CRUISING MAKES AN ANALOG COMEBACK
HOW QUEER FOLKS FIND EACH OTHER HAS EVOLVED with technology: classified print ads gave way to phone chat lines, which led to those infamous AOL chat rooms. And now? The power to hook up rests in the palm of our hands, with apps like Grindr and Scruff having become a (let’s be honest, mostly mundane) part of queer sex lives over the last decade. But even if scrolling the apps has become passive and rote, they still serve an important purpose: they find people you can’t see, but yearn for. Before this technology became readily available, that yearning was instead met by cruising: the tactile, IRL art of signaling to another person with a glance or other nonverbal communication that—right there, right now—you want to be intimate.
Cruising has long been where queer space and queer sex intersect. With relatively few spaces for queers to meet and interact, queer sex was driven underground—or, more correctly, into the darkness of public spaces: The Rambles in New York City’s Central Park, Los Angeles’s Pershing Square, and San Francisco’s Baker Beach are all famous examples of cruising grounds that still operate to this day. But the art of cruising was not relegated solely
