Phallos (novella)

Phallos (2004) is a novella by American writer Samuel R. Delany, first issued by Bamberger Books and later republished by Wesleyan University Press in 2013. The story is structured as a contemporary online essay that describes the history and provides a summary of a fictional novel, also titled *Phallos*, which is set in the Mediterranean world during the rule of Roman Emperor Hadrian.

The novella employs a double frame story. The outermost frame opens with three short paragraphs about an African-American man named Adrian Rome, who first encountered the book as an adolescent. A decade later, as an adult, he tries to find a copy but eventually settles for an online synopsis posted by someone named Randy Pedarson from Moscow, Idaho. The second frame is more elaborate, focusing on the fictional editor, Randy Pedarson, and his interactions with two graduate students at the University of Idaho, Binky and Phyllis, who are also fans of the novel. According to Pedarson’s post, he believes that an anonymous gay pornographic novel called *Phallos* was published in 1969 by Essex House of West Hollywood, California. Pedarson lists it as one of his three favorite works of this kind, alongside John Preston’s *Mr. Benson* and William Talsman’s *The Gaudy Image*, both noted for their above-average writing. The anonymous introduction to the 1969 volume claims that *Phallos* was known to various literary gay men from the past, including the 18th-century advocate of Greek beauty Johanne Joaquim Winkelmann, the 19th-century Oxford aesthetician Walter Pater, the historian John Addington Symonds (whose seven-volume *The Renaissance in Italy* served as a counterbalance to Pater’s single-volume *The Renaissance*), and later figures such as Baron Corvo (Frederick Rolfe) and sex researcher Havelock Ellis. Pedarson, however, concludes that these claims are merely the kind of bogus folderol used to legitimize pornography during that licentious decade.

Pedarson then provides a synopsis of *Phallos*, omitting the explicit sexual content but relating much of the plot, occasionally quoting from the novel to give a sense of its style. This synopsis, along with extensive footnotes—some running five or six pages—supplied by Binky and Phyllis (both recent Ph.D.s), constitutes the novel-within-the-novella.

The fictional *Phallos* begins with a Greek epigraph: the Anaximander fragment, one of