Big Joe is an erotic travelogue set in present-day America, featuring a community of four horny gay vagabonds beating the road in search of a better life. A 120-page tale of never-ending gay sex may read as a yaoi manga penned at night by a teenage girl (a comparison suggested by my twenty-year-old boyfriend), but Big Joe is not this. It is a novella by Samuel R. Delany, born in 1942, an award-winning classic of American literature. Boldly and beautifully illustrated by the artists Drake Carr and Sabrina Bockler, the book came out with the small independent New York based publisher Inpatient Press in February this year.

Delany, once a sci-fi prodigy who won his first Nebula prize for best novel at the age of 25, a pioneer of Afrofuturism and an iconic queer author—his novel Dark Reflections about a self-restricted aging Black gay poet won the Stonewall Book Award in 2008—has a long-standing rep of an unsettling figure in American literature. His Joycean 1974 science fiction novel Dhalgren sold more than one million copies, but up until today remains one of the most controversial and impenetrable books in the genre.

Delany largely ceased writing science fiction in the mid-1980s, shifting to realist prose and non-fiction. Many of his realist books proved to be not less troublesome than his speculative fiction. Even critics honestly admit that they could not go through the vivid details of ‘carnal debauchery’ with which Delany obsessively fills the pages of his books like Hogg (1995), described by Larry McCaffery as ‘the most shocking novel of the twentieth century.’

Big Joe is an equally unsettling book. Not for its experimental language; it is mostly written in plain country and Black English, in which the tale’s characters, dwellers of the mixed-race section of a trailer camp, are most fluent. Nor for its sexually loaded content; for Delany, physical obscenity is an expressive device. What makes Big Joe a rather disturbing read is the social underpinnings of seemingly undisturbed orgiastic indulgence of the rural working-class men who make up the narrative. Here and there, we learn that Big Joe, a recent school drop-out and an owner of an exceptionally big package in his pants, always on offer for anyone eager to enjoy it, is a ‘bed-wetter’ and constantly chews his nails if there is nothing else to keep his fingers busy with. Sex keeps him calm. Sex is the only thing that keeps him calm.

It does so for all the others in the book as well. ‘Well, we ain’t passin’ on no AIDS. We ain’t makin’ no new babies that nobody wants to bring up. And we’re still trying to have ourselves some fun with whoever feels about the same and wants to join in.’ An irresistible craving for calm brings all these men and boys—once unwanted babies—together. Sex here is meant to be a joy, but it’s actually just a painkiller. Big Joe, Uncle Shad, Uncle Tommy and their new boytoy Ligie do not love to fuck, they just do not have on hand any other remedy against the anxiety, fear, and emotional pain scratching their guts inside out. Their bodies are their only resource.

This has long been one of Delany’s major concerns. A lifelong dyslexic, Delany views language as the most profound way to expand beyond the corporal limits. In the words of Rydra Wong, a linguist and poet with intergalactic fame and the protagonist of Delany’s early Nebula-winning science fiction novel Babel-17 (1966), ‘and as I see into this language, I begin to see… too much.’ In Delany’s fantasy worlds, it’s through the languages that bodies, corporate and discorporate (read Babel-17 and you’ll see what I mean), connect to each other and transcend social worlds, physical spaces, and even the laws of physics. This language does not have to be verbal. Radical surgical modifications with bestial implants, tuned up senses and so on are all legitimate means of self-expansion in his work.

Language is central in Big Joe as well, but in its all too down-to-earth narrative, the interstate drifters are not able to use even the most basic extracorporeal means of self-expansion in the same way as those in his science fiction stories. Most of them are simply illiterate. The fact that Uncle Tommy can read and write becomes decisive for mechanic Shad to marry him. This also drives Sam, the guy the squad bumps into on the road, into sticking with his regular cocksucker because he occasionally helps him with some paperwork—that simple.

According to the PIAAC, a large-scale study of adult literacy in developed countries, half of US adults can’t read a book written at the eigth-grade level, fourteen percent are bellow basic literary levels, and four percent are nonliterate. The study ranks the US illiteracy levels not only as the highest among the OECD, but even above the global average. That is—the idea of a novel about illiterate Americans in the twenty-first century is not science fiction.

Big Joe is hardly an unapologetic dithyramb to liberated sexuality, but rather a shockingly accurate account of a system that leaves those at the bottom with no other means but their own bodies. A friend of mine once came up with the most accurate measurement for liberation I have ever heard. It is when we smoke weed because we want to, not because we have to. The same goes for sex. Big Joe is the story of the opposite, and that is precisely what makes it so unsettlingly powerful.