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 theater, 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. [...]
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”. [...]
But one reason it is so surprising to see cruising being taken seriously in theater, gallery art and literature (domains which, no matter how much they may seem to foster the work of gay men, have their gates kept by straight people) is that a fear of possible cruising has been a driving force in American cultural politics. As the writer and scientist Joseph Osmundson wrote, “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 – from North Carolina’s notorious HB2 “bathroom bill” to 11 states suing the federal government after the Obama administration directed “US public schools to let transgender students use the bathrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identity”. As Osmundson writes, “it is in bathrooms that these two trends – integration into the mainstream literary canon and a rightwing backlash against gay and trans progress – currently meet.”
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