Long the most infamous street in America, in recent years Forty-Second Street has been remade into a sanitized tourist haven. In the forced disappearance of peep shows and street hustlers, to make room for a Disney store, a children's theater, and large, neon-lit cafes, Samuel R. Delany sees a disappearance, not only of the old Times Square, but of the complex social relationships that developed there.

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue paints a portrait of a society dismantling the institutions that promote communication between classes and disguising its fears of cross-class contact as "family values".