Zepke Stephen: Head in the Stars. Essays on Science Fiction

run by the Kyle foundation, ‘an institution dedicated to
the betterment of the lives of gay black men and of those
of all races and creeds connected to them by elective and
non-elective affinities’ (232). The foundation controls the
local council, runs a credit union, a pension plan, a farming
co-op and subsidises local public services such as rubbish
collection and disposal, public transport, a health clinic,
a gay cruising establishment (Turpens), a gay cinema (the
Opera) and a gay piss-bar (the Slide). The Dump was
established and continues only because of the philanthropy
of Robert Kyle, but what makes it successful is its focus on
the free exchange of pleasure as the basis of life. This focus
was there from its beginning, and indeed as its beginning.
As Robert Kyle himself explains to Eric, he set up the
Dump because of his love for Dynamite, who only ‘ever
wanted a decent job, and to have a fair number of black
men around who liked to fuck, and be left alone to live his
own life’ (501). In this sense there is a coming together of
charity, political community and sexual love under the term
‘generosity’, which is the foundational common notion of
the Dump, of the sex that takes place there, and in different
ways of nearly all the characters in the book. On all of these
levels the same generosity applies; the giving of joy means
receiving it, and happiness is good, even if sometimes
desire must be balanced with the value of honest hard work
(a theme Dynamite on the rubbish run often returns to).
Goodness in this sense is a necessarily shared value arising
only through relations, first of all sexual (between people
and with animals – Dynamite is not called ‘pig-fucker’ for
nothing, but he is the first to explain that the animal has
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