LGBTQ Literature is a Readers and Book Lovers series dedicated to discussing literature that has made an impact on the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. From fiction to contemporary nonfiction to history and everything in between, any literature that touches on LGBTQ themes is welcome in this series. LGBTQ Literature posts on the last Sunday of every month at 7:30 PM EST. If you are interested in writing for the series, please send a message to Chrislove.
Happy New Year to our LGBTQ Literature readers! For this first diary of 2021, I am going in a slightly different direction than I normally go when I write for this series. I tend to focus on academic monographs, but this book—Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime (2019) by Alex Espinoza—just happened to pop up in my Amazon suggestions earlier this month. (I’m not sure what that says about my online habits, but I’m okay with it.) When I saw the book, I knew that I had to read it. The subject of cruising is seemingly omnipresent in LGBTQ history monographs, but it’s not often that one runs across a full-length book on the subject. I decided that this book would be my LGBTQ Literature topic for this month.
But now that I’ve read it, and now that I come to the task of writing this diary, I confess that I don’t even know where to begin. “How the hell am I going to write about this for a general Daily Kos audience?” I asked myself many times while reading the book. So let’s just start in a place with which everybody here is probably familiar:
We all remember (and have various feelings about) the Larry Craig scandal in 2007. To sum it up: Larry Craig, an anti-gay Republican senator from Idaho, was arrested at the Minneapolis airport after propositioning an undercover police officer in the restroom. The “proposition” consisted of foot-tapping (which remains endless fodder for jokes), moving his foot into the officer’s stall, and making a motion with his hand under the stall. Although there have been other high-profile arrests related to men cruising for sex in public places, the Larry Craig scandal is perhaps the most infamous.
I have to say, however, that something has always bothered me about the Larry Craig discourse. I get the jokes, and I get the disdain for Craig—I’m no defender, believe me. But it seems to me that there are much more detestable things about the man than the fact that he cruised an airport restroom (something that is happening at this very moment as you’re reading this, probably in several airports simultaneously, I can assure you). Craig—closeted or not—is a despicable bigot and certainly a hypocrite. The foot-tapping, though? Perhaps the bigger problem is that law enforcement resources were being used to police airport restrooms. The subtext to much of the (liberal) Larry Craig discourse seems to be that he’s not just a closeted bigot, but that he’s a dirty pervert who resorts to understall sex. Nice, respectable gay men, after all, would never stoop to such depths. There’s a distinct heteronormative bias that always seems to come out when the subject of Larry Craig’s foot comes up.
Many gay men have cruising stories, some of them not all that dissimilar from the Larry Craig encounter (minus the arrest, hopefully). I’m not here to share mine. But Espinoza’s Cruising appealed to me not just because I wanted to know more about the history of cruising (although that was certainly the case), but because I wanted to dig a little deeper to understand myself a bit better. Having now read the book, I can say that readers will learn a good deal about the history of men who seek sex with other men, but this is not an academic monograph. This really is an “intimate” history, as the title suggests—at times, it feels more like introspection on the author’s part, as he weaves together the broader history with his own story. Along the way, the gay male reader may find himself going on that same kind of journey, whether or not he has ever cruised.
Cruising is, in many ways, a “defense” of cruising. I put that word in quotes because I don’t think the author would consider cruising something that needs defending. But the book starts by looking at the first really wide-scale introduction of cruising to the general population, which was not a very positive one: the 1980 film titled Cruising.
In 1980, Cruising premiered in theaters. The film was directed by William Friedkin, better known for his work on The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973). It starred Al Pacino as a New York City cop who goes undercover to hunt down a serial killer targeting gay men at leather bars and S&M clubs. Friedkin was inspired to write and direct the film after discovering that an extra who appears in The Exorcist, Paul Bateson, was a serial killer who butchered scores of gay men he picked up at leather bars and sex clubs around New York City in the late seventies. [...]
It wasn’t until I began doing research for this book that I came across any references to the movie. It is a problematic film, to say the least, linking violence and depravity to homosexuality. And yet it remains one of the first instances in pop culture to explore the secret world of anonymous sexual hookups in the gay community. Mostly forgotten today, Cruising heightened already discriminatory attitudes about homosexuality in pre-AIDS America.
Espinoza then mentions Jeffrey Dahmer, whose victims were gay men he met in locations such as bathhouses. Then, George Michael’s 1998 arrest and Larry Craig’s 2007 arrest, both of which were covered as “crimes” and introduced the broader public to cruising “cues” such as foot-tapping.
Cruising had been brought out of the alleyways and onto the front page, but it had also been given a face. Tom Rasmussen examined its legacy and impact nearly twenty years after George Michael’s arrest: “So why do we ‘do what we do’? Cruising and cottaging [as it is also known in the UK] culture is born just as much out of need as it is out of want.” When your identity is forbidden, there is a need beyond physical desire, a human need to be who we truly are if only for a moment. For centuries, the only way to satisfy this need was through cruising, and the practice plays this crucial role today in the many places around the world where LGBT people are targeted.
Espinoza then introduces us to himself, back when he experienced cruising for the first time in the 1990s. He was a teenager who was very aware of his “imperfections”: “a birth defect that had stunted the development of my right arm, the growing bald patches across my scalp from alopecia areata.” It only took one time before the underground world of cruising opened up to him:
I spent the months after that encounter at the bus stop wondering what trysts were occurring all around me. I found myself lingering in public restrooms a little longer and looking for cars driving slowly through the park near my home. It was as if my first sexual encounter set off a homing beacon of sorts, because more opportunities slowly began to present themselves.
It is here that Espinoza touches on something that really resonated with me. He already noted that cruising was, at one time, really the only way men who wanted sex with other men could get it. But, of course, it still happens, and not just among the closeted. There are many reasons why, but I think Espinoza uncovers an important one: there is a certain egalitarianism in the cruising scene. It’s almost something primal, and it doesn’t discriminate. It’s just two (or more) men who each want something, and they get it from each other. That “something” is sexual, yes, but it’s also the need to feel desired. The author puts it much more artfully (this passage was an “oh shit” moment for me, and really hit me on a deep level):
As I grew older and found gay friends, I also grew to dislike the West Hollywood scene we often visited. I saw it as superficial, and intolerant of difference. Despite what I had been told about the gay community being accepting and welcoming, I felt shunned and isolated. My Mexican friends—with their lean bodies and their self-confidence—were always fetishized by the mostly white WeHo clubgoers back then (and likely still now), who viewed them as nothing more than outlets for their own sexual kinds and fantasies. The club scene was too involved for me. It required me to look and dress a certain way, and try as I might, I was never going to be as cute and desirable as my friends. In that space, nobody eyed me. Nobody wanted or needed me the way men in the restrooms, parks, and back alleys did.
Much later, I would come to understand the coded desires attributed to cruising, the power associated with performing such intimate acts in these open spaces. The energy and rush I felt engaging in something so intense in such a public place worked to elide any sense of crushing doubt and insecurity. These unmapped geographies became my domain, my territory, the places I turned to at the low points in my life, in those moments when I felt the most alone, the most undesirable.
If you’re wondering where the “history” is, it’s in there, don’t worry. It doesn’t get too deep (again, this is not an academic history monograph), but there’s enough to teach you a great deal about how men have sought sex with other men throughout history. Espinoza starts in ancient Greece and Rome, and then moves to Renaissance Florence. He notes that, while many often think of ancient Greece as a permissive, sexually open society, it was much more complicated than that. In ancient Greece and in Rome, men could only have sex with men within the confines of distinct power hierarchies. The same was true in Florence:
In Renaissance Florence, homosexuality appeared much as it did in ancient Rome, regulated as a controlled deviance, one that was at once outlawed and criminalized yet still allowed to exist, just as long as it adhered to the same rules seen in Greece and Rome. Florentine attitudes regarding sex between men were based on the idea that masculinity, even when engaged in homosexual behavior, needed to be carefully orchestrated around long-established roles that organized men into active and passive participants. Moreover, these demarcations could operate only within a societal structure that reinforced a system of carefully coded limitations attributed to such behaviors.
In order to enforce these rules, Florence established the Office of the Night, which went after “sodomites” and “buggers.” And there are plenty of court documents showing the prevalence of homosexual activity going on in Florence. The point:
Cruising flourishes the more it is policed. Attempted suppression not only confirms that cruising is in fact occurring (and where), but the resulting secrecy and fear also begin to cement a kind of identity. Cruising happens in an instant, capturing a sudden opportunity that could never be planned. The signals and habits—all the basic tenets of cruising—are designed to communicate spontaneously and in plain view.
Moving into the 1600s and 1700s, Espinoza touches on Paris and then London. In London, perhaps the world’s first recorded glory hole appeared by the 1700s. There were also “molly houses” (places where men often met for love and sex) and other establishments that supported a growing gay subculture. Molly houses frequently found themselves the targets of police, of course; the author notes a 1726 raid on the infamous Mother Clap’s molly house, in which dozens of men were arrested. The policing, in turn, “pushed the subculture further underground” as men continued to find ways to meet for sex.
Espinoza draws a line through these hundreds of years of history, from antiquity to the present day:
It is thus a testament to the act of survival that sodomy, cottaging, hooking up, or cruising continues now, that it has evolved from the public baths of antiquity to the molly houses of London to parks and public restrooms across college campuses and major department stores, adult bookstores and porno theaters, rest stops and freeway underpasses. It happens, it continues to happen, because it simply can’t not happen. So urgent, so necessary, is our desire to connect, to engage in this act of intimacy, that we would do almost anything for it, even risk exposure, arrest, our very lives in some parts of the world. It takes patience and time, I was once told. And dedication. Sometimes you have to sit there on the toilet of a restroom for hours, listening to Celine Dion being piped in through the little mesh speakers, just waiting for a stranger to come into the stall next to yours, to tap his foot and reach his hand out. It is one of the oldest practices, this person explained. A part of our legacy, a way we push past the darkness and into something resembling light.
Okay, that last part was a little gratuitous, but I had to include it. Is that beautiful or what?
Espinoza continues to trace the intertwined histories of gay culture and cruising throughout the twentieth century. In the 1960s, when much of gay life was still quite underground, Bob Damron (a gay bar owner who traveled) produced his Address Book, which was small enough to fit in a jeans pocket but was comprehensive enough to list gay-friendly locations across the United States. In the 1970s, “cruisy areas” were added to the publication, in addition to the “Hankie Code,” which used handkerchief colors and locations to signal sexual preferences. While this made cruising more accessible, the risks remained. It is in this section that Espinoza discusses a 1962 case in Mansfield, Ohio, in which 18-year-old Jerrell R. Howell confessed to killing two girls after they refused oral sex. Amazingly, he blamed his encounters in the restroom at Mansfield’s Central Park. This incited a kind of moral panic in Mansfield, and the Mansfield Police Department began to surveil the restroom (actually using cameras and two-way mirrors). This footage still exists—I’ve seen some of it (and no, I don’t know how I feel about it). It was turned into an art project called Tearoom:
Tearoom is 56 minutes of rapidly spliced scenes of men wearing horn-rimmed spectacles and their everyday shirts, flickering hints and several clear views of fellatio and masturbation, erections and penetrations. Parts of the footage are badly degraded, much of it is incomprehensible or ambiguous, its meaning imposed by its context: we know this is supposed to be a compilation of scenes of anonymous gay sex in a public toilet, so we presume that is what we are viewing. Watching it feels like riffling through a worn-out flip-book, its pages stained or missing, the deterioration itself a form of evidence of both over-use and neglect.
From the oppression of 1960s Mansfield, Ohio, Espinoza take the reader through the gay liberationist 1970s, which extended sexual freedom to countless gay men who had been born in “repressive shackles.” And then, the 1980s, when AIDS changed the landscape entirely. Then, computers and online cruising in the 1990s and early 2000s. Then, chapters on cruising in Russia and Uganda. As you can see, I’m skipping over a lot—if I kept going like I was, this diary would be a mile long. If you want to dig into those chapters, you should read the book.
But I’d like to end with the other notorious cruising arrest, which happened almost a decade before Larry Craig’s unceremonious Minneapolis arrest: George Michael. Espinoza spends a considerable amount of space on the George Michael episode, which is so unlike the Larry Craig arrest. In 1998, undercover officers with the Beverly Hills Police Department arrested the singer for “engaging in a lewd act” in a park restroom.
The incident forced the singer out of the closet, and Michael had to fess up about his “secret life” as a homosexual masquerading as a straight pop star, whose biggest hits like “Careless Whisper” (with Wham!) and “Faith” (as a solo artist) the entire world had loved and danced to. Yet what might have ruined anybody else’s career led to a resurgence in Michael’s, which at the time was not exactly on the upswing. His position of defiance and his refusal to apologize for his actions had many gay rights activists interpreting his response as a rebel yell; Michael was not conceding to heteronormative definitions of sex and intimacy. As gay men, we revel in the anonymous hookup. This is part of our culture, he seemed to be saying. It’s who we are. It’s what we do. If you don’t like it, turn the other way.
In a televised interview on NBC in 2004, Matt Lauer asked Michael why he’d behaved in such a “risky” manner. “[You] can afford privacy,” Lauer said at one point. Michael replied, “People actually don’t understand the principle of cruising for gay men, but it’s nothing to do with necessity. And that’s something that I think straight people don’t understand.” This exchange illustrates one of the most important aspects of cruising. For gay men, it’s something that can happen out in the open, an equal exchange between strangers that doesn’t need to cause shame and doesn’t need to be codified in any other way. By contrast, the indiscretions Lauer would be accused of, and would lead to his ouster from the network over a dozen years later, were about power and control. Such unequal exchanges could only occur under highly leveraged and private circumstances.
I had to include that second paragraph, because fuck Matt Lauer.
Far from running from the “shame” of cruising (like our friend Larry Craig), George Michael embraced it and defied attempts to impose heteronormativity on his sexuality. He went on to make this incredible music video for “Outside,” the message of which couldn’t be clearer:
And it is with that same defiance that Espinoza ends his book:
We are doing something we know is illegal and subversive. The act itself is a protest, an uprising. Cruisers are renegade outlaws. And like all revolutionaries, we move between the light and the dark, our lives forever tethered to one another.
As it always has been.
As it always will be.
There is so much more to this book than I can fit into this diary. For example, Espinoza includes an entire chapter exploring the intersection of cruising and race, furthering his argument that there is an egalitarianism inherent in the practice of cruising that directly challenges existing power structures. That said, Cruising (much like cruising) is probably not for everybody. But for those who want to learn—about gay history, about themselves perhaps, about this very old practice that is still associated with guilt, shame, and stigma—it is an eye-opening and (dare I say) empowering read.
LGBTQ Literature Schedule (2021):
If you are interested in taking any of the following dates, please comment below or send a message to Chrislove. We’re always looking for new writers, and anything related to LGBTQ literature is welcome!
January 31: Chrislove
February 28: OPEN
March 28: OPEN
April 25: OPEN
May 30: OPEN
June 27: OPEN
July 25: OPEN
August 29: OPEN
September 26: OPEN
October 31: OPEN
November 28: OPEN
December 26: OPEN