Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime

By Alex Espinoza

"Alex Espinoza's much-anticipated book takes readers on a unique ‘cruise.’” — John Rechy
Acclaimed author Alex Espinoza takes readers on an uncensored journey through the underground, to reveal the timeless art of cruising. Combining historical research and oral history with his own personal experience, Espinoza examines the political and cultural forces behind this radical pastime. From Greek antiquity to the notorious Molly houses of 18th century England, the raucous 1970s to the algorithms of Grindr, Oscar Wilde to George Michael, cruising remains at once a reclamation of public space and the creation of its own unique locale—one in which men of all races and classes interact, even in the shadow of repressive governments. In Uganda and Russia, we meet activists for whom cruising can be a matter of life and death; while in the West he shows how cruising circumvents the inequalities and abuses of power that plague heterosexual encounters. Ultimately, Espinoza illustrates how cruising functions as a powerful rebuke to patriarchy and capitalism—unless you are cruising the department store restroom, of course.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Unnamed Press
• Release date: Jun 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9781944700836

Alex Espinoza

Alex Espinoza was born in Tijuana, Mexico and raised in La Puente, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. He has worked as a used appliance salesman, a gardener, a retail manager, and an egg candler on a chicken farm. He attended the University of California-Riverside before earning his MFA in Writing from the University of California-Irvine. His non-fiction has appeared in Salon and as part of the Chicano Chapbook Series edited by poet Gary Soto. He lives in Riverside, California, where he teaches English at his old community college.

Book preview

An Introduction to the Art

The only time the word cruising was used when I was growing up was when my brothers and cousins and uncles talked about taking their low riders out to drive up and down Colorado Boulevard, Hacienda Avenue, Whittier Boulevard, or any number of streets where young Mexican Americans gathered on Friday and Saturday nights around the San Gabriel Valley.

Let’s go cruising, one would say, and they’d pile in a car and be off, gone for hours.

It was less about the destination and more about the journey, I’d come to find out later. Cruising wasn’t about where you were going. Rather, it was about how you were going, about what you looked like when you were going, about what car you were riding or driving in. My brothers and their friends ironed their shirts when they went cruising. They shaved. They dabbed on cologne and combed their hair. They made sure to look good when they went out. It was about taking your time, scoping out the scene, getting the lay of the land and, of course, picking up girls. Cruising the streets had as much to do with seeing as it did with being seen. Growing up a closeted homosexual, navigating a culture that encouraged hypermasculinity and patriarchy, I would learn to live and operate in both worlds, learn the customs and traditions necessary for survival in both spheres. I would also learn to decipher the coded behavior and language of both, especially when it came to that word: cruising.

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 cruised for chicks. All of these involve, to some degree, the act of leisurely crossing and recrossing 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 word became synonymous with secret sexual encounters. We know the word comes from the Latin word crux, or cross.

Cruzate, my mother would say when we passed a church.

I would make the sign of the cross.

Vamos a cruzar al otro lado, my relatives in Tijuana said when they crossed the border from Mexico into the United States.

Once an airplane reaches cruising altitude, the seat belt sign is turned off; you are free to move about the cabin, to stretch your legs or go to the bathroom, to wander up and down the aisle aimlessly as you try ridding yourself of that restless, cooped-up feeling.

As a kid, I knew about cruise ships, of course. Those long, extended sojourns on luxury liners to exotic ports of call. I remember watching The Love Boat, getting lost in the personal intrigues of passengers as they sunned themselves on deck chairs and played shuffleboard. There were stops along the way—Mazatlán, Acapulco, Cabo San Lucas—and people had affairs and sometimes even fell in love. It was a journey of discovery but also of reinvention; you could become someone else.

In The Autobiography of a Thief, Hutchins Hapgood writes of Victorian England, It was in the days when every woman had to possess a fine silk handkerchief; even the Bowery ‘cruisers’ (street-walkers) carried them.¹ This remains one of the earliest printed instances where the word is linked to sex. The historian Timothy Blanning traced the definition of cruising, as it pertains to the act of clandestine sexual encounters in oftentimes public places, to the gay community. It is derived, he found, from the Dutch kruisen, which, in the simplest terms, means to cross or intersect. But kruisen also means to breed or to arrange the mating of specific plants or animals.

The idea seems to hint at a word whose use signals to others in a subculture the intent of action, the adoption of a code only those in the know were aware of, similar to the phrases light in the loafers or friend of Dorothy, the latter dating back to World War II (at least) and both operating as veiled signals for gay men. Though the terms have been co-opted by the mainstream, in often pejorative ways, this wasn’t always the case. The average person in midcentury America would think nothing of such a phrase upon overhearing it in the course of a conversation, but closeted homosexuals used such language to maneuver, survive, and engage in sexual activity at a time when being gay meant being a criminal, a stain on society.

But how did it start? What led to gay men’s urge to engage in public sex? It is difficult to trace the history of sex in public places simply because everyone has done it. We can turn, of course, to the Greeks and the Romans for starters.

The Greeks had the concept of paiderastia (pederasty), defined as a sexual relationship between a boy and an older man. It is important to note that same-sex relationships in ancient Greece weren’t as tolerated and accepted as scholars once believed. Besides the fact that there was always an imbalance of power, there were also rules about the kinds of wooing gifts that could be used. Dried fish and fighting cocks were the ancient homosexual equivalent of flowers and chocolates.²

Early civilizations gave way to more urbanized city centers, and cruising spots quickly materialized, as evidenced by ancient graffiti depicting men looking for other men.³ Certain hieroglyphics in Egypt, now seen through a contemporary queer lens, clearly depict homoerotic themes that had been brushed over by their straight white discoverers. The evidence is there, if you know what to look for.

The act of looking, so intrinsically connected to cruising, was entrenched in ancient Rome’s high society, where distinctly modern cruising practices were established: men searched for sailors in the vicinity of districts close to the Tiber. Public baths are also referred to as a place to find sexual partners. Juvenal states that such men scratched their heads with a finger to identify themselves.⁴

Fast-forward to eighteenth-century London, where we find the first iteration of the gay bar in molly houses, clandestine locations scattered across the city where men would meet to stage drag shows, mingle, and have sex. Distinctly social places, molly houses were places of refuge where men could be with whoever they wanted, but also simply be themselves.⁵

The criminalization of these secret locations emerged from moral and cultural shifts, which included changing attitudes surrounding homosexuality. In the postwar cities of the United States, men (both closeted and otherwise) had to learn to negotiate the surreptitious world of hookups and sexual gratification with tact and dexterity, given the rise in anti-gay sentiments. In 1963, author John Rechy introduced readers to a nameless gay hustler who traverses the bleak and lonely streets of America as he attempts to reconcile with his troubled past while searching for a place to belong. Rechy’s character finds a world of sexual outlaws and deviants, those marginalized individuals looking for greater purpose. In City of Night, American culture at large—girded by faith in the nuclear family, suburban development, home mortgages, and placid children—is supplanted by Rechy’s depiction of a complex gay world, one fueled by drugs, alcohol, and sexual encounters in public toilets, parks, and subway stations.

In States of Desire: Travels in Gay America, Edmund White recounts cruising in Los Angeles in the 1970s:

For cruising, gays go to Robertson Boulevard between Third Street and Beverly, especially the little park where bare-chested men sun or work out. The leather bars are all on Melrose as is Hardware, the boutique that carries not only the usual slave bracelets and athletic socks but also windbreakers and boxer swimsuits in semi-transparent, bruise-colored sleaze. The owners of Hardware invented the Guard douche (Be prepared for anything… anywhere). Griffith Park is cruisy, especially the footpaths near the Greek Theater. Hilldale Street is always busy. But Santa Monica Boulevard remains the Great Tan Way of cruising.⁶

And yet at the time, the audience for Rechy’s and White’s work was limited. Outside of the gay community and perhaps the counterculture, the notion of cruising had not yet entered the mainstream. Practices that had been occurring for centuries—clandestine meetings in public, searching the docks, frequenting bathhouses and gay bars—still remained under the radar as far as the general population was concerned.

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. By day, Bateson had been an x-ray technician, and his character in The Exorcist appears as such in a scene in which young Regan, displaying abnormal behavior, is wheeled into an examination room where doctors perform an angiogram. "The scene is considered one of the most disturbing of the movie, because of it’s [sic] hyper-realistic precision," wrote Matt Miller in a 2018 article for Esquire.⁷

A box-office flop, Cruising was heavily criticized by gay rights activists who opposed its depiction of gay men as murderous degenerates. After the film’s DVD release in 2007, Michael D. Klemm wrote for the website cinemaqueer.com:

Friedkin [fuels] the flames that the gay lifestyle is inheritantly [sic] violent. One of the most damning arguments to support this is a series of subliminal shots—each lasting only a frame or two—of gay pornography (close-ups of anal penetration to be exact) that flash on the screen during the first murder scene—linking gay sex with the stabbing of the knife. Cruising oozes with queer self loathing.⁸

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.

And then there’s Jeffrey Dahmer, the notorious midwestern serial killer who mutilated and ate seventeen gay men he met in bars, alleys, public libraries, and bathhouses from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. If cruising remained largely a taboo act, it was sensationalistic triggers like Friedkin’s film and the Dahmer murders that inextricably linked the act with violence and criminality in the nation’s imagination.

George Michael’s 1998 arrest marks a clear moment when the act of cruising itself entered the popular consciousness, followed almost a decade later by Republican Idaho senator Larry Craig’s arrest in an airport bathroom in 2007. While the incidents were treated as crimes by authorities, they also sparked public debate over our contradictory, often prudish attitudes toward gay sex. The salacious reporting by the tabloids also served to familiarize readers to the act itself, providing intimate details and cultural cues, like the foot tapping between bathroom stalls, previously known only to participants.

Cruising had been brought out of the alleyways and onto the front page, but it had also been given a face. Tom Ras-mussen 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.⁹ 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.

While closely guarded secret cruising locations continue to operate as sites