This piece is airing worldwide this week on This Way Out (TWO), the syndicated LGBT radio show. Click here to listen to the entire show.
(TWO is the first international LGBTQ radio news magazine.)
Is cruising a lost art?
There might be several answers to this question according to Alex Espinoza the author of the book Cruising, an intimate history of a radical pastime – a book about the experiences of gay men.
When I first started reading this book, I explained gay male cruising to my partner, as a way of some men hooking up with random strangers for casual sex. I told her that the gay men might wait for hours for the right guy to come along – just as straight guys on a fishing expedition might wait for hours to land a fish. It was, as you probably can imagine, the kind of semi-hilarious conversation that lesbians might have about men.
But then I started reading the book and I have to admit I was fascinated. I learned a lot. The first thing that I learned was that cruising can have a cultural context. On reflection, I realized that this shouldn’t have been a surprise. Everything has a cultural context. Growing up as a Mexican American, Espinoza’s first memories of “cruising” was his brothers and their friends dressing up to go out to pick up girls. As the author writes:
“It’s hard to trace exactly how the term became associated with anonymous sexual encounters in the gay community. People cruised in their cars. My brothers and their friends [quote] “cruised for chicks.” All of these involve, to some degree or other, the act of leisurely crossing and re-crossing the same place. They involve the acts of seeing (and being seen), of pursuing (and being pursued). Yet, no one knows exactly when or how the phrase became synonymous with secret sexual encounters. We know the word has its origin in the Latin word crux, or cross.”
I learned about the history of the gay bar, in places called “molly houses” in London in the 1700s where men would meet, as Espinoza writes, “to stage drag shows, mingle and have sex.” It was, of course, at the time, a crime. Many were arrested. In one raid in 1726, Mother Claps – London’s most infamous molly house at the time – forty men were arrested. More than a few gay men resisted arrest – resistance that might have been overcome at the time, but which portended changes to come.
As he travels through history, Espinoza writes about the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and how it devastated the gay community and subsequently changed the behavior of many gay men. He writes that the massive losses of the time caused many gay men to turn to long-term monogamous commitments. He also writes of the history of online chatrooms and the gay hook-up apps of the day.
He writes that, “An argument can be made that, because of its ability to pre-screen and its exclusionary practice, using apps like Grindr does not qualify as ‘cruising.’”
He also writes about the drawbacks of using poplar gay hookup apps in repressive countries:
“…while such apps have helped people connect, they have also become tools for authorities. In countries like Russia and Uganda – the latter known as the most dangerous place in the world to be gay — the act of modern-day cruising, with its digital paper tail, can be a death sentence.”
But Espinoza also writes that the act of cruising is eternal:
“We are doing something we know is illegal and subversive. The act itself becomes a protest, an uprising. Cruisers are renegade outlaws. And like all revolutionaries, we continue moving between the light and the dark, our lives forever tethered to one another.
As it always has been.”
To learn more about my novel THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders (published by Adelaide Books New York/Lisbon), click here.
Janet Mason, author 