I thought I had an occasional problem with potato chips.
I wouldn’t even want to *shake hands * with 50,000 people.
Well, that’s the thing. That period was over 30 years ago. How did he keep up the volume needed to make the number viable in the decades since?
Definitely overblown.
This is a point I didn’t even consider. Since the AIDS crisis, it can’t possibly be as easy to score 100 guys a night… can it? It’s a miracle he didn’t catch anything more serious than the clap as it is, but if he were fucking thousands per year through the 80’s and 90’s? It strains credibility on more than one count.
It was gay men who eroticized condoms. My friend had no shortage of sexual partners in the 80’s.
Not credible. And keeping count is pathetic.
I doubt his figure, if only because I suspect it’s somewhat degenerate.
In a mathematical sense, that is. Logistically, he might well have participated in 50,000 anonymous sex acts in his lifetime. But I’ll bet that a lot of those, through no particular planning, were with the same people repeatedly. New York has a population of what, 7 million? Using the standard figure of 5% homosexuality in males (though who knows how accurate that is), that gives us 175,000 gay males in New York. But what fraction of those are still hiding in the closet? And of those that are left, how many are into the extreme promiscuity lifestyle? I suspect that the pool of potential partners is smaller than 50,000, which would put a cap on how many he could have had. And even if there are 50,000 individuals in his partner pool, what are the chances that he had sex with each of them exactly once?
He pulled those numbers out of his ass.
Yes, blown over and over, as noted.
Sir Rhosis
Sorry, had to. . . 
Well, that’s his claim, anyway. :o
Okay, snorting out loud here.
And -
Samuel Delany was gay?! No one tells me anything!
Here’s some more reasons to doubt this number. Look at this autobiography of Delany:
http://www.pseudopodium.org/repress/KLeslieSteiner-SamuelRDelany.html
(K. Leslie Steiner is a pseudonym for Delany.)
Delany hasn’t spent that much time in New York for the last twenty years. He’s had full-time professorships at a series of universities for all that time. He had a number of shorter teaching jobs outside of New York before that. He also spent a lot of time before then in Europe. So Delany has not, by a long shot, been part of the New York gay scene for the past 20 years and was only on and off part of it for some years before that. He’s lived with his current lover for the past 17 years and lived with another lover for 8 years in the 1970’s and 1980’s. So the claim that he’s been part of the New York gay scene for 50 years is clearly not true.
Maybe he went to two different orgies with 25,000 partners a piece?
Why would someone lie about something like this? Any ideas?
How do we know it is simply not a typo, and that site added an extra zero?
Sir Rhosis
The Village Voice also mentions that Delany “slept with 50,000 people.” It refers to the same article, “Polymath, or the Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman,” but I can’t believe 2 cites would have gotten it wrong.
The number is a bit high, but not impossible.
A few of my gay friends used to go down to NYC for a week and hit the gay bars, saunas, gyms. They’d report having had sex with incredible numbers of people. The numbers they could rack up in Montreal venues were smaller, but nonetheless, from the point of view of a heterosexual female friend, mind-boggling.
Yeah, one of them has AIDS. Just wanted to add that he is NO LONGER sexually active.
Yeah, but if you read the note at the end of Dahlgren, Delany wasn’t part of the NY gay scene. He’s lying about something.
ETA: I don’t really care how many people Delany fucked. I think he’s an interesting writer. I just think this claim is bullshit, but whatev’.