Amelia Abraham is the author of Queer Intentions: A (Personal) Journey Through LGBTQ+ Culture and the editor of We Can Do Better Than This: 35 Voices on the Future of LGBTQ+ Rights. She is currently working on a novel.
Jack Parlett is the author of The Poetics of Cruising: Queer Visual Culture from Whitman to Grindr, the poetry pamphlet Same Blue, Different You and Fire Island. He is currently working on a new non-fiction book about flamboyance.
They spoke to one another about queer encounters, the history of cruising and the future of public sex.
Jack Parlett:
Shall we begin by reflecting on what public sex has meant to each of us? It is, after all, an embodied experience. That said, cruising began as an object of study for me; it took a while for me to see it as a heritage that I could opt into in real life. When I was eighteen or nineteen, a few years before I was out, I remember picking up a battered copy of Derek Jarman’s At Your Own Risk in a charity shop and landing on a page where he talks about discovering gay sex in London in the 1960s. I began joining up the dots, and started to wonder how the gay chat rooms I was tentatively exploring (long live cottaging.co.uk) were connected to a broader history of people meeting for anonymous or impromptu encounters. I started cruising soon after that. For me, that has meant anything from long or loaded glances with strangers, which is often what initiates cruising, to sex acts in public spaces.
I feel less sure about my relationship to cruising these days. Any encounter where you’re entrusting your body to a stranger involves an element of risk; that can even be part of the thrill. But in my life, cruising has often been connected with drinking and drugs. Now that I don’t drink or use anymore, I feel complicated emotions about some of those memories, and wonder about the impulses that led to certain decisions. It’s interesting to be at a slight remove from something that has played a central part in my sexual and psychic life for the last decade.
I’m curious to hear your thoughts about public sex. When we spoke the other day, it seemed like we were in quite different places.
Abraham:
I relate to your experience of first engaging with cruising as an object of study. I was very into queer indie films as a teen and became familiar with the gay hustler figure that you find in My Own Private Idaho by Gus Van Sant and Mysterious Skin by Gregg Araki. I discovered David Wojnarowicz (just as you found Jarman), who wrote about hustling in Times Square and cruising on the abandoned piers of New York City’s waterfront. I remember being especially moved by his sexual encounters against the backdrop of rural American landscapes in his memoir Close to the Knives. I felt like I was discovering a gay Jack Kerouac (not that Kerouac’s On the Road is short on homoeroticism). It was a revelation – Wojnarowicz’s writing on cruising is, to me, uniquely visceral and haunting – but it was the projected sense of freedom that hooked me in. This idea that you could fuck your way across America. Not just sex outdoors but sex in ‘the great outdoors’.
I think I partly became interested in cruising literature because it symbolised a claim on public space that did not feel available to me as a woman. Reading is always a vicarious exercise, but reading about cruising when I was also coming into my own sexual identity and learning what it might mean to be a lesbian felt particularly profound. If the lesbian cinema I consumed was to be believed, it meant more longing than doing. And if our literature was to be believed, lesbianism meant drowning in the proverbial well of loneliness (although I’m sure cruising can feel lonely too . . .).
There was no equivalent to cottaging.co.uk, or public bathroom or park or sauna to quell my curiosity. This is not to downplay the sex I had in private throughout my twenties, or even the sex I occasionally had in public, just to say that cultures around public sex felt absent. You mention uncovering ‘a broader history of people meeting for casual, anonymous, impromptu encounters’. This was not something I thought existed for queer women, which is why I have attempted to fill in some of the gaps through writing and research.
Recently though, I have discovered a kind of sex in public that seems to be more available to me: darkrooms. I recall a lesbian nightlife promoter trying to hold a club night with a darkroom for women ten years ago and reporting that it was empty all night. Now, several clubs in London have ‘all-gender’ darkrooms, or darkrooms for queer women, nonbinary people and femmes (though the latter seem emptier than the former). What is notable about these new spaces is the focus on consent and safety – fear about our safety in public is probably one reason female, or femme, cruising culture has not existed. It seems from what you have written that a lack of safety or a sense of risk is part of what drew you to cruising to begin with.
Parlett:
Yes, I think that’s what drew me in, but the idea of fucking a stranger in a toilet cubicle is quite different from actually doing it. Even if the fear of exposure or punishment lends its own frisson, when that fear sets in it can produce a kind of cognitive dissonance. I can recall moments when I’ve almost been observing myself from above, wondering what the hell I’m doing. For the most part, that dissonance seemed like part of the fun, and I’d say that very little of the gay male cruising literature I’d read had really disabused me of that notion. What you say about vicarious reading is so true, particularly during moments of discovery and awakening, when we’re often measuring fantasies against realities.
I was convinced for quite a long time that there was something inherently radical about cruising; that it disrupts public space, that it can offer more lateral or democratic ways for people to connect across lines of difference. Historical accounts of cruising produce in me a kind of nostalgia, I guess, as if they’re glimpses into richer or more liberated sexual cultures than those we have today. Wojnarowicz paints the culture of public sex, as you put it, in such mythic terms; every encounter feels momentous, cinematic. There’s something fearless and even romantic about it. I think I inherited from reading his work and others, the sense that risk is part of what makes cruising exciting, but also part of its communal quality, because you are placing trust in total strangers. It’s also where cruising can become baldly sociological too, however, as a site of projections, where certain kinds of people might be perceived as more dangerous or riskier than others.
I guess what changed for me is that I started to question this desire and how much I actually enjoyed this dissonance, as well as whether riskiness and unpredictability were things I wanted to invite. Playing fast-and-loose with safety in this way is a form of privilege. I suppose I’ve never really associated gay male spaces with a particular emphasis on safety and consent (which is not to say that there aren’t certain spaces that do highlight these things). I think that my experiences of cruising have taught me that public sex doesn’t have to come at the expense of feeling safe.
I’m really interested in all-gender darkrooms, because they seem to offer an explicitly queer sexual space that caters to a much broader range of needs, desires and people than traditional gay male spaces. It feels like an important development in femme/female cruising culture because these spaces are addressing an historic gap. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, and whether these spaces might also be a product of a post-#MeToo sexual culture, in which consent is being more openly discussed?
Abraham:
Interesting to hear you mention the strange coexistence of that lack of safety with the sense of privilege we might associate with feeling able to put yourself in that position – it’s easy to think of cruising as an indulgent hypersexual pursuit, but it was borne out of oppression. At times, these transient interactions have been all that is possible for gay men, and have always come with risks, including literal policing by cops. Homosexuality and public sex laws have changed over time, but it’s still a criminal offence to have sex in a public toilet specifically – which feels pointed – and any public sex act could be charged as ‘indecent exposure’ or ‘outraging public decency’ (according to the Sexual Offences Act 2003). Given that the only sex that has never historically been outlawed is that between a married cis man and woman in private, cruising – typically transient, between two people of the same gender, and in public – is inherently transgressive. At the same time, cruising is not as accessible for many people, such as some disabled queer people. It is perhaps riskier for Black and brown people in terms of policing, and it is less physically safe for trans people and women. Yet it is often talked about as a radical practice as you mention – ‘as gay as it gets’, as it were – and I have felt frustrated by that sentiment for these reasons.
Still, queer women, femmes and non-binary people have created our own spaces or practices within these constraints. I don’t want to give the impression that all-gender darkrooms are totally new or without precedent. Gayle Rubin writes about visiting referral-only Catacombs, an SM fisting club in San Francisco during the 70s and 80s. Or I think of Chain Reaction, a sex club in London frequented by SM leather dykes (and protested by anti-porn feminists) in the 1980s. And I’ve heard stories of women having sex on the beach on Fire Island, as well as stories of dykes cruising by the lakes and queer bathing spots around Berlin during the summer, or at Berlin clubs like KitKatClub or Berghain.
All-gender darkrooms follow in this legacy. There is a strong focus on safety and consent – I think that is to do with #MeToo, as well as an atmosphere of accountability within cancel culture; if something happens to someone at the night you organised, are you responsible? Someone on the door of the darkroom might ask you to relay three rules as you walk in, like ‘no photos’ or ‘no means no’ or ‘no solo masturbation’. In Gay Bar, Jeremy Atherton Lin talks about a recent shift from ‘randy and problematic’ spaces to a more conscious clubbing culture, roving club nights that aim to provide more intentional and intersectional experiences. It seems that in this context some queer people feel more comfortable to mix. A while ago I had sex with my partner at a gay male kink night: we were in a darkroom surrounded by men having group sex. No one seemed to care? This felt kind of new . . . like some gay male misogyny had dissolved, probably due to the idea that gender is not binary becoming more widespread, and maybe to some extent because kink communities can foster quite accepting environments.
How have you seen consent change in gay male cruising culture, or have codes of consent in cruising always been ahead of their time? Do you feel that we are seeing a shift from the randy and problematic to something different?
Parlett:
I don’t think I’ve necessarily noticed codes of consent shift all that much in my own experience of gay male cruising. But I might not be going to the right parties! Maybe it’s a product of being part of a generation that still experiences those ‘randy and problematic’ spaces. I do think that cruising – which often feels to me like a kind of dance – has always been made up of signals that direct the encounter and act as forms of consent. I guess my point from before was that these encounters can become quite blurry, as they’re often unspoken, particularly if you’re also contending with the constraints of a public space (like a park or a public toilet), which is already making the sexual act somewhat contingent or illicit. I think it’s possible that I’ve eroticised that blurriness in the past, as far as my own consent is concerned, but I now feel differently about some of those encounters and the effects they’ve had on me.
When it comes to safety, I think privatisation plays an important role in this history, and a lot also depends on how we’re defining private versus public. Is a club or a darkroom somewhere in between? In some ways, queer sexual cultures have been privatised for as long as there have been queer establishments, and the proposed trade-off is about protection. You’re paying to dance, or kiss, or fuck in a place that offers relative safety, although not without complications. The eulogising about public cruising – from parks to bathrooms – might stem from the fact that it seems more resistant to commerce. I remember hearing the photographer Sunil Gupta speak at a conference about the fact that he and his gay friends sometimes rejected the bar cruising scene in the 1970s because it felt capitalistic and didn’t chime with their politics. Even if hooking up with someone you meet at the bar has an air of spontaneity, it’s still shaped by a series of transactions; paying to get in, buying a drink, buying the other person a drink, etc.
Abraham:
I am glad you brought up Sunil Gupta’s account of cruising in London (I think I was at the same conference!). I suppose this links to what I meant by indulgence and hypersexuality – the idea that cruising is a kind of fast food (or a fast fuck) of sexual intimacy. I think that view is reductive, but it’s how some people view cruising.
Parlett:
That is one reason why a lot of people preferred public spaces like the piers on the west side of Manhattan in the 1970s and early 1980s, as captured in the work of writers like Wojnarowicz, but also photographers such as Alvin Baltrop and Shelley Seccombe. The cruising scene there didn’t depend on financial means or the problematic biases of club door policy, and it was a more socially diverse space as a result. But it was also less physically safe, particularly for those already vulnerable to violence and policing, because it was a fluid, urban public space that was mostly derelict and abandoned.
As you say, all-gender darkrooms build on a legacy of private spaces for non-male-bodied people, as distinct from the outdoor public spaces of parks, streets, bathrooms and piers. It seems like a variety of social factors around consent, accountability and gender are informing the creation of more equitable and exploratory cruising spaces. In that sense, the privatisation of public sex is a logical step in this process, and it’s unfolding in the gap left by the old-school gay bars that are disappearing as cities gentrify.
Cruising for sex is often seen as quite ‘retro’ nowadays, particularly when there are other ways for queer people to meet each other, and of course hook-up apps. I think they are part of this privatisation too, with mixed effects. An app like Grindr offers a clear virtual structure, where you can be open about what you’re looking for, and perhaps communicate upfront the things that might be harder to express in person. At the same time, the focus on images replicates the feeling of a sexual marketplace and, like other forms of social media, it also gives free rein for people to reveal their prejudices, as is well-documented. Apps are definitely shifting the way we seek and find sexual connection. And clearly they create new problems as well?
This might be a side note, but I also wanted to pick up on your earlier point about cruising and indulgence. I’ve had conversations with straight people where the question about whether cruising is still ‘necessary’ has come up. A similar logic also gets applied to whether we still ‘need’ queer spaces now, and it’s often an assimilationist logic, as if same-sex marriage laws somehow solved everything. I guess the argument goes that, stripped of its historical purpose, cruising loses its actual function and therefore becomes an indulgent pursuit harking back to the past, at least in places where homosexuality is legal. But even just focusing on gay male sexual practices from an intersectional perspective, this argument doesn’t make sense. Race, gender presentation, class and disability still have a huge bearing on how people are able to act on and express their sexuality, as you point out. Anonymous or transient encounters might act as a lifeline for those who for various reasons can’t safely be out, or who live in places where there isn’t an obvious safe place to find queer connection, and I think an app like Grindr fulfils an important function here.
I’m curious whether you think apps and virtual spaces play a comparable role for communities beyond the gay male demographic, or is that landscape quite different too?
Abraham:
I’m interested in what you say about consent and re-evaluation. I think sometimes we consent to sexual acts because we think we ought to, and I think societal and sexual cultures can play a role in that. For instance, I’m gay, therefore I should cruise. Or, compulsory heterosexuality. I’m female, therefore I should sleep with men. This is something my next book looks at – this task of revisiting how social forces shape our desire. This has been of interest to queer theorists and feminist writers for decades, but I think it needs renewed attention given that social forces continue to change, especially with the acceleration of technology.
Which brings us to Grindr. There have been attempts to create queer female hook-up apps. They have lez-camp names like HER or Brenda (now defunct). For a long time, the app LEX encouraged you to post a lonely-hearts style ad, rather than a photo, to direct the focus away from beauty and body standards, although that has now changed. It felt less like a ‘marketplace’ than what I’ve seen on Grindr. A lot of queer women I know use Feeld, which caters to an increasing interest in polyamory, and I think also speaks to this shift towards a more fluid understanding of sexuality or gender; you might use it to arrange group sex with strangers of various genders, or to open up your heterosexual relationship. These apps in and of themselves are both public and private, I suppose. Your friends or colleagues might see your profile so people are opting for fake names or images without their face pictured, as many guys do on Grindr. Like Grindr, it’s a space where users are very forthright about their kinks, which are sometimes enumerated like a shopping list.
You’re right that these apps are invaluable to some. I’d echo that this is probably particularly true for those in rural areas, or who are shy, or who want to explore their sexuality theoretically before they do so physically. But they create new problems as well, as you say. We could point out the issues with platform capitalism – how algorithms lead us into a sexual echo chamber, how the anonymity of an app coupled with a design and user experience that feels like ‘a sexual marketplace’.
But I want to say – perhaps nostalgically – that for me at least, there is something romantic about the potential of meeting or even just exchanging a glance with someone in person – analogue rather than digital – even if it’s fleeting. When I try to put the feeling into words, I think of a passage from your book The Poetics of Cruising where you talk about the ‘shimmer’, which to me is about the unknown, the anticipatory, the ‘now you see it, now you don’t’ aspect of encounters or attractions with other people.
I think you’re writing about Eileen Myles’s poem ‘Hot Night’ and what you call the atmosphere of cruising. I love this phrase. To me it holds all the queer potential of reclaiming the city from gentrification by seeing it as a cruising ground, and it takes into account the lack of accessibility of ‘actual’ cruising for some people, and most importantly it’s kind of playful.
Parlett:
I share that appreciation for the romance of the unknown and the anticipatory. It’s true that public sex and cruising can be complicated, but I still believe in the solidarity that a look can forge between people. It’s erotic, for sure, and not only about consummation. I’ve just moved back to London after a while living in much smaller or suburban places, and I feel like I’m noticing all the time that there are so many strangers to share looks with. It’s a very different feeling to the one created by digital approximations of a cruising culture; more transient, maybe, but also more real.
I find ‘atmosphere’ to be a helpful idea because it names something that might already be in the air, but also something that is created by and between people: we both inhabit and participate. Similarly, the ‘shimmer’ is an evocative way of imagining how the boundaries between ourselves and others might break down. It’s used by film and trans studies scholar Eliza Steinbock as an index for the cinematic image and its relationship to gender, because it’s a moving image and it can therefore convey states of transition. This sense of a flash or illumination also has a rich heritage in theoretical writing. In the context of public sexuality, I think it names a lighting-up, a moment of becoming. We make ourselves available to the world and to others, and so enter states of change or possibility. It was Eileen Myles’s poem ‘Hot Night’ that led me there – it describes the streets of this sexy and ravaged city as ‘shimmering / with themself’.
I think in this atmosphere we face ourselves in new ways. In the process of negotiating risk, strangeness and intimacy, we tease at boundaries and maybe even see ourselves through the eyes of others. Even a look can do that; when someone returns your glance, you’re reminded that you are both a subject and the object of their gaze, just as they are of yours. I’ve recently started writing something autobiographical about sex and my experiences of cruising, partly as a way of processing those experiences, but also because I’ve spent a long time thinking about the questions critically, and the personal often takes a backseat in that context. I’m not sure what the piece is yet, whether it’s a memoir or something else, but I think I’m facing myself again through that process of experimentation.
Abraham:
I love how you’ve written about subjectivity, in a fragmented world, particularly in the city. To that point, I think Myles was writing in that poem about venturing into their neighbourhood in New York to look for connection in, and around, and with, the city. In London right now, it feels like there is an assault on public spaces, which are constantly being devoured by developments; even our parks are privatised for festivals and fairs. Meanwhile people are struggling to afford rent or private space. It forces many of us into a liminal position where both the public and the private become harder to access. For those seeking ways to come together, and for those looking for an escape from all of this, I genuinely believe that, at least in their less commercialised forms, acts of cruising, clubbing and darkrooms have the potential to offer a meaningful and intimate way of relating to one another. In a context where monogamous, straight, long-term relationships are still prioritized, I think these kinds of encounters and environments still have the power to challenge the status quo. It will be interesting to see, going forward, how we navigate protecting sites of queer intimacy and public sex from policing, fetishisation and tourism, without swapping one kind of gatekeeping for another.
Photograph © Alex Crook
