Gay Cruising And Public Toilets 11
12. Cruising A Cultural Art..? Media Says "Yes"
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On a Saturday afternoon shortly before Christmas, I found myself in
the dungeon-like basement of a sex club in Manhattan to see a
site-specific performance called Adonis Memories. It was an immersive theater experience based upon oral histories with patrons of the Adonis movie theatre, the once opulent movie house-turned-gay porn theater located off Times
Square in the 70s and 80s. In its day the Adonis epitomized hedonistic
group viewing of pornography, the kind of place where gay, queer and
straight men could watch hardcore films together. Meanwhile, just
offscreen, it was anything goes between the men in the audience,
especially in the theater’s infamous balcony.
The performance, the brainchild of Alan Bounville, a theater artist
and activist, makes the audience contend with the gay art of cruising:
the practice of fleeting sex between men, usually anonymously and
without exchanging names, often in semi-public indoor spaces (bathrooms,
saunas) or outdoors (rest stops, forests). Audience members watched
actors re-enact Adonis patrons cruising each other, and made them
complicit by having them follow the action around the space, deciding
what they watched and what they didn’t.
Cruising has been having something a moment in art over the past year
or so, though it’s not as if it hasn’t been depicted in fiction and
non-fiction for some time. The act has received heavy criticism for
depicting gay life as deviant and inherently dangerous. The late George
Michael was outed when he engaged in a "lewd act"
in Beverly Hills in 1998, and Republican senator Larry Craig was
lambasted in media in 2007 when he “tapped his right foot”, which an
officer said was “recognized as a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct".............
But the art of cruising is not simply about shame and self-hatred; it
can also be a space of exploration and connection, as queer literature
and art have reflected more recently. It’s at the heart of Garth
Greenwell’s much-lauded novel from earlier this year, What Belongs To
You, in which an unnamed American narrator becomes obsessed with a sex
worker named Mitko he meets in a bathroom in Bulgaria. Everything about
their relationship is in the context of sex, and as Mitko and the
narrator get to know one another, Greenwell presents gay male life
through the prism of their complicated sex lives, moments of intimate
partner violence, and the risk of sexuality transmitted disease.
That a book about cruising has been so welcomed by mainstream readers and critics, and featured on best of lists is pretty stunning. As Greenwell discussed in January, it’s been
considered impolite to discuss not just in front of straight people, but
also within gay circles until now.
Still, Greenwell contends that cruising “spaces can be spaces of
exploration and empathy”, ripe for artistic and emotional study. And
yet, due to its inherent corporeal hedonism that Greenwell and Bounville..... have recently depicted, it’s largely been left untouched as a site of study within mainstream art or literature.
The
reasons for this are many. One is that apps like Grindr and Scruff have
made cruising possible on your smartphone. Another is that fear of
HIV/AIDS made the kind of free sexual exchange depicted in the Adonis
play extremely dangerous, leading municipalities to shutter many theaters, bathhouses and saunas where cruising flourished. But as Samuel Delaney describes in his beautiful 1999 book Time Square Red, Times Square Blue,
cruising was also a victim of gentrification. It was victim to the
pressure from real estate developers which led cities like New York to
dispatch the NYPD to “clean up” and crack down on any form of sexual
assembly, so that places like Times Square could be rebranded as
family-friendly and “Disney-esque”..........
“I think the marriage equality battle was important and it’s important that we won it,” Greenwall said during an onstage interview
in March. But he believes that “it came at a really great cost. And
that cost was a marketing campaign that took queer lives and translated
them into values that could be appreciated by people who are disgusted
by queer people.” .....
“I think it forecloses much of the kind of radical potential in queer
life. And that radical potential, I think, inheres in spaces like
cruising bathrooms and parks, where the categories by which we organize
our lives, like race and class, get scrambled by desire, which is a
reason why our culture is so terrified by desire, because it scrambles
those things,” he said.
Cruising inhabits a kind of sexuality that is about seeking fleeting
pleasure, allowing for bodily expression to function as free-from
commitment in the same vein that same-sex marriage is tethered to
commitment. The multimedia artist John Walter addressed the disappearing
act by mounting the exhibit Alien Sex Club,
“a large-scale installation based on the shapes of cruise mazes, found
in sex clubs and gay saunas”, during 2015 Pride in London. Walter wanted to raise awareness about HIV and hosted testing onsite to decrease its
stigma. He said: “I’m not actively facilitating sex,” in his exhibits,
“I advertise my work on Grindr. If people want to have sex in the spaces
I do my work, that’s fine. It highlights the fact that you can
repurpose any space for sex.”
Then, last fall, British artist Prem Sahib
had two shows in London which explictly dealt with “cottaging”, though
the work is so clean and precise, a viewer might not know the reference
unless they knew about underground gay culture. As Vice observed,
“the gay aspect of the work is thrilling and affirmative to anyone
who’s found themselves cruising in loos, [toilets] losing themselves on a dance
floor (preferably Berghain) or lounging listlessly in an odd sauna.”
But one reason it is so surprising to see cruising being taken
seriously in theater, gallery art and literature............. is that a fear of possible cruising has
been a driving force in American cultural politics. As the writer and
scientist Joseph Osmundson “This has been the year that cruising has reached the literary
mainstream,” but also “the year that gay, queer, and especially trans
bodies have been made criminal entities simply for existing in public
bathrooms.” All over the US, the threat of cruising has created a wave
of transphobia, just as cruising is getting an airing in art – .......
It
is no surprise, then, that liberals and conservatives alike have been
loth to discuss cruising, particularly as the most heralded (if tacitly
secure) civil rights win for LGBT people – same-sex marriage – is only
barely accepted on the condition of queer life being mythologically
private and desexualized. Bathrooms have become such a source of sexual
anxiety that, according to a large survey, a majority of transgender Americans avoid public restrooms altogether.
Good art, though, should walk us right into the mess of locations of
conflict. That’s why it is so rewarding when Bounville, Greenwell,
Walter and Sahib take us into these shadowy spaces, where so many gay
connections have happened (and still happen). Cruising sites are spaces
of gay censure and celebration alike, tense with the possibilities of
danger and connection at the same time. They straddle the boundaries of
the public and private, the respectable and the reviled. Cruising spaces
may never be wholly resolved – and thus they remain ripe for art.
-----"Out from the shadows: why cruising had a cultural moment in 2016", The Guardian, 29 December, 2016
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