Call for Participants: Samuel Delany 1968, Samuel Delany 1969 Reading Group Spring 2026
Deadline
Deadline to apply is Fri, Feb 20th, 11:59 PM. This weekly meeting group will begin on March 11 and consist of six sessions on Wednesdays from 6-7:30 pm at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Apply to join our spring reading group, which will focus on Samuel Delany’s account of 1968 and his novel Hogg, initially drafted in the days before the 1969 Stonewall Riots. This is the first of three reading groups centered on Delany’s writing and archive as part of a series titled ThePara/Literary and the Post/Transgressive: A Samuel Delany Reading Group Series , spanning Spring 2026 to Spring 2027.
Apply to attend this reading group below. Members of the general public, in addition to all CUNY and Graduate Center students, faculty, and staff, are eligible to apply. Preference may be given to CUNY affiliates. There is limited capacity. To be admitted, prospective participants should fill out a short questionnaire here or click the button below. Deadline to apply is Friday, February 20th, 11:59 PM.
About this reading group
On the heels of the popular uprisings, political assassinations, and violent police repressions of 1968 and just days before the Stonewall Riots of June ‘69, Samuel Delany completed an initial draft of the novel Hogg. Yet it would take nearly two decades for the novel to ultimately be published, in 1995, one year prior to the advent of protease inhibitors for HIV—a publisher of the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom claimed that it was the only manuscript they had ever rejected solely on the grounds of its sexual content.
This reading group will take up this incendiary and storied text alongside supplemental essays and excerpts from his more recent pornographic novels to read beyond the initial shock of its transgressive content and lore of its censorship. We will explore the complex, challenging questions and provocations it raises about the politics of race, sex, gender, violence, language, and desire; where Hogg stands within Delany’s oeuvre of pornographic writing; the label of transgressive literature and/against/alongside K’eguro Macharia’s formulation of the post-transgressive; the historical and personal context from which the text arose; and debates emerging from its reception.
The participants will be provided free reading materials and be expected to come to sessions prepared to discuss. As we are reading a novel across several sessions, attendance at all sessions is expected.
Meeting dates
This weekly meeting group will begin on March 11 and consist of six sessions on Wednesdays from 6-7:30 pm at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Reading list
In addition to Hogg, we will look at excerpts of The Mad Man, Through The Valley of The Nest of Spiders, Tides of Lust; letters and essays by Delany commenting on Hogg; and essays by K’eguro Macharia, Dennis Cooper, Bruce Benderson, Kirin Wachter-Grene, and Jeffery A. Tucker.
Content Notes: Hogg and other texts we read may be difficult because they are unfamiliar or engage complex ideas. They may also be difficult due to the nature of their content—several texts contain physical violence, death, sexual and racial slurs, sexually explicit content, and depictions and discussions of racism, sexism, homophobia, and bodily injury. Representation of this content is not an endorsement of it. As we parse through these texts, we may all have to sit with some level of discomfort. Similarly, I expect participants to navigate difficult content with sensitivity, thoughtfulness, and care towards one another. This reading group’s pedagogy strives toward interrogating and refusing racism, sexism, heterosexism, transphobia, ableism, classism, xenophobia, and other structures of oppression and inequity.
Read more about this group here.
Facilitator
