Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner darkroom, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present.
—Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (trans. James Grieve)
When a man recognizes another man’s desire, he is also learning something about the other’s identity, not exactly what kind of person he is, but what kind of group he belongs to.
—Leo Bersani, Homos
Three Photographers (1975–1979)
In 1976, twenty-two-year-old photographer Sunil Gupta moved to New York City from Montreal, where his family had relocated from India some years earlier. Although Gupta was already involved in both photography and gay politics, interests he had developed during his time as an undergraduate in Montreal in the years following gay liberation, he had ostensibly come to the city to study for an MBA. Living in the London Terrace building on West Twenty-Third Street in Chelsea, Gupta found himself at the heart of “a gay public space such as hadn’t really been seen before.”1 At the encouragement of the esteemed street photographer Lisette Model, Gupta gave up the business degree and enrolled in her photography course at The New School. In his recollections of this period, Gupta describes the artistic and erotic climate of New York in adjacent terms—“I just got drawn into the whole moment of early ’70s documentary stuff that was happening here, in terms of photography and also the gay scene, both of which suddenly exploded in front of me here”—and foregrounds the street itself as a space of exploration and experimentation.2 “It was the first time I was living in a city that seemed full of photography,” he remembers, both in terms of the number of commercial galleries and museums exhibiting photography and the experiential plenitude of the city; the sense that “the real life of the street was our theatre.” Before long, the erotic and aesthetic site of the street, and one street in particular, became Gupta’s primary subject.
Christopher Street, which Gupta describes as his “natural habitat” during this period, spans the western section of Greenwich Village, extending all the way from Sixth Avenue to the Hudson River. By the mid-seventies, it was a well-known cruising area for gay men. It played host to a multitude of bars, clubs, shops, and social spots including, most famously, the Stonewall Inn at its easternmost end, and the Oscar Wilde Bookshop, the city’s first gay bookstore, which opened in 1967 and moved to Christopher Street in 1973. Armed with his Leica camera, Gupta spent weekends walking up and down Christopher Street and photographing the men he saw. Although the resulting collection of images, simply titled Christopher Street 1976, possesses a documentary function, for Gupta the photographic act was not just a way of documenting cruising. It was like cruising itself, and the level of interaction it involved was familiar to him, as he “was used to going up to people anyways.” Some of the men in the photos look away, seemingly—or perhaps studiedly—unaware of the camera. Others look directly at it. Gupta’s photographic subjects were, in this sense, doubly solicited, both by the lens of the camera and by the man “looking through the viewfinder.”
Cruising, as I will go on to argue in the chapters ahead, is a profoundly optical phenomenon, a perceptual arena where acts of looking are intensified and eroticized. The presence of Gupta’s camera thus augments the latent theatricality of these encounters; the sense that his subjects, at the moment of transient and passing interaction, are playing not only to the real spectator before them but to the imagined spectators suggested by the medial figure of the camera. Gupta’s images light upon the cruise at its moment of initiation, not the hookup that will hopefully, if not invariably, follow. In this regard what they capture is an eroticism at its most incipient, yet on the other hand these images also mark an endpoint. Because Gupta’s subjects are mostly captured in passing, their disappearance is signaled just beyond the frame of the photograph that freezes them in time. A person walking down the street in any given city will likely experience this phenomenon numerous times a day—a moment of optical interaction with a stranger, however brief, that is swiftly subsumed into the city’s incessant flow of time and people. But Gupta’s images capture something more particular: a look that is charged and directed; a look that is the very currency of an entire sexual culture most commonly—and often nostalgically—associated with New York in the 1970s. Thus, while the photographs signal an abundance of potential sexual encounters, they in turn locate a quiet melancholy in such abundance. The sense, as Gupta put it recently in a talk, that there were “so many men” and “so little time.”3
This comment about promiscuity is no doubt shot through with a retrospective awareness of the HIV/AIDS epidemic that followed, less than a decade after these photographs were taken, but it also speaks more whimsically to the sense of new endless possibility that attended cruising culture in this period. If cruising, as Leo Bersani has it, is a form of “sexual sociability,” its intrinsic danger is not “that it reduces relations to promiscuous sex, but rather that the promiscuity may stop.”4 The efficacy of cruising in the street, in this regard, could far exceed what Gupta described in this talk as cruising’s more capitalistic iteration in bars and clubs, which involves the financial bargain of buying drinks, for example, and often proscribes a focus on solitary pleasure. Choosing one partner from an available pool of many could easily resemble a form of erotic individualism whereby the “promiscuity may stop.” On the street, however, encounters are largely freed from the choreography of the bar and exist instead as a series of intensified looks, looks which may come and go but nonetheless leave an impression. Faced with the seemingly endless erotic potential of Christopher Street, Gupta’s project locates photography as a site of possibility; an erotic alternative to consummation itself. Shooting on the hoof was a “cheap way of having them all,” of creating a “catalogue of all the guys I wished I’d slept with,” like a visual “wishlist” (a phrase that nonetheless has its own capitalistic associations).5
This visual “wishlist” of erotic prospects speaks to the vital role played by fantasy, because in the face of the risk that the “promiscuity may stop,” it is through imagined acts of consummation and connection with passing strangers that the cruising subject may find a way of “having them all.” Back in the much “smaller town” of Montreal, Gupta and a “literature-oriented buddy who liked cinema” made up “fictional narratives about still frames” they had taken and “tried to make up stories about people like us who were young, single, gay men.”6 After “going to the same bars every weekend for a few months, you’ve kind of seen everyone,” so “we invented fictional names and backgrounds for people.” These acts of invention were, for Gupta and his friend, a response to the over-familiarity of Montreal’s gay scene, and yet this same fictional impulse is present in Christopher Street for quite the opposite reason—New York’s overabundance of possible lovers. The street portraits of Christopher Street zoom in upon (presumably) gay male subjects and present them for imaginative projections by the viewer. From the raw details of their self-presentations—what these men are wearing, how tall or broad or slim they are, how they wear their hair—arise any number of questions. Who is this person? What is his story? What would it be like to go to bed with him? Gupta’s photographs invite viewers to inhabit the peripatetic vantage of street cruising and in turn to participate in a conjectural exchange about their subjects. In dramatizing this optical scenario they suggest, ultimately, that the “look” of cruising is itself photographic; that the desirous look shared between strangers is itself an imaginative act of capture.
Just a year later, in the similarly vibrant gay hub of San Francisco, Hal Fischer was interrogating the codes and customs of erotic fantasy in gay cruising culture. If Gupta’s peripatetic images of men walking in the “habitat” of Christopher Street provide a vivid portrait of a time and place—marked by the prevalence of particular fashions—Fischer’s numerous photographic projects in the late 1970s offer an inventory of the cultural meanings of such fashions. Fischer’s photographs of gay men attest, as he writes in the foreword to Gay Semiotics, to how “gay people have developed a semiotics intended both for identification and/or visibility within the larger culture, as well as communication among themselves.”7 These photographs demonstrate an intricate repertoire of signals and accessories, earrings and handkerchiefs placed deliberately in this or that ear, this or that pocket, all of which indicate not only sexual availability but your expressed “role” as either “active” or “passive.” He continues:
Gay culture has established a set of public, sexual prototypes. In gay magazines men are pictured in situations which were initially inspired by established male fantasies. Within the gay community certain characteristics of the fantasy have been adopted as fashion, thereby creating a “gay look,” i.e. Gay Prototype, the cowboy; Contemporary adaptation, flannel shirts, jeans, short hair.8
The adaptation of such “looks” has an intriguing chronology; they are born of “established male fantasies,” photographed as “situations” in magazines and then adopted into everyday life, thus becoming another kind of cruising code, one that refers back to sexuality via the fantasy narrative it is attributed to.
In his 1979 series Boy-Friends, which is composed of anonymous portraits of men accompanied by a short text describing or imagining an encounter with them, Fischer further teases at the relation between the semiotic and the narrative. The types represented in his photographs here give way to miniature character-led cruising stories, like “A Hippie,” which begins, “Shoulder length hair and black leather jacket; he’s a Haight-Ashbury hybrid. Eye contact, he gestures me over.” Each man is also given a number, like “B75SF-46,” a reminder of the proximity between the delineation of types and more official and even sinister forms of cataloging by industrial or sociolegal bodies.9 The proximity between image and text in Boy-Friends serves to emphasize the semiotic nature of erotic fantasy and a reliance upon preexisting or familiar cultural matter. Dreaming up an erotic encounter with a “cowboy” involves not the invention of a new figure but the queering of a masculinity that is ubiquitous in the American imaginary from Western films, for example. As with the other archetypal media images that Fischer cites and reconstructs in Gay Semiotics—the classical, the natural, the urbane, and the leather—the adoption of the “look” by gay men walking the streets is the result of an intricate appropriation. This adaptation of preexisting images from gay and straight sources comprises a mode of performance through which to enact or elicit fantasies. The “adapted items are essentially neutral in the culture at large,” Fischer writes, “but form a style within the gay culture,” one that is only legible to certain eyes.10 In the chapters that follow, style will emerge as one of cruising’s communicative faculties, a way of inflecting the erotic “look” through an attention to the way one looks, sartorially speaking or otherwise.
There is a prevalence of certain stylistic features in Gupta and Fischer’s images, then, like mustaches and denims, that are rooted in the semiotic conventions of a particular time and place. Back in New York, at the westernmost end of Christopher Street and beyond, the photographer Alvin Baltrop was documenting another kind of cruising culture, where desire was less entangled, to some extent at least, with the prevailing gay archetypes of the day. The largely abandoned Hudson River piers on the west side of Manhattan were frequented by men for sex throughout the 1970s and ’80s, and are equally as iconic as Christopher Street in the queer imaginary of the city’s past. Where Christopher Street was an artery of the gay Village, the derelict piers comprised a quasi-pastoral and even wild space of alterity, synonymous with a shadowy past of organized crime and reappropriated as a home for any number of the city’s social outcasts. Men of different stripes—working-class truck drivers and middle-class denizens of the Village bars, for example—visited the piers in search of sex, away from the public glare of the streets. Although, as Jonathan Weinberg writes in his art history of the piers, there is the danger of imagining that participants “shed all their inhibitions and conventional behavior when they stepped onto the docks,” finding “sexual partners along the waterfront” was in fact still “prone to be highly competitive and often frustrating,” but they nonetheless provided an alternative to the more stratified spaces of the Village.11
Baltrop’s photographs, which were mostly taken between the years 1975 and 1986, attest to the ambivalent world of the piers in wide-ranging ways. They demonstrate, as Fiona Anderson writes, that “while many of the men who cruised the piers wandered there from the adjacent bars, others were those intentionally excluded from such spaces,” and many “were homeless, overweight, disabled, older, poor [ . . . ] African-American or Latinx.”12 As an African American artist himself, Baltrop was a relative outsider both to the dominant gay culture and the exclusionary New York art world. He worked as a postman and as a club bouncer during the same period in which he produced his most enduring works, and ensconced himself in the life of the piers by moving into his van, poised with his camera to capture whatever was going on. Baltrop would often go to extreme lengths—scaling the heights of the piers’ structures in order to photograph them from particular angles—and he used the police radio he had acquired from his days as a cab driver to keep abreast of criminal activities. Among the more haunting examples of his work is a photograph of a dead body being fished out of the river, surrounded by police officers. The piers were as much a place of danger as they were of refuge, and Baltrop captured, Douglas Crimp writes, the “harsh realities of the place,” from the “sad fates of teenagers who lived there,” to the “terror of psychopaths preying on vulnerable men,” and “even the risk of falling through a rotten floorboard or stepping on a rusty nail.”13
Like Christopher Street for Gupta, the piers for Baltrop were an erotic and artistic site, a place where he both cruised and created. Among the range of scenes he captured is an attendant fixation upon the erotic look of the cruiser. Antonio Sergio Bessa suggests that the “object of desire for Baltrop is often seen from afar, enmeshed in a pile of debris that at once frames the subject while making it inaccessible,” and the photographer’s signature vantage point, capturing figures and sex acts from the distance of a neighboring pier, speaks to the importance of inscrutability to queer desire, often forced below—or behind—the surface of public visibility.14 But recurring throughout Baltrop’s work are also portraits of men—like Gupta’s passing subjects—“who were happy to become exhibitionists for the camera at close range.”15 Among Baltrop’s various and uncatalogued images—he did not attribute dates or titles, such that any arrangement of them is somewhat arbitrary—we find arresting faces punctuating any sequence with a direct intensity. One in particular, of a man sitting with his back against the wall, inhabits the optical scenario of cruising. It invites us to measure him up, just as he appears to be measuring us up with a look at once antagonistic and flirtatious. He sits against the wall with one leg stretched out, his hand grabbing his crotch and an open tin of Miller Lite beer between his legs. He wears an open shirt that shows his chest, sleeves rolled up to reveal his lower arm muscles quietly exerting themselves in his crotch-grab, along with denim jeans and workman boots with roller skates attached. Under the aspect of Fischer’s gay semiotic model, we might attribute the man’s style to the Western archetype, say, though we are left wondering, in the imaginative space forged by Baltrop’s close-range composition, about the other aspects of his story.
Taken together, the works of these three photographers offer vivid portraits of gay male urban culture during a period widely regarded as the halcyon days of cruising, the post-Stonewall and pre-AIDS years when sex and possibility were palpable on the streets and in the piers. Indeed, Gupta, Fischer, and Baltrop’s works are vital parts of cruising’s archive, an archive that is itself large and unwieldy. As Fiona Anderson notes in Cruising the Dead River, her study of David Wojnarowicz and the piers, there is a compelling friction between cruising’s evanescence and its archival ubiquity. “Cruising,” she writes, “even as it exploits urban anonymity and is structurally dependent on movement and ephemerality, has a queer historical orientation that is both imaginative and material.”16 At the same time, the process of archiving and remembering cruising’s material traces is not always a smooth one. Although Baltrop exhibited his work during his lifetime at The Glines, the bar space of a gay theater organization, and even at the bar where he worked as a bouncer, he was still a relatively unknown artist when he died of cancer in 2004 at the age of fifty-five. It wasn’t until the publication of Douglas Crimp’s 2008 essay on Baltrop in Artforum that the art world began to take heed of the artist’s significant archive of photographs, which are now held by the Bronx Museum. The museum’s 2019 exhibition on Baltrop demonstrates the renewed and rising interest in his work. But this resurgence, as Mia Kang argues, is multipronged and bittersweet: if the “rise of ethnic, gender and sexuality studies in the academy” has “led to an increase in scholarship and exhibitions addressing artists previously excluded from canon formation,” an artist “like Baltrop,” who did not follow a familiar trajectory according to the art world’s vectors of success, “could only gain entry belatedly—and more importantly, too late for the man himself to receive its benefits.”17
Published in the catalog of the Bronx exhibition, Kang’s observations are valuable for drawing attention to the way that the reclamation of Baltrop in numerous circles can lead to a flattening of the work along certain axes. His “life and work present the discipline of art history with a challenge,” in that his photographs “tend to be written about in either formal or documentary terms, and those terms interact variously with an opposition between a utopian or abject view of queer social life.”18 Baltrop’s recent inclusion in various art historical narratives is thus not only born of inclusion per se, but occurs against a larger backdrop of interests. His status as a documenter of cruising, along with more established photographers like Fischer and Gupta, has come to fruition in the context of a larger cultural interest in gay cruising, and in particular in the ways it was captured and constituted in New York and San Francisco in the 1970s. In the years 2018 and 2019, each of these photographers had a solo exhibition of their cruising photography in New York or London, and accompanying catalogs of those photographs have recently been published. The simple question “why now?” has no simple answer, but rather speaks to several intersecting concerns about the contemporary moment’s relationship to a queer past.
In blurbs, interviews, and catalog essays, Gupta and Fischer have framed their seventies work in the retrospective terms of a pre-AIDS atmosphere, and these recollections speak to the vitality and exhibitionist charisma of their photographs from this period. But as well as remaining mindful of the less than enlightened elements of the halcyon days of seventies gay sexual culture, we must also resist, Anderson argues, “the sense of viral momentum that often accompanies popular, or at least heteronormative, narratives of gay life in the 1970s,” exemplified by the “moralistic suggestion of a causal relation between the diverse cruising cultures of the late 1970s and the advent of HIV/AIDS in the early 1980s.”19 If the revival of interest in gay seventies photography speaks, indirectly, to contemporary attitudes toward HIV/AIDS in an age where the advent of preventive medication (PrEP) for those who can afford it all too easily invites talk of being “post-AIDS,” the interest is no doubt also related to the contemporary status of cruising culture. The “gay public space” Gupta identifies in his images has today largely moved online, regulated by geosocial dating apps like Grindr and Scruff. In his book on the piers, Weinberg writes that we “love to complain that the virtual world of the internet, computers, and cell phones has destroyed our humanity,” such that many “of our accounts of sex and romantic relationships today are built around a longing for a past when people supposedly had more authentic connections with one another.”20 Weinberg resists conventional thinking here, as Bersani famously does in his classic 1987 essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?”21 by suggesting that the “anonymous sex” of the past was hardly an enlightened phenomenon. Indeed, Weinberg writes, it is comparable to the “supposed alienation of the early twenty-first century.”
Contemporary app culture has altered the nature of cruising in any number of profound ways, from the virtualization of space as a digital grid to the more sinister and discriminatory ways in which “premium,” fee-paying Grindr users could, until 2020, filter the type of men they are exposed to on that grid.22 It is thus easy to see why the relative unsophistication of “analog” cruising becomes its own kind of nostalgic fetish in the face of the digital, and only makes the work of Gupta, Fischer, and Baltrop more compelling as a document of historical practice. Where cruising in “real” time and space operates according to the contingencies of encounter, apps serve to regulate the space of cruising and determine users’ chosen pathways through it. The incipient and contingent now of a cruising encounter is reified on Grindr as “Right Now,” the unit of time that delineates a given user’s desire for casual sex. The interpersonal immediacy of the street is replaced on Grindr by the vexed evidentiary function of the image, where “pics”—of faces, torsos, and other body parts—are a primary currency. To look at Gupta, Fischer, and Baltrop’s work under the aspect of contemporary online sex culture is thus to observe both deviation and a sense of continuity. While these photographs may provoke a longing for a past that reveals, in the face of Grindr’s more banal and instrumental interface, how far we have fallen, they nonetheless also reveal that cruising has long been a visual culture where image and self-image play a constitutive role.
Just as the seventies cruising culture captured by these then-young gay photographers developed in dialogue with the increasing accessibility of photography as a form, where students and novices could more easily get hold of a portable Leica camera and document the world around them, so the imagistic culture of Grindr has flourished through, and alongside, the development of smart phones. In fact, this intermingling of cruising and images has a longer history still than this brief survey of cruising photographers would suggest. Gupta, Fischer, and Baltrop are significant figures in the canon of the art of cruising, which is to say art that not only documents cruising but also speaks to its status as an imaginative capacity and an aesthetic phenomenon. Their identification of cruising’s photographic essence at a particular historical moment can steer us through the magnitude of gay New York’s archive. But it is in an altogether different creative form, this book will argue, that we find the relation between cruising (as an optical interaction between queer subjects in time and space) and visuality (as a perceived aesthetic heightening) most clearly articulated.
Gay New York
Rehearsing the history of three queer photographers from the 1970s might be an unusual way to begin a study primarily concerned with poetry and literary texts. To establish these increasingly ubiquitous images of mustachioed men in shorts and leather as the backdrop for the book’s picture of cruising risks perpetuating the decade’s insatiable hold upon contemporary imaginings of the city’s queer past. As Doug Ireland wrote in a piece for New York Magazine back in 1978, there “have always been parts of our city that have served as gay cruising areas,” such as “Washington Square Park in the 1940s” and “Third Avenue near the Queensboro Bridge in the 1950s,” among others.23 The post-Stonewall moment does not possess a monopoly on what constitutes a gay tradition; as Walter Holland writes, there is a “mythic view of Stonewall as the moment when a deep wall of silence and invisibility was magically lifted and gay identity and culture were instantly constituted,” and this view has been “deconstructed by the work of George Chauncey,” whose 1994 study Gay New York “shows the existence of a rich and diverse ‘gay’ past even at the start of the [twentieth] century.”24 One of the major interventions of Chauncey’s now-classic history is precisely its identification of vibrant social and sexual cultures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, long before the advent of an “out” public culture for gay men, as well as the observation that the look has long been an important tactic in such cultures.
Because of the “cultural injunction” in the early twentieth century “against men looking at other men in the sexually assertive way they gazed at women,” Chauncey writes, “a ‘normal’ man almost automatically averted his eyes if they happened to lock with a stranger, whereas a gay man interested in the man gazing at him returned his look.”25 The phenomenon that art historian Rebecca Zurier terms “urban visuality,” the “social and cultural habit of looking as a social and cultural practice in cities,” where “city dwellers become knowing interpreters of a potentially bewildering overload of visual information and learn to assess strangers optically,” can be traced in the life of New York City at least as far back as the turn of the twentieth century.26 Thus, in their directness and immediacy, Gupta, Fischer, and Baltrop’s images from the seventies crystallize a mode of erotic looking that can be identified throughout the history of gay life in the city and, I will argue, across a number of literary texts. These photographs actualize a “look”—a term I am using to denote both a gaze and a form of sartorial or even archetypal self-image—that is in fact a frequent and striking trope among several New York poets.
The Poetics of Cruising explores this relationship between cruising, photography, and the visual in the work of a number of writers, from Walt Whitman in the nineteenth century to Eileen Myles in the twenty-first, and also locates its initial crystallization in nineteenth-century Paris, in the work of Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin’s account of it. In establishing this formulation, the book does not seek to enshrine, transhistorically, a delimited “gay” or “queer” canon of New York writing—such a task is ever thwarted by historical particularities. Laying a claim to Walt Whitman or to Langston Hughes as gay or queer writers, for example, is no simple matter; although there is evidence these writers had sexual relationships between men, scholars still debate the pertinence and appropriateness of using terms which precede, or else do not adequately describe, their erotic lives. Whitman was writing before and during the period when desire between men began to be framed linguistically in a manner familiar to us today, and as John Boswell writes, the “word ‘homosexual,’ despite its air of antiquity, was actually coined in the late nineteenth century by German psychologists, introduced into English only at the beginning of the present [twentieth] century.”27 Similarly, inasmuch as the examples of Frank O’Hara and David Wojnarowicz comprise a historical continuity in regard to gay life in New York before and after Stonewall, it would be reductive to try and fit Eileen Myles neatly in this category, not least because there has been a relative erasure of lesbian cruising, and of female and nonbinary writers, from the history of cruising. And, as we shall see throughout this book, this history is not just one of community but of exclusion, where certain gendered and racialized bodies are marked and policed.
In other words, a “gay” sensibility does not map out consistently in this history, and in the course of attending to these three writers chronologically I am not suggesting a linear equivalence that leads from, say, 1855 to 2018, but rather seek to consider correspondences across these divergent historical moments. As its complex historical fate has shown, the term “gay” feels insufficient and even exclusionary. “While conceived as an act of resistance to homophobic oppression,” writes Bersani, “the project of elaborating a gay identity could itself be discredited” for “delineating what is easily recognizable as a white, middle-class, liberal gay identity,” as if the act of “looking for a gay identity predetermined the field in which it would be found.”28 Thus it is in a structural sense, in the first instance, that the word “queer” proves particularly useful. “Queer approaches to understanding the past and present,” Mark W. Turner writes in Backward Glances, his study of cruising in London and New York, can eschew the “levelling out of history” and the “grand narratives” of continuity, and can get “beyond binary thinking (‘gay’ and ‘straight’), of the sort that has defined so much of the way urban modernity is understood.”29 Queer, in its elasticity, is amenable to the transhistorical by rejecting binary or deterministic labels, and moves past the methodological etiquette of appropriateness versus anachronism, as recent entries in the Whitman debate that argue for his queerness have suggested.30
This book keeps both terms, “gay” and “queer,” in play, and contends that the urban space figured by these texts can still be fruitfully named as that of “gay New York,” to return to the title of Chauncey’s book, which spans the years 1890 (just two years before Whitman’s death) to 1940. Gay was one among a number of terms used to describe homosexuality in this period, Chauncey argues, many of which were “not synonymous with homosexual or heterosexual” but still represented “a different conceptual mapping of male sexual practices,” each with their own “specific connotation[s].” Still, it is perhaps the most commonly accepted member of a family of words that mostly, in spite of their differences, refer back to sex between men.31 The word “queer” is also included along with “faggot,” “fairy,” and “trade,” but in this lexical assemblage it meant something different to its more recent redefinition as a critical term, a term that could “be taken,” Bersani writes, “as delineating political rather than erotic tendencies.”32 The “gay New York” that forms this book’s field of enquiry thus refers to the city as both an imaginary and a localizable site, one that provides an umbrella term for the divergent portraits of queer life in the city that these texts provide. The ground covered ranges from Whitman’s Brooklyn Heights in the 1850s to Myles’s East Village in the 2010s, and the question of what constitutes these queer spaces is, of course, radically different in each of these periods. While Gupta’s vision of Christopher Street in the mid-seventies, as a “gay public space such as hadn’t really been seen before,” seems like the consummate landscape of gay cruising, I am not seeking to impose a postliberation vantage upon Whitman’s New York, for example, nor O’Hara’s, even if the culture of the West Village in the sixties was continuous with the more open and tangible form that cruising took in the years following Stonewall. What I am suggesting in bringing these writers together in this study is that they each, in their focus upon the look as an instrument of erotic perception, queer the respective urban spaces they inhabited. Out of this assemblage something like a “gay New York” emerges, and although its constituent iterations may not be directly reproducible across time, they are parallel examples, nonetheless, of a queer relation to urban space.
What this assemblage also offers, then, is a vivid glimpse into the ways that cruising has been conceptualized in relation to the visual culture of given historical moments. Although Whitman’s cruising in Brooklyn or among the crowds of Broadway is well documented, there is much in his work to suggest that his devotion to the love between men and, more particularly, the love between strangers, is intimately linked with his interest in daguerreotypes and burgeoning forms of portrait photography. Similarly, Langston Hughes’s poems of looking and cruising are mediated by traditions of street photography and montage, a connection that is taken up explicitly—and to explicitly queer ends—by Isaac Julien’s 1989 film Looking for Langston. Frank O’Hara’s little-known film texts from the 1960s help to illuminate his cruising poems, revealing a queer erotic fixation with film stars that is replayed on the streets of Manhattan, just as David Wojnarowicz’s unpublished poetry from the 1970s allows us to reinterpret his better-known photographic and prose works.
What does “gay New York” look like today, fifty years on from the Stonewall riots? Most apparently, the ongoing gentrification of the city and, as Sarah Schulman suggests, of the mind, continues to endanger the radical potential of what the city has to offer queer and subcultural communities.33 The Hudson River piers, which, as Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed point out, themselves “became a locus of memory, marked by casual graffiti—much of it, as the AIDS crisis developed, explicitly memorial,” have now all but “disappeared,” former memorial sites lost to the process of regeneration.34 Where David Wojnarowicz’s visual art could once be found, like the graffiti Castiglia and Reed describe, on the crumbling walls of the piers, it is nowadays viewed in museums like the Whitney, home of the 2018 Wojnarowicz retrospective, whose new Renzo Piano–designed building sits on Gansevoort Street, a block away from Piers 51 and 53, both of which have now been turned into parks. But perhaps the most significant change wrought upon queer urban space in recent years is the virtualization of the space of cruising by apps like Scruff and Grindr.
Created in 2009 as a means for gay men to communicate, date, and meet for sex, Grindr approximates the arena of cruising using a virtual grid comprising user profiles that are displayed in the order of their proximity to you at a given moment. These profiles are shown in the grid as images; what is shown in users’ profile images is at their own discretion, though full-frontal nudity is not permitted, and some users choose not to display an image at all for anonymity’s sake. Within a profile, which is accessed by tapping on this image, a user can choose to display such information as Height, Ethnicity, Body Type, Relationship Status, Sexual Position, and HIV Status. A user can also choose the “Tribe” that best describes them, from a list that includes the following types: Bear, Clean-Cut, Daddy, Discreet, Geek, Jock, Leather, Otter, Poz, Rugged, Trans, and Twink. (Grindr’s grid of course often reproduces discriminatory attitudes, of a piece with the fetishistic and even violent economy of preference that can govern actual encounters on the street.) Finally, there is the option for a user to display why they are using the app through the “Looking For” function, stating that they are looking for Chat, Friends, Dates, Networking, or Right Now. To be looking for right now is to turn the act of virtual perusal into the act of cruising at one remove, mediated by the technology that governs what is available to explore. Provided with this information, to differing degrees, users can pick and choose who to communicate with from the available network of men, determining who they are to share their “right now” with.
Grindr may have altered or adapted the “now” of cruising to its own ends, and in the book’s coda I will explore both how cruising culture has changed in its wake, and how contemporary poets like Danez Smith have carved out the distinctive textual space of the “Grindr poem” to reflect on this. But in the chapters ahead I will be considering how these historically particular texts from Whitman onwards can speak to the “now” of the present moment as icons of a queer cultural past. By staging acts of looking, I will argue, these cruising texts invite their readers to participate in the optical erotics they establish. This occurs most often through triangulation. A Whitman lyric, for example, makes available (at least) two kinds of address simultaneously, such that we imagine the “you” of a given poem as being both an imagined addressee particular to the poem’s compositional situation—the cruisee—and us ourselves, who thus occupy a third position within the poem’s interlocution. And it is no accident that some of Whitman’s most explicit extensions to future readers are figured analogously as encounters occurring in the urban environment, like his invocation of the “others who look back on me because I look’d forward to them” from the urban vantage of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”35 This line describes both the immediate optical situation of looks between strangers in the street—the backward glance of cruising—and the parallel interplay of backward and forward that attends the poet’s relation to his readers, who “look back” upon him as he looks “forward” to them from a historically distant time and place.
Indeed, like the often brief and random back-and-forth of cruising, the hermeneutic “look” of a text’s reception can also be contingent or fragile, and similarly prone to missed signals and misreadings. As Jonathan D. Katz puts it in introducing a collection of portraits representing same-sex desire, the “social universe of sexual desire, in painting, as in life, is so often of necessity communicated through the most subtle gestures, glances, and codes.”36 Whitman’s poetics of presence is correspondingly animated by an anxiety to be seen and understood, to be affirmed by the look of the other, and it is bolstered by the hope that textuality itself can maintain and revivify the possibility of communion between poet and reader. However, while the erotics of this second-person address is not quite unique to Whitman, the directness of his invocation of the reader as a historically distant “you” is a central idiosyncrasy of his particular textual project, and one not exactly reproduced in the work of his successors. What is the place, then, of the reader in cruising texts that implore their onlookers less directly, which is to say texts that instead narrate an encounter between a self and an object who is not “you,” but a third-person “he”? If O’Hara and Wojnarowicz’s texts seem more inclined toward apprehending strangers who are rendered in the third-person, this is not to say that the reader does not still come to occupy something akin to the triangulated third positionality I described above. As in cruising, a text need not be looking squarely at its reader to retain its uncanny capacity to look back. It is here that the visuality courted by these texts comes to bear, for insofar as they frame cruising encounters as photographic or cinematic, these texts themselves might then be thought of as ekphrastic; as texts that render and describe their desired strangers as visual objects that share, in some sense, the properties of artworks. Though the ekphrastic text, in its tendency toward description over apostrophe, may seem to sideline its reader as an onlooker who is situated at a further remove from the object of attention, is the writer’s act of reading not, in another sense, an implicit extension to their own reader?
In the introduction to his instructive book on queer ekphrasis, Brian Glavey writes of the “situatedness of ekphrasis that hinges on the forms of sociability involved in responding to artworks for readers, a scenario with at least three rather than two players” and which “is not simply about seeing” but “also about showing and sharing.”37 The reader of a quasi-ekphrastic cruising text, then, such as Wojnarowicz’s apprehension of a man “handsome like some face in old boxer photographs, a cross between an aging boxer and Mayakovsky,” is not only witness to an act of looking, but is instantiated by the text into a way of looking.38 If ekphrasis “is, in this sense, pedagogical,” Glavey continues, then this “sociability” might encourage a reader not only to inhabit the vantage of the “I” as if they are inside the time and space of the text’s situation—a testament to immediacy, vividness, and the stirring of empathy—but also to turn this way of looking back upon the speaker and the text itself. In other words, a text that performs an act of close reading, in homing in upon a desired stranger, correspondingly invites a kindred effort from its own reader.39 Such a mode of reading in turn invites an interrogation of the text’s “I,” the reader’s own desired object, who is constituted at once by the particulars of form and the biographical matter of authorship. The reader thus becomes suspended, similar to the “Lucky Pierre” of O’Hara’s “Personism,”40 in a triangulated cruising scenario, compelled to visualize both the passing stranger of the text’s situation and the no-less-strange speaker who mediates this encounter; a speaker who is himself suspended between an abstract “I” and “David Wojnarowicz,” for example.
This capacity of texts to enact the look back that they describe touches upon recent methodological debates around what Rita Felski describes, in her critique of “context,” as the “transtemporal movement and affective resonance of particular texts.”41 Such movement indeed recalls the sense of agency and posterity that Whitman seeks for his text, and in turn himself, in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” Using Bruno Latour’s notion of “nonhuman actors,” Felski asks “what would it mean for literary and cultural studies to acknowledge poems and paintings, fictional characters and narrative devices, as actors?” The “bogeyman in the closet” of this conversation is the “fear that acknowledging the agency of texts will tip us into the abyss of a retrograde religion of art” or else insipid proclamations about universality and timelessness, so “context” is presumed to safeguard against these by invoking that which is outside, or to one side of, the text (583). And yet, as Felski writes, there “is no zero-sum game in which one side must be conclusively crushed so that the other can triumph” (584). Rather, the cruising works I am concerned with solicit a kind of reading that flouts any such fixed line between text and context. Their erotics depend on a closeness to form that is simultaneous with attending to the particulars of their production, and to the circumstances of their author’s lived experiences as cruisers of the city. The call of Whitman’s “you,” after all, draws its potency from its historicity.
That poems can look back or attain “transtemporal movement and affective resonance” in a variety of ways is, on the surface, no more particular than the nature of reception writ large. And yet, I am suggesting, this capacity is queer, or has particularly queer potential, and finds rich analogical expression in the optical mechanism of cruising. The notion that a poem of cruising might in turn cruise us suggests that the status of texts as actors needn’t remain at the level of the nonhuman. Walter Benjamin once wrote, on a scrap of paper that will prove significant in the next chapter, “Words themselves have an aura; [Karl] Kraus described this in particularly exact terms: ‘The closer one looks at a word, the greater the distance from which it returns the gaze.’”42 Words are rendered here not merely as actors or extensions of action; they resemble persons themselves, glancing back, perhaps taking on the countenance of the “loved one” or the “lover” Benjamin elliptically describes in the next, incomplete paragraph of this note. This account of reading recalls the feared, “retrograde” religion of art that Felski refers to, and resembles Alfred Gell’s anthropological theory of art where “we approach art objects” as “indexes,” as if they had “physiognomies like people,” for when “we see a picture of a smiling person, we attribute an attitude of friendliness to the ‘person in the picture’ [ . . . ] just as a real person’s smile would trigger the same inference.”43 If the “inference” of animate or interpersonal presence is the condition of the “index” in the realm of visual art, a perception of “agency” that these textual accounts of cruising narrate in their absorption in the look as a live and visual encounter, then they share in that same “abduction of agency” as texts themselves, their “index” the linguistic phenomenon through which a reader detects a physiognomic presence.
The stakes of this model of reading for a queer poetics lie, then, in the seeming perversity or naivety, or indeed perverse naivety, of an investment in the animate. As Glavey writes, “whether obtuse or otiose, old-fashioned or utopian, modes of thought tied up with an attention to form are queer in the sense that they care about things too much or in all the wrong ways.”44 Indeed queer theory abounds with these constitutive tendencies toward excess or wrongness that are sustained in relation to the supposed efficacies of texts and artworks, objects of study that are brought to life, correspondingly, through the queer art of reading. “Close reading,” Kevin Ohi writes, “offers a way to access the potentiality of the literary work—not to settle it, once and for all, in a meaning that masters it, but to rewrite it, perpetually,” and in this schema “potentiality” refers to that “recurrent topos in queer writing, where it is a mode of sexual and political critique and where imaginings of utopian sexual possibilities take shape in readings and rewritings of precursor texts.”45 Elizabeth Freeman similarly identifies in queer studies a formalism that seeks to carve out a space of solace, “a longing for form that turns us backward to prior moments, forward to embarrassing utopias, sideways to forms of being and belonging that seem, on the face of it, completely banal.”46 The utopian act of reading that anchors José Esteban Muñoz’s 2009 study Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity is, in the first instance, exemplary for my own purposes. Muñoz frames his formulation of the utopic around a poem that is itself a reading of a photograph, James Schuyler’s “A photograph,” a text that “harnesses multiple temporalities” and suggests that a relation to the visual—exemplified by the speaker’s ekphrastic relation to a photograph of a happier time—is itself a negotiation of proleptic retrospection.47 In the act of recollection, Schuyler’s speaker illustrates “a type of affective excess that presents the enabling force of a forward-dawning futurity that is queerness” (23).
The placement of this poem, as a text illustrative of “moments of queer relational bliss,” suggests that the utopian or ecstatic temporality Muñoz theorizes is something that can be learned or taught, or pedagogical, as Glavey has it. It is a way of looking at something—a poem, a photograph, a person—and this important ekphrastic dimension of Muñoz’s argument is often neglected in accounts of Cruising Utopia. More obviously, there is also the suggestiveness of Muñoz’s title, which he explains thus: “The mode of ‘cruising’ for which this book calls is not only or even primarily ‘cruising for sex.’ I do see an unlimited potentiality in actual queer sex, but books of criticism that simply glamorize the ontology of gay male cruising are more often than not simply boring” (18). I hope to follow Muñoz’s word in offering an account of gay male cruising that is neither decorous nor boring; which neither glamorizes cruising as an ahistorical paradise nor repeats the same old tropes. Like Muñoz, who puns on the “look” or glance of cruising as both an excavatory and erotic gesture when he writes that the book’s “critical methodology can be best described as a backward glance that enacts a future vision” (4), I too am interested not only in cruising for sex per se but in the incipient and intricate temporalities the act brings to light.
In as much as the optical encounter of cruising is an immersion in the present, it is also, as Paul K. Saint-Amour writes, after Muñoz, a present that is “the only temporality that could harbor the utopian touch of past and future.”48 Saint-Amour’s article illuminates and builds upon Muñoz’s diagnosis of the present as an oppressive here-and-now in order to identify what he coins the “literary present,” a given of literary studies, the widely shared “practice of writing predominantly in the present tense when writing about literary works,” as if the text and its author were live, or alive.49 Saint-Amour explores and complicates the assumptions of the literary present in fascinating ways, particularly its relation to futurity, and I find myself needing to state at the outset of this book—as he does at the end of his article—a renewed though self-conscious faith in this wiliest of tenses. It is, after all, with recourse to the literary present that the cruising texts I am concerned with are seen to be looking at us, right now. Perhaps this mode of temporal interconnection is what Freeman means by that longing that looks forward to “embarrassing utopias,” or, as Muñoz has it, the “longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative.”50
Tyler Bradway has recently connected this sense of longing to the notion of “bad reading,” a mode of affective relation to texts where “we suspend the institutionally sanctioned critic as the originator of the affective relations of reading” and attend instead “to the aesthetic object’s affective agency—its capacity to foster new relational models for reading.”51 Such models would look beyond the “dialectic of suspicion and empathy” inherited from Sedgwick toward affects that include “stupefaction, anxiety, masturbatory pleasure, exuberance, shameless immodesty” and so on; they would weather the potentially “embarrassing” or “retrograde” implications of finding and seeking queer kinship, even solidarity, in texts from across great historical distances.52 And, indeed, of taking Whitman at his word when he writes in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” that it “is not upon you alone the dark patches fall” (LG, 138). That our encounters with queer texts, like our hook-ups and the looks that initiate them, can feel embarrassing, pleasurable, shameful, wounding, and utopic, as if, to quote Frank O’Hara’s 1954 poem “Homosexuality,” “we’d been pierced by a glance!” (CP, 181–82), is the main argument of this book.
In chapter 1, I extend a backward glance to nineteenth-century Paris in order to illustrate this imbrication of cruising, looking, poetics, and photography. Baudelaire’s poem “À une passante” (“To a passing woman”), as well as Walter Benjamin’s account of it in relation to the interpersonal-aesthetic phenomenon of the aura, are both frequently recruited to tell the origin story of urban modernity. In this chapter I carve a new path through this material to identify its resonance for queer looking, particularly with regards to the erotic and photographic capacity of poetry itself, and compare Baudelaire’s poem to Whitman’s “To a Stranger.” This comparison also brings to light the ambivalence of cruising’s look, the fact that it can be utopic and illuminating, but also wounding, violent, and scopophilic, which I pursue at greater length in Whitman’s work in chapter 2. Whitman’s celebrations of cruising in Manhattan, an environment he names the “City of Orgies” in the title of one poem, are connected, I suggest, to his fixation upon portraits and daguerreotypes. Although this connection seems most apparent in Whitman’s cruising poems, a similar erotics of looking is also palpable in poems of wounding and war. Whitman’s definition of a textual and erotic magnetism gathers together these various strands in his poetic thinking, and provides a gloss upon his own cruisy solicitations of his readers.
In chapter 3, I identify Langston Hughes’s relation to Whitman as loaded with queer meaning, and locate the presence of Whitman’s legacy as a poet of cruising in Hughes’s 1925 poem “Subway Face.” Using that poem’s fixation upon looking, desire, and interchange, I turn to Isaac Julien’s 1989 film Looking for Langston as an optic for Hughes’s own furtive representations of queer love and interracial desire, and trace his use of textual cruising as a mode of resisting the white gaze in his photographic and quasi-photographic works from the 1950s. In chapter 4, I begin by identifying how race, desire, and cinema intersect in Frank O’Hara’s work, and argue that his well-documented love of the movies is intimately linked to his interests in cruising. Through a close reading of Act and Portrait, a rarely discussed film collaboration with the artist Alfred Leslie, I identify how O’Hara’s poetic eulogies to cinema and to the erotic strangers of the streets, whom he apprehends as if they were movie stars, are both steeped in the semiotics of cruising, which in turn provides a way of thinking about his own flirtatious poetic style.
In chapter 5, I study David Wojnarowicz’s unpublished poetry alongside his photographic project Arthur Rimbaud in New York and suggest that, for Wojnarowicz, the shared glance of cruising is a distinctively photographic phenomenon that is also closely linked to the temporality of masturbation. Following these strands in his work, I argue that the simultaneously wounding and erotic dimensions of looking are thrown into relief by the specter of HIV/AIDS that haunts his writing. In the book’s coda, I address the question of who is traditionally excluded from the practice and history of cruising, and explore how the poetry of Eileen Myles, from the 1990s through to their more contemporary output, critiques, both directly and obliquely, the gendered inequities in the queer community. This analysis of Myles’s work, in particular their poem “Hot Night,” precipitates a turn to the contemporary moment, and a reflection upon the changing nature of cruising and looking “right now,” in the age of Grindr.