Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Chip!

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I was quoted in a long article about Samuel R. Delany that ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Sunday.  And my friends have been calling me up ever since and asking to speak to Michael Swankier.  Anything that gives my pals a chance to razz me happily is a good thing.

You can read the article here.  I believe my name may have been corrected.

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4 comments:

Matthew Sanborn Smith said...

Nope. You're still Swankier. I've always thought you were Swankier than the Ritz anyway.

David Stone said...

50,000 partners? OK, he's 67, let's say he's been active since he was 20... nope, the numbers still don't crunch. He's gotta be pulling a fast one on the reporter. Or, they made another typo there.

Michael Swanwick said...

In one of Chip's essays, he made a brief but detailed excursion into how easy it is for a gay man (who wants to) to have fifty sexual contacts a week. Which would be 2,600 a year, adjusted upward in his early years when he first discovered anonymous group sex and would disappear into it for days at a time, and then downward for the fact that with the increasing decades his energy must surely have waned somewhat . . .

So it's apparently eminently doable, provided you live in a major city with lots of anonymous sex folkways.

Still, it's got to be said... Chip is the least closeted gay male in the country.

David Stone said...

Wow. Well, even if the logistics of it isn't too hard to work out, and even if his use of the term "partner" is a bit broad, physiologically it's still pretty impressive!