Dissertation TRUE FINAL

‘Out and About: An examination of gay
cruising in Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance

and Greenwell’s What Belongs To You’
Candidate Number: Y18852

King’s College London, 2018
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of Master of Arts
in the Department of English
at King’s College London
0
Table of Contents
Introduction………………………………………………………… …….4
Cruising and the city-space…………………………………………………4
Cruising and the stranger in modernity…………………………………..…5
What is cruising? …………………………………………………………...8
Chapter 1: A brief history of cruising……………………………..……12
The figure of the flâneur ……………………………………………...…..14
The importance of contact: Jacobs and Delaney………………..……..….16
Chapter 2: Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance ……………………..….27
Gay fiction after Stonewall…………………………………………….….28
Cruising and the formation of Malone’s identity……...……………...…..38
Chapter 3: Greenwell’s What Belongs To You……...…………...……..48
The re-emergence of the cruising novel……………………………….….53
Chapter 4: The future of the cruising novel………………………...….63
Bibliography…………………………………………………………...….71
1
Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful to my supervisor, Professor Mark Turner, for his expert advice
and guidance during this project and for first piquing my interest in gay cruising
during one of his seminars early in the course. I would also like to thank my
personal tutor, Myka Abramson, and all the programme administrators in the
English department for their continued kindness, support and understanding during
my time at King’s. I am eternally indebted to my incredible family, particularly my
parents, who have always shown me unconditional love and encouragement, not
just in my academic endeavours, but throughout my whole life. Lastly, I would like
to thank Sam for the many hours he spent listening to me talk about gay cruising,
proofreading drafts and forcing me to get out of bed and write. I would never have
finished without you.
2
Abstract
The present dissertation examines representations of gay cruising through a close
reading of two unapologetically gay novels - Andrew Holleran’s seminal 1978 text
Dancer from the Dance, and Garth Greenwell’s 2016 debut novel What Belongs To
You. In doing so, this dissertation also explores two distinct eras in cruising history
- the hedonistic halcyon days of late 1970s New York (the so-called ‘Golden Age
of Promiscuity’1) and the 21st century, post-AIDS, digital world of 2016 onwards.
The decision to focus on these texts is primarily based on their literary merit as
examples of outstanding gay writing but is also rooted in the ways in which they
act as representations of particularly fascinating periods in cruising and gay
history. This dissertation will investigate the centrality of the act of cruising to the
creation of gay male identity and will also investigate the ways in which the
landscape of gay cruising has altered in the nearly four decades between the
publication of the two novels.
1
Brad Gooch, The Golden Age of Promiscuity, (New York: Hard Candy Books, 1997)
3
Introduction
Cruising and the city-space
My interest in the topic of cruising arises firstly out of an interest in urban cultural
geography and how the space of the city landscape enables and allows for the
practice of cruising to flourish. George Chauncey in his groundbreaking work Gay
New York, a historical analysis of gay male relations in early twentieth century
New York, asserts that it was in the city’s public spaces, ‘less easily regulated than
a residential or commercial venue, that much of the gay world took shape.’2 Mark
Turner in his book Backwards Glances: Cruising the queer streets of New York
and London, an examination of cruising across a range of cultural material
including Whitman’s notebooks and Hockney’s graffiti, presents the idea of
cruising as a specifically urban practice, a ‘counter-discourse in the literature of
modernity and an alternative street practice in the modern city, a way of both
imagining and inhabiting the spaces of the city that challenge other ways we have
come to understand urban movement.’3 Indeed, both of the novels I explore in this
2
George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of a Gay Male
World, (New York: Basic Books, 1994), p.179
3
Mark Turner, Backwards Glances: Cruising the queer streets of London and New York,
(Reaktion Books Limited, 2004), p.7
4
dissertation feature the urban space prominently and in both contact with strangers
(whether sexual or non-sexual) is central, both structurally and thematically. In
Dancer from the Dance, this urban space is New York, a city which has always
occupied a culturally significant space in the gay male psyche, home to decades of
gay history, culture, and memory. In What Belongs To You, the narrator’s
relationship with rent-boy Mitko begins and ends in the ex-Soviet city of Sofia.
Ex-Soviet cities inhabit their own distinct and mysterious space in the imagination
of the Western reader, which Greenwell maps directly onto the relationship
between his two main characters.
Cruising and the stranger in modernity
Secondly, my interest in cruising lies in what the practice has to tell us about our
relationship with strangers and strangeness in modernity - or the question that Tim
Dean poses at the end of his book Unlimited Intimacy: ‘Why should strangers not
be lovers and yet remain strangers?’4 The question is wonderfully and casually
flirtatious. Additionally, it is a question I have returned to time and time again
whilst writing this dissertation and to which I still do not have an answer. On a
surface level, Dean’s question flies in the face of conventional wisdom
4
Tim Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the subculture of barebacking, (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2009), p.180
5
surrounding ‘safe sex’ - always get to know the person you are having sex with
first, always have sex in a safe, familiar place (ideally in your own home, in your
own bed). Even within the gay community, a myriad of factors, including the rise
of respectability politics - the attempts by marginalised groups to police their own
members and demonstrate the ways in which their social values and identities are
compatible with the mainstream - has led to a renunciation of some of the more
extreme or outlandish gay sexual practices, cruising included. But it is also a
fundamentally unanswerable question: why not, as opposed to why. The idea that
we can interrogate why we, as a society, would decide against something that
might bring us pleasure (provided it does not cause direct harm to anyone else)
becomes the interesting question of how we legislate and police our own sexual
and moral desires.
Thus Dean’s argument for an ethics of cruising, outlined in his fourth and final
chapter, ‘Cruising as a way of life’ resonates. In this chapter he differentiates
online cruising from its older brother, public cruising, and draws on the work of
psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche in order to advocate a positive ethics of the practice,
one that ‘far from being ethically irresponsible, may be ethically
exemplary.’5Although, strictly speaking, cruising can be practiced by anyone,
5
Tim Dean, Unlimited Intimacy, p. 176
6
straight or gay, it is impossible to separate from its roots as a uniquely queer
pursuit that experiences a complicated relationship with law enforcement and
heteronormative society at large. When gay men were prohibited by law from
seeking out sexual relationships within their own homes, they turned to the streets
and other public places to fulfil these relationships in more casual ways with
strangers. Cruising has always been then, a space for exploration and connection
across categories like race, class and gender.
For many decades, the sexual practices of the gay community have been declared
morally ‘wrong’ and the practice of cruising and public sex seen as an example of
the moral and spiritual decline of Western society. It was only in 1973 that
homosexuality was officially delisted from the classification of mental disorders in
the United States.6 Meanwhile, sting operations to ‘catch’ gay men in the act of
public sex continue in countries around the world today. The spread of AIDS in the
1980s and 90s - or Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (GRID) as the disease was
originally called - helped to fuel the hysteria surrounding the inherent danger of
gay sex and sexual practices. The gay community has for so long been used as a
warning to the heterosexual community, particularly at the height of the AIDS
6
Jack Drescher, ‘Out of DSM: Depathologizing Homosexuality,’ Behavioursal Sciences,
(December 2015) <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4695779/> [Accesssed
online January 2 2018]
7
crisis and its aftermath, that I am interested in how the reverse of this might look.
What can the straight community learn from the way gay men engage in and fulfil
their sexual desires? I agree with Dean’s interpretation that cruising exemplifies a
‘distinctive ethic of openness to alterity’7 and that ‘we all, gay or non-gay have
something to learn from this relational ethic.’8 In the post-9/11, post-Trump world
in which we live, an understanding of and relationship with strangers and
strangeness is more important than ever.
What is cruising?
It may be useful to begin by clarifying a definition of ‘cruising’. Cruising, in
simple terms, can be defined as the act of walking or driving around a locality in
search of a sexual partner or partners. It can also be used when technology is used
to facilitate such a meeting, for example, through the use of internet chatrooms or
dating apps - so-called ‘online cruising’, although the differences between online
cruising and traditional street cruising are stark. The Encyclopedia of Sex and
Gender refers to cruising as ‘the act - and the art - of soliciting a type of sexual
7
8
8
activity that is anonymous, impersonal and often promiscuous’9. The focus here on
cruising as an art-form is particularly relevant. Gay men have an art-form of their
own and it must be learned. In this way, it is not unlike a language. Hal Fischer in
his photo-series Gay Semiotics, a playful photo essay of cruising culture in 1977
gayborhood Haight Ashbury in San Francisco, stresses the importance of visual
cruising codes - for example, the bandana strategically placed in a backpocket.
Years later in 2009, as part of the Victoria & Albert Museum’s ‘Making A Scene’,
Brian Lobel launched his interactive one-on-one performance series Cruising for
Art, where audience members were handed a bandana and encouraged to ‘cruise’
the performance space. In preparation for attending the performance, Lobel lists a
series of ‘Rules for Cruising’ on his website. The number one rule? ‘Cruise with
your eyes, not with your voice’10.
Turner echoes this when he writes of cruising as, ‘the moment of visual exchange
that occurs on the streets and in other places in the city, which constitutes an act of
mutual recognition amid the otherwise alienating effects of an anonymous crowd.11
In this definition, the sexual activity which we have come to associate with
9
Encylopedia of Sex and Gender, (Thomson Gale, 2007)
<https://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-
maps/cruising> [Accessed online February 2 2017]
10
Brian Lobel, Rules of Cruising, <https://www.blobelwarming.com/cruising/#/about-2>
[Accessed online March 15 2018]
11
Mark Turner, Backwards Glances, p.10
9
cruising is not present – equally, if not more important, is the non-verbal contact
that is made and the shared acknowledgement of desire for contact. And of course,
the city-space features prominently. Whether or not the encounter leads to physical
contact is secondary to the fleeting moment of recognition between the two men on
the street. For the purpose of this dissertation, when I refer to cruising, I too am
defining it as a moment of visual exchange and desire for contact between two men
on the streets, where the potential of sexual contact hangs in the air but ultimately
is not always realised.
The remainder of this dissertation is formatted into four chapters. In the first
chapter, I discuss the cultural history of cruising, focusing on cruising as a key
component of cross-class contact in twentieth century American cities and the
representational problems it created. Drawing on the work of sociologists and
theorists Jacobs and Delaney, I look at how the development and expansion of
urban cities created spaces where cruising flourished and the ways in which
cruising scrambled categories such as class and race, allowing for connections
across those categories. The second chapter focuses on Holleran’s Dancer from the
Dance and the importance of public cruising to the creation of gay male identity
and sexual subjectivities in the late 1970s, while the third concentrates on Garth
Greenwell’s 2016 novel What Belongs To You and discusses the text in relation to
10
the re-emergence of the cruising novel. Lastly, in my final chapter, I consider what
it means to cruise in the 21st century - how has the landscape of cruising changed
in the last forty years? And what does the future hold for cruising and the cruising
novel?
11
Chapter 1: A brief history of cruising
I would like to begin with an attempt to locate my contemporary analysis of
cruising literature within the wider historical perspective of cruising as a practice.
This is useful in order to identify the rich culture and tradition in which both
Holleran and Greenwell are drawing from and building on. In doing so, I will
highlight the caveat offered by modern scholars of cruising - namely, like any
illicit practice of the marginalised, its history will always remain to, to some
extent, transitory and ephemeral.12 It is a history that is often fragmented and rarely
recorded, at least not through what we might consider ‘traditional’ methods.
Cruising is a distinctly visual practice, sometimes accompanied by a verbal one,
and thus like many oral and visual histories, is prone to becoming lost or altered in
the shifting passage of time. Literature and art on gay cruising exist and have
become increasingly mainstream in recent years,13 but they serve to capture only a
fleeting moment in time. A comprehensive history of gay cruising may be
12
Mark Turner, Backwards Glances: Cruising the queer streets of New York and London,
(Reaktion Books Limited, 2004), p.10
13
Steven W Thrasher, ‘Out from the shadows: why cruising had a cultural moment in 2016’, The
Guardian Online, (December 2016), https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/dec/29/cruising-
gay-culture-2016 [Accessed 28 January 2017]
12
impossible to write, but its relationship to other key concepts, figures and ideas in
modernity has been explored by other scholars of the twentieth century.
Firstly, the rise of cruising is inextricably linked to the rise of the modern city;
cruising’s complex relationship to the growth of sprawling, industrialised Western
cities of the late 19th-century is well-documented. This is not to say that cruising
did not exist in the streets before this period of time; on the contrary, for as long as
there have been urban spaces where residents are able to congregate, there have
been men seeking contact with other men. ‘Where there is public space, there will
be diverse appropriations of it, and so it should be,’14 says Turner in a 2006
Guardian article. And not just by men – although my dissertation deals primarily
with men – but by women too, as well as those with other gender identities.
Analysis of the existence of lesbian cruising is more limited but there is no doubt
that lesbian and bisexual women cruised the streets of their cities, though perhaps
not with the same frequency as men. Turner touches on women cruising in 1950s
New York although ultimately decides that women’s cruising is ‘its own important
and distinct story.’15 In a chapter titled ‘The Death and Life of Public Space in the
“Private city”’, Stein depicts a compelling account of Rittenhouse Park in
14
Mark Turner, ‘Welcome to the cruising capital of the world’, The Guardian Online, (May
2006) <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jul/30/georgemichael.popandrock> [Accessed
2nd January 2018]
15
13
Philadelphia in the 1940s, describing a ‘fantastically dynamic’ place where both
lesbian and gay men congregated to mix socially and cruise for partners.16
Nevertheless, it is the man cruising the city streets that is our most enduring
cultural image of cruising and the one that has been written about with the most
nuance and complexity.
The figure of the flâneur
Indeed, the French figure of the flâneur, (meaning ‘stroller’, ‘lounger’, ‘loafer’ or
‘saunterer’) acts as one of the key ways of understanding the relationship between
the individual, modernity and the urban city. Deriving its name from the dandy
young gentlemen who ambled, explored and loitered the streets and arcades of
19th-century Paris, the flâneur, ‘traditionally male, is a figure of pedestrian
mobility whose sensorial and mobile engagements with the urban landscape
generate distinct forms of creative practice.’17 Emerging from the imagination of
Baudelaire in his 1863 essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, the flâneur is a
16
Marc Stein, ‘The Death and Life of Public Space in the “Private city”, City of Sisterly and
Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia 1945 – 1972, (Temple University Press: 2004),
p.87
17
Jamie Coates, ‘Key Figure of Mobility: The Flaneur’, Volume25, Issue1, Special Issue: Key
Figures of Mobility, (February 2017), Abstract
14
‘passionate spectator’18 who ambles around the city, observing the kaleidoscope of
buildings, people and places, taking indescribable pleasure in establishing ‘his
dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the
infinite.’19 Despite being modelled after a real person, Monsieur C.G., the flâneur
is firmly a labor of imagination, a timeless man of leisure and connoisseur of the
street. The flâneur’s aim is to achieve a level of transcendence, to seek out
‘l’éternel du transitoire’ (‘the eternal from the transitory’) and to see the ‘poétique
dans l’historique’(‘the poetic in the historic’).
In the early twentieth century, other scholars found Baudelaire’s critical and
aesthetic observations regarding the flâneur helped open up space for a critical
discussion of the phenomenon of modernity. Sociologist Georg Simmel in his 1903
essay, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, attempts to codify the impact of big city
urban living on the human psyche and the psychological defence mechanisms
employed by the individual to cope with his or her own ontological insecurity - the
overwhelming, inescapable desire to ‘preserve the autonomy and individuality of
his existance in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of
18
Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, (1863)
<https://www.writing.upenn.edu/library/Baudelaire_Painter-of-Modern-Life_1863.pdf>
[Accessed online April 2 2018]
19
Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, p.4
15
external culture, and of the technique of life.’20 However, it was Walter Benjamin
who brought Baudelaire’s strolling figure into the Academy by linking him to the
impact of modernisation on the individual. In his lengthy, but unfinished work The
Arcades Project, Benjamin uses the flâneur as a starting point for his Marxist
exploration into the effects of the Industrial Revolution and the sense of alienation
experienced by the individual in the face of an ever-changing, impersonal city.21
By the time Benjamin began writing in 1927, the arcades of Paris were long past
their prime, but this was of no consequence to Benjamin, who viewed modernity as
essentially transient. In this sense, the flâneur is a traveller in space, but also
through time. Even as he cruises the urban streets, the cornerstone of modernity, he
is always looking back to a distant and glorious past.
The importance of contact: Jacobs and Delaney
I would like now to think specifically about the contexts in which both Holleran
and Greenwell are writing and, more specifically, about cruising and the city-space
in the latter half of twentieth century America. On this topic, the work of two
theorists is particularly relevant - Jane Jacobs and Samuel Delaney. On the face of
20
Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, Classic Essays and the Culture of Cities
(Prentice Hall: New York, 1969), p.47
21
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999)
16
it, the two writers appear an unlikely pairing. Jacobs was a straight, Columbia-
educated, white woman born into a Protestant family in Toronto, who later moved
to New York during the Depression before settling in Manhattan’s Greenwich
Village. Meanwhile, Samuel Delaney was an openly gay, African-American New
Yorker from Harlem who dropped out of college at the age of nineteen. Both are
writers, though at first glance, their works appear dissimilar - Jacobs wrote
predominantly non-fiction, working as a reporter and freelance journalist, and later
academic, focusing on urban planning and sociology. Meanwhile, Delaney’s work
is firmly located in the realm of fiction, his science fiction novels touching on a
wide range of themes including memory, language, sexuality, and mythology.
However, both writers shared a mutual vision for the importance of contact in big
city living.
In 1961, Jane Jacobs published her influential work The Death and Life of Great
American Cities, which she describes in her opening line as ‘an attack on current
city planning and rebuilding.’22 The chief assertion of her book is that cities are
fundamentally different from suburbs, and large cities fundamentally different
from small ones. Additionally, most of what we consider to be ‘ideal’ urban
planning - the redevelopment of central areas, low density suburbs and the division
22
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, (New York: Random House,
1961), p.3
17
of use in public spaces - is not only wrong, but actively harmful to the dynamic
life-force driving great cities. To make her case, Jacobs delves deep into an
analysis of the day-to-day street life in various American cities and
neighbourhoods, contrasting this analysis with contemporary 1950s thought on
urban planning, before finally ending with a selection of specific recommendations
for how the government can help protect and regenerate American cities. Many of
these recommendations directly contradict what urban planning authorities claim
are desirable. Instead, her recommendations centre around encouraging dense
concentrations of people, promoting mixed-income housing and championing
diverse uses of public space. In doing so, Jacobs’ makes a persuasive case for
urban planners to consider the importance of contact. This, she argues, is the key to
a city bursting with exuberance, vitality and diversity.
Delaney agrees with her; in fact, what both writers had common was a shared
interest in the preservation of diverse neighbourhoods that promote inter-class
contact and an appreciation for how contact was vital to the lifeblood of great
cities. In her chapter, ‘The Uses of Sidewalks: Contact’, Jacobs asserts that the
‘point of sidewalks is precisely that they are public’23 because they ‘bring together
people who do not know each other in an intimate, private social fashion and in
23
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, p.55
18
most cases do not care to know each other in that fashion.’24 This sounds very
much like Dean’s question from Unlimited Intimacy: why should strangers not be
lovers and yet remain strangers? Jacobs argues that the streets in big cities are full
of strangers from all races, classes and backgrounds, for whom a certain degree of
contact is useful or enjoyable, but ‘you do not want them in your hair.’25 For
Jacobs, a certain level of casual contact between people in the street or within your
neighbourhood cannot be underestimated - it is what helps create a sense of
community, a sense of public identity and above all, a ‘web of public respect and
trust.’26
Delaney draws upon this notion of contact that Jacobs espouses, and takes it a step
further in order to apply it to cruising. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
comprises two essays ‘of different focal length, along different trajectories and at
different intensities.’27 The first, written in October 1996, is a personal recollection
of the many men Delaney met over the years while cruising in 42nd Street porn
theatres. In particular, Delaney focuses on Ben, the friendly neighbourhood shoe-
shine, who calls out to the women who pass by his stand with a mixture of
24
25
26
27
Samuel Delaney, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, (New York: New York University
Press, 1999), p.xi
19
‘harassment and protestations of admiration.’28 He strings together a series of
anecdotes collected ‘over thousands of visits29’ which provide a vivid cross-section
of men who cruise – from almost every occupation, race, age and class background
imaginable. In the second, more theoretical essay ‘Three, Two, One...Contact’,
Delaney rails against the gentrification of Times Square by developers and argues
that gentrification only serves to further fuel class war between marginalised
groups and their richer counterparts. He then proceeds to expand on the differences
between what he terms ‘networking’ and ‘contact’. While networking tends to
occur between people of the same social stratification, contact crosses class
boundaries and is thus politically desirable because it destabilises and potentially
disrupts class hierarchies.30 A high level of cross-class contact with strangers, then,
is what makes a great city function effectively. It is what draws individuals to big-
city living and it is what helps sustain them. Without a healthy degree of contact,
the essential and defining characteristic of urban living is lost.
In Great American Cities, Jacobs points out the paradoxical fact of the presence of
strangers actually increasing safety, giving the example of the White Horse tavern
on the street where she lives, where the comings and goings of patrons to the bar
28
Samuel Delaney, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, p.5
29
30
Tim Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking, (University of
Chicago Press, 2014), p.187
20
throughout the day and night make it a street ‘always safe to come home
to.’31.Jacobs’ example is illuminating because it disputes accepted wisdom
regarding the risk posed by strangers. Building on this, Delaney too is invested in
challenging the prevailing discourse around the notion of ‘safety’:
As, in the name of “safety,” society dismantles the various institutions that
promote interclass communication, attempts to critique the way such
institutions functioned in the past to promote their happier sides are often
seen as, at best, nostalgia for an outmoded past and, at worst, a pernicious
glorification of everything dangerous: unsafe sex, neighborhoods filled with
undesirables (read “unsafe characters”), promiscuity, an attack on the family
and the stable social structure, and dangerous, noncommitted, “unsafe”
relationships—that is, psychologically “dangerous” relations, though that
danger is rarely specified in any way other than to suggest its failure to
conform to the ideal bourgeois marriage.32
Delaney neatly extends this argument to cruising spaces, arguing that the existence
of places for public sex such as bars, bathhouses, parks and toilets are necessary
31
32
21
for a ‘relaxed and friendly sexual atmosphere in a democratic metropolis.’33
Indeed, Delaney remarks that ‘public sex situations are not Dionysian and
uncontrolled but are rather some of the most highly socialized and
conventionalized behaviour human beings can take part in.’34 Delaney argues that
when the opportunity for sex in public places decreases, contact as a whole
decreases as people are often wary of conducting sexual relationships with
strangers in their own home. Society becomes less open, less tolerant and less
diverse.
Tim Dean explores this further in his work Unlimited Intimacy but takes it a step
further to include not just cruising in this positive relational ethic, but bare-backing
as well. Although there has been an attempt to reclaim cruising from the margins
of sexual activity, the same cannot be said to be true of bare-backing – the practice
of unprotected anal sex. Indeed, many gay men are hypervigilant about the use of
condoms and safe sex, more so than their straight counterparts, particularly when
the shadow of the AIDS crisis looms in not-so-distant memory. Yet Unlimited
Intimacy attempts to do precisely this, by examining some of the positive benefits
of the practice and aspects of the community, without relying exclusively on a
pathology-based understanding of bare-backing. By suspending moral judgement,
33
34
22
Dean is able to present a revealing ethnography of the cruising subculture – its
‘identities, rituals and iconography.’35
While barebacking and cruising do not necessarily go hand-in-hand (one can, of
course, practice safe sex while cruising), Dean sees the two practices as
intrinsically related in that they exemplify a ‘relation to alterity’36, relying on both
a ‘critique of safety’37 and an ‘embrace of risk.’38 The latter points seem somewhat
negated in light of Dean’s later reliance on Jacobs’ argument about safety in
strangers – that far from increasing risk, the presence of strangers paradoxically
ensures safety in urban spaces. Nevertheless, what Dean finds to praise in the art of
cruising is how it thrives on an intimate connection with strangers (possibly an
unlimited intimacy) without necessarily downplaying the stranger’s strangeness.39
How does this relate to the novels I examine in this dissertation? Firstly, both
writers have openly admitted that they engage in the art of cruising in their
personal lives; Greenwell even declares that he ‘came of age as a gay man in
35
Tim Dean, Unlimited Intimacy, p.104
36
37
38
39
23
bathrooms and parks in Kentucky.’40 He makes no secret of his fascination for the
art of cruising and his desire to see it represented in literature with richness and
nuance. Through his numerous essays and interviews on the topic, as well as his
novel and related short stories, Greenwell has helped contribute to a contemporary
re-imagining of cruising as an essentially poetic endeavour. In an essay for
Buzzfeed in April 2016, he expands on his decision to make cruising central to his
debut novel. He explains that cruising made him a poet, but also that cruising itself
is a kind of poetry; that the two things serve as metaphors for one another:
Cruising carves out intimacies in public space in the same way poetry carves
out intimacies in public discourse; and cruising is also itself a kind of
discourse, with codes that have to be secret in plain sight, legible to those in
the know but able to pass beneath general notice, like one of Wyatt’s
sonnets. Both poetry and cruising have a structure that is essentially
epiphanic, offering the sudden, often ecstatic revelation of a meaning that
emerges from the inchoate stuff of quotidian life. As poetry declares a
system of value incomprehensible to the world of Yeats’ “bankers,
schoolmasters, and clergymen,” a value different from that of commerce and
40
Drew Nellins Smith, ‘Q&A: Garth Greenwell on writing sex in his novel 'What Belongs to
You' and the queer literary tradition’, (January 19 2016),
<http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-garth-greenwell-sex-what-belongs-to-you-
20160112-story.html> [Accessed online February 26 2017]
24
instrumental usefulness, so cruising depends on an idea of the value of
human interactions shorn of the usual institutions that mark that value.41
This paean to cruising is poetic in and of itself. Greenwell writes with moving
intensity about the private, secret pleasures of both cruising and poetry, drawing
parallels between the two as being set apart from commercial, utilitarian systems
and belonging to an underground lifeworld with its own hidden codes and meaning
- only accessible to those ‘in the know’. He also makes the point that cruising
exists outside the usual institutions that mark value, similar to Dean’s argument
that cruising has plenty to tell us about our openness to alterity. Despite being born
decades apart (Greenwell was just one year old when Dancer from the Dance was
first published), both writers appear to share the same literary influences - in this
passage, Greenwell quotes Yeats’ ‘Adam’s Curse’, while the title of Holleran’s
taken from the last lines of Yeats’ poem ‘Among School Children’.
Secondly, both novelists write about cruising with a complexity and nuance that
has historically been absent from other contemporary representations of cruising.
While Holleran has not been quite as forthcoming about his own personal
41
Garth Greenwell, ‘How I Fell In Love With The Beautiful Art of Cruising, Buzzfeed Online,
(April 4 2016), <https://www.buzzfeed.com/garthgreenwell/how-i-fell-in-love-with-the-
beautiful-art-of-cruising?utm_term=.ofEmNMeKe#.gy3Oopele> [Accessed online 21 August
2018]
25
experiences with cruising (possibly due to the fact that when he came of age,
sexual relationships between men were still illegal), he has chosen to make
cruising a key part of his protagonists’ life in Dancer from the Dance - both
Malone and Sutherland regularly cruise the city looking for conquests. And not just
his protagonists’, but also other, lesser characters, who help make up this elegy to
1970s New York. Greenwell, of course, opens his novel with a startling scene of
cruising, and it this act that leads to his narrator’s obsession with young rent-boy
Mitko. The key characters in both Greenwell and Holleran’s novels, then,
exemplify the kind of openness to alterity that Dean praises.
Lastly, both novels recognise the importance of the urban space to the pursuit of
cruising. Both Malone and the unnamed narrator of What Belongs To You connect
and fall in love with other men, but they also connect and fall in love with the
urban cities they live in. The events that take place in both novels could never
happen outside of a big city - it is only within the context of an isolating urban
existence and the anonymity offered by other strangers that this kind of contact
with other men can take place. Cities act as spaces for bodies and people to collide,
but also as a hotbed for revolutionary action, which is why they have always
served as a ‘home away from home’ for marginalised groups seeking to recruit,
organise and revolt. By the summer of 1969, the Stonewall Riots had cemented
26
New York as the focal point of the struggle for gay liberation and a decade of
flourishing gay art, literature and activism was about to emerge.
Chapter 2: Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance
In the winter of 1978, after having spent the last seven years immersed in New
York’s gay scene, Eric Garber returned to his parents’ home in a small Florida
town with the sole mission of finishing a novel once and for all. His time living in
New York had been characterised by a desire for sexual contact - in 1971, after
having attended both the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and University of Pennsylvania
Law School (dropping out of the latter halfway through), Garber had decided to
move to New York for all the city had to offer: ‘It was basically because there
were more men, more bars, more baths — it was sex.’42 Garber’s world had
expanded considerably since moving to the big city, but he had spent the years
flitting between a variety of part-time roles - at a catering company, as a typist in
Manhattan, serving canapés at art gallery openings - all the while trying to write
42
Mike Mischke, ‘How Dancer From The Dance Changed Queer Literature Forever’, (July 10
2018)
<https://www.them.us/story/dancer-from-the-dance-andrew-holleran> [Accessed online June 22
2018]
27
his first novel with little success. He had managed to publish only one thing so far -
a short story in The New Yorker. Finally, at the age of 35, Garber was being forced
to confront the reality that his dream of being a writer might be over before it had
even really begun. He describes the moment as ‘bleak’, but adds that it was
‘cushioned by the fact that I could go home to my parents and have a bedroom and
I could write.’43 He did so, and three months later, produced what would go on to
become his most famous work on the lives of gay men in 1970s New York -
Dancer from the Dance.
Gay fiction after Stonewall
This year we celebrate the fortieth anniversary since the publication of Dancer
from the Dance, often referred to as ‘The Gay Great Gatsby.’44 It is important not
to underestimate the impact Holleran’s novel had on a generation of young gay
men who had only recently been witness to the horrors of Stonewall. The 1960s are
commonly thought of as a period of intense political, social and economic
upheaval, but for the gay community, the struggle for social acceptance and sexual
freedom was fought in the 1970s, coinciding with the formation of ‘gay ghettos’ in
43
Mike Mischke, ‘How Dancer From The Dance Changed Queer Literature Forever’
44
Andrew Schopp, ‘The Gay Great Gatsby: Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance and the
Dismantling of Normative Cultural Frames’, Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 27:2,
(Routledge: Taylor and Francis Group, 2016)
28
Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen neighbourhoods.
Holleran’s writing, produced in the latter part of the decade, was unique,
revolutionary even, because as his friend and contemporary Edmund White asserts,
his story wasn’t ‘sad or pathological’45:
We [in Andrew’s case] recognized that our themes and settings were
glamorous material. Our approach was startling because gay themes were
supposed to be sad and pathological. The fact that our novels were
glamorous and you might want to actually do what we wrote about if you
were gay, was really unusual.46
White’s comment about the relative dearth of positive gay stories at the time
is significant. Larry Kramer’s provocatively-titled Faggots came out within a few
months of Holleran’s, but the two portrayed gay life in vastly different ways.
Holleran’s tells the story of the quintessentially good-looking mid-Western lawyer
Malone, who realises his attraction to men, quits his dull, conventional job and
decides to move to the big city in search of fun and sex, and true love. Once there,
he links up with the mysterious Sutherland, variously described as a speed addict,
45
Frank Pizzoli, ‘In Conversation with the Violet Quill’, Lambda Literary, (April 10 2013),
<http://www.lambdaliterary.org/interviews/04/10/in-conversation-with-the-violet-quill-andrew-
holleran-felice-picano-and-edmund-white/> [Accessed online July 29 2018]
46
Frank Pizzoli, ‘In Conversation with the Violet Quill’, Lambda Literary, (April 10 2013)
29
socialite and drag queen. Together, they discover the thrills and the horrors of
cruising the discotheques of New York and Fire Island. It is Fire Island, however,
that provides the pivotal backdrop for the novel, famous for being a kind of
‘Pleasure Island’ for gay men in New York. Meanwhile, Kramer’s protagonist,
Fred Lemish, is similarly looking for true love and stumbles through a series of
unsatisfying and emotionally unfulfilling sexual encounters in order to do so. The
settings of the two novels are much the same as the characters traipse through
famous gay cruising spots in 1970s New York; Kramer’s novel even ends with a
complicated weekend spent on Fire Island.
Despite the similarities between the two novels, I have chosen to focus on
Holleran’s. This is not because I necessarily agree with White that Dancer from the
Dance to be made of wholly glamorous material. In fact, in an interview with Paul
Morton in 2007, Holleran unequivocally rejects White’s statement that Dancer is
somehow intended to glamourise gay life and asserts that it was always meant as a
critical satire of 1970s gay New York:
In my mind Dancer is a critical/satiric book. It’s not a glamorization of gay
life. It was a younger person’s book so it came out with a certain element of
romanticism that has something to do with temperament and false
30
ideals...It’s criticizing something at the same time as making it so alive that
you want to be part of it.47
This young person’s romanticism, which I find lacking in Kramer’s much bleaker
and sex-negative novel, reflects the sense of possibility and joy inherent in
cruising. Dancer from the Dance is one of the first great gay cruising novels
because of the significance cruising plays in the novel and the honest yet romantic
way in which it is represented. Many gay men have spoken about the pivotal role
Holleran’s novel played in helping them feel connected to, and in some cases,
proud of their gay identity. It achieved cult status amongst the gay community
(becoming ‘required reading for gays’48) because of how closely connected it was
to ‘a certain place at a certain time’49 - the act of public cruising is a key part of
this zeitgeist. In this chapter, I will focus on how cruising is figured throughout the
novel as being an principal component of the identity of the novel’s protagonist,
Malone. Cruising leads to self-discovery in Dancer from the Dance and is featured
as being central to Malone’s acceptance of his sexuality. It is also true of secondary
character, Sutherland, an extravagant queen who takes Malone under his wing and
47
Paul Morton, ‘An Interview with Andrew Holleran’, (March 2007),
<https://www.bookslut.com/features/2007_03_010776.php> [Accessed online January 26 2018]
48
David Lewis, ‘Dancer from the Dance - Required Reading for Gays’, Medium Online, (1
September 2015), <https://medium.com/@dwlewis/dancer-from-the-dance-required-reading-for-
gays-e6e9f231c5> [Accessed online June 21st 2018]
49
Roman Trusnik, ‘Dreams of a Past Gone: Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance
Revisited’, Cult Fiction and Cult Film: Multiple Perspectives, (Palacky University, 2008)
31
shepherds him from party to party, and who also spends an extraordinary amount
of time cruising for sex in public bathrooms.
In both characters, it is possible to draw parallels with Holleran himself -
handsome, well-educated Malone, grappling with his newfound sexuality against
the constraints of his bourgeois upbringing echoes Garber’s own journey. The
young Malone spent the first fifteen years of his life in the warmer tropical climes
of Ceylon; the young Garber lived most of his childhood in Aruba. Malone attends
boarding school in New England, followed by Yale and then law school. Garber
himself attended Harvard College in the mid-1960s, before being drafted into the
US Army during the Vietnam War. He returned to attend law school for a year and
a half before discovering the gay bars of Philadelphia, abandoning his legal
aspirations and moving to New York. Up until that point, Garber had ‘done all
those things a young man was supposed to do’50 and yet, like his protagonist
Malone, had still found something lacking.
Deciding on the advice of his publisher to choose a pseudonym to protect his
retiree parents from speculation and gossip, Garber chose the name Andrew, the
name of an old school-mate and one he had always liked, and Holleran, the name
50
Holleran, Dancer from the Dance, (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001), p.58
32
of another old school-mate. To the enigmatic character of Sutherland, Holleran
also gives this much-loved first name ‘Andrew’.
What do the two Andrews have in common? They were both veterans of the New
York/Fire Island cruising scene and in various ways, both enchanted and
disillusioned by their experiences. They had both lived many different incarnations
of existence and both, of course, were in thrall to the big city:
Sutherland seemed to have been alive, like the Prime Mover, forever. He had
been a candidate for the Episcopalian priesthood, an artist, a socialite, a
dealer, a kept-boy, a publisher, a film-maker, and was now simply -
Sutherland. And yet - behind the black veil his face was still as innocent and
wonder-struck as it was the day he arrived in New York.51
This sense of innocence and wonder permeates the novel and the experiences of
Malone as he discovers for the first time the pleasures available to him as a gay
man in the big city, where he becomes a ‘professional faggot.’52 In both Sutherland
and Malone, there are echoes of that curious literary ancestor, Jay Gatsby, whose
naivete and optimism lies similarly obscured by the black veil of his enigmatic
51
Holleran, Dancer from the Dance, p. 49
52
Holleran, Dancer from the Dance, p.228
33
personality. The comparison between Malone and Gatsby has been noted by
scholars such as Michael Schwartz who write that ‘Malone is gay romanticism, a
gay Gatsby, who now believes in love as he once believed in Christ.’53 Edmund
White, Holleran’s friend and contemporary, repeatedly emphasises the link
between Dancer and Fitzgerald’s classic novel by noting that Fitzgerald was one of
Holleran’s ‘favourite writers’ and that ‘Dancer from the Dance accomplished for
the 1970s what The Great Gatsby achieved for the 1920s.… the glamorization of a
decade and a culture.’54
Yet while The Great Gatsby remains firmly in the realms of fiction, part of Dancer
from the Dance’s enduring legacy is its significance as a historical document of the
time- an era which Holleran refers to as the ‘Age of Promiscuity’ and a golden era
for the gay party scene. The references to real-life events and places are supported
by people who were there at the time and by Holleran’s assertion that he was
writing about real places he had been and real people that he knew - from the
campy letters that make up the opening of the novel to the wide-eyed boys
wandering the parks at night:
53
Michael Schwartz, ‘David Leavitt’s Inner Child’, The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review 2.1,
(Harvard Gay and Lesbian Caucus, 1995)
54
Andrew Schopp, ‘The Gay Great Gatsby: Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance and the
Dismantling of Normative Cultural Frames’, Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 27:2,
(Routledge: Taylor and Francis Group, 2016), p.154
34
It wasn’t until I wrote about gay life that suddenly I had material: things I
felt, and things that I had thought about, and things I had observed...What
happened to me was coming out in New York and being gay, really in
retrospect, and that’s what Dancer was all about.55
Holleran writes with reverence about the all-night partying on the Twelfth Floor,
copious taking of drugs with names like Angel Dust, sex on the starlit beaches. The
bodies of the young men are depicted as endlessly muscular and youthful, men
returning from a club at dawn is likened to ‘athletes coming from a game, [like]
youths coming home from school.’56 Yet all the time the ‘black veil’ remains, an
unspeakable but malevolent presence.
Malone has always been a spiritual inhabitant of the city, even while growing up in
small town, and he chooses to migrate to the big city at the first opportunity. Long
before he has come to accept the reality that he is gay, Malone is drawn to the
anonymity offered by the big city and spends his time cruising its streets, although
at this point, he does not yet know what he is cruising for. While still firmly in the
55
Mike Mischke, ‘How Dancer From The Dance Changed Queer Literature Forever’, (July 10
2018), <https://www.them.us/story/dancer-from-the-dance-andrew-holleran> [Accessed online
June 10 2017]
56
35
closet, Malone releases some of his tension by cycling, walking and driving
around, often aimlessly. His anxiety about his sexuality translates into anxiety
about the city-scape - ‘architecture he anxiously judged. It mediocrity, the absence
of beautiful avenues, lovely squares, pained him. He lay awake nights replanning
the city.’57 His desire to ‘replan’ the city can be read as a desire to ‘replan’ himself
or the parts of himself he feels are lacking. Before he begins cruising, the city’s
lack of structure alarms and terrifies him; he drives along the freeways late at night
and feels ‘sure he was in hell.’58 This hellish intensity is not limited to the city, but
also transposed onto the entire world which, ‘like the city, seemed an
unmanageable mess, filled with squawling, venal babies.’59 Nevertheless, he
broods about the fact he is not yet married and resents the time spent with married
colleagues. He falls in love with a young gardener named Michael, although
nothing ever transpires between them. When Michael leaves to go away for
college, Malone is gripped by an overwhelming sadness, though he cannot
articulate to himself just yet the root of his despair.
His instinctive solution to this despair is cruising. That very night, Malone slips out
of bed, goes downstairs and drives off in his car - ‘where he did not know. He just
57
58
59
36
drove.’60 Even before he has accepted the reality that he is gay, before he has
admitted the truth, even to himself, the desire to lose himself in the streets of the
city is instinctive. Where in the previous paragraph he is described as lying on his
bed, almost dead, ‘like the effigy on an Etruscan tomb’61, here he is brought back
to life and propelled forward by the desire for sexual release that cruising offers
him:
He drove around that wilderness of gas stations and fast-food franchises that
surrounds Washington as once the armies of the Confederacy had, drove
around in that crimson glow of doughnut shops and new-car showrooms, in
which all things, cars, faces, bodies, gleam with an otherwordly light, and he
kept driving - never admitting what he was about - until he came to Dupont
Circle and there he stopped and got out under the green trees and met a man
and went into the park and blew him.62
For Malone, like many young gay men before him, cruising initially functions as a
coping mechanism. There is nothing particularly poetic about this first sexual act
Malone engages in, although the build-up to it and the city itself is described
60
61
62
37
poetically - the ‘wilderness of gas stations and fast-food franchises’; the doughnut
shops and new-car showrooms emit a ‘crimson glow’. There is the link to a
violent, distant past with the mention of the Confederacy armies, but mostly it is a
sense of possibility that is aroused in Malone through his journey through the
streets. As he drove cars, faces and bodies seem to jump out at him and ‘gleam
with an otherwordly light’. Malone is transported out of the reality of the
Washington’s bleak outskirts and into another world through the sense of
possibility cruising offers him. He describes the sensation as being ‘both trancelike
and sharply conscious; as if another being had momentarily occupied the physical
shell that was Malone.’63 Cruising is a way for Malone to exist both within and
outside himself.
Cruising and the formation of Malone’s identity
Cruising is thus central to the formation of Malone’s identity as a gay man. Up
until this point, Malone has never been able to give words to the emotions he is
experiencing and thus remains pent up, closeted, furious. After his first encounter
with the man in Dupont Circle, he returns to his apartment, takes a shower and then
sits up the rest of the night writing. He chooses to write a poem, but is consumed
63
38
by self-loathing, describing how his lips have been ‘soiled beyond redemption.’64
But gradually, this self-loathing paves the way for a new realisation.
“My only hope,” he wrote in his hardbound ledger, resembling the account
books of store clerks in the early part of this century, “is with those men
circling the fountain. They are my fate and if I wish to have Life, it must be
with them. What is most remarkable, I have no choice. I who have never
been constrained by poverty, disease, accident, am now constrained by this.
God’s joke. His little joke. To keep us human. To humble the proud. And I
have been so proud.”65
When Malone first accepts, then, that he is gay, he is forced to align himself with
the ‘those men circling the fountain.’66 Malone clearly perceives a ‘them’ and ‘us’
divide in his mind and up until this point, has always seen himself on the latter’s
side: the side that includes a trajectory towards marriage, children and a white-
picket house in the suburbs. This is highlighted later when Malone spends
Thanksgiving with his family and his youngest niece demands to know when he is
getting married and why he doesn’t have a car. These are the two things, Malone
64
65
66
39
notes, that constitute ‘adulthood in America.’67 But when he realises that he is gay,
Malone’s first thought is for the men cruising in public parks. For Malone, cruising
is synonymous with being gay. We are reminded, here, of the novel’s title - taken
from the final lines of one of Yeats’ finest poems, ‘Among Schoolchildren’:
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?68
The poem was inspired by the writer’s visit to a convent school in Waterford,
Ireland in 1926 and forms part of his meditation on the passing of time, human
frailty and the unity of existence. Filled with classical allusions, Yeats guides us
through his tour of the convent school, observing the schoolchildren going about
67
68
William Butler Yeats, ‘Among Schoolchildren’, English Literature: Victorians and Moderns,
(OER, 2012)
40
their daily tasks and seeing the face of his muse and lover Maude Gonne reflected
in the faces of the schoolgirls before him. He thinks of his mother and questions
whether the pain she underwent in childbirth was worth it in order to give him his
sixty years of life on Earth. Drawing on ancient Greek philosophers - Plato,
Pythagoras and Aristotle - Yeats ponders the meaning of existence, noting that all
three philosophers had their own approaches. In the final stanza, Yeats uses the
metaphor of the chestnut tree to answer his own question. Does the essence of the
tree lie in its leaves, its blossom or its bole? The answer: none of them. The
essence of the thing lies in the sum of its parts. Just as the dancer cannot be
separated from the dance, the body and the soul cannot be separated. The fullness
of existence can only be appreciated as a joint effort between mind, body and soul.
If cruising is an art-form, what art-form is it? Greenwell compares cruising to
poetry, here Holleran compares it to a dance. Unity of existence cannot happen for
Malone until he embraces his desire to cruise as part of his desire for men. The
‘brightening glance’69 which Yeats decribes is similar to the ‘moment of visual
exchange’70 that occurs when two men connect in the street or cruising spot. The
bodies ‘swaying to the music’ perfectly sums up Malone’s favourite past time in
New York - he is addicted to losing himself on the sweaty dance floors, pressing
69
William Butler Yeats, ‘Among Schoolchildren’
70
41
up another man’s body, even without a sexual element: ‘The friend you danced
with, when you had no lover, was the most important person in your life.’71 If he
wants to have ‘Life’, it must be with ‘them’72. The capitalisation of ‘Life’ here
emphasises the significance which Malone places on his sexual identity. Life, as
lived to its fullest, is one which embraces and unifies all the disparate parts of
himself - including his sexuality, including cruising.
‘Nothing really happened until such time as I identified myself as a gay man.’73
This statement by Neil Bartlett curiously captures the cultural significance of
identifying as gay. It also applies to the plot of Holleran’s novel as a whole -
nothing really happens in the novel until Malone identifies himself as a gay man.
And the way that Malone identifies himself as gay is through cruising. It is
significant that before Malone puts pen to paper to write his poem; before he says
the words ‘I’m gay’ aloud to himself or anyone else; the anonymous sexual
encounter he has with the man in Dupont Circle confirms his sexuality in a way no
other act can. Indeed, Dancer from the Dance in general has a relatively limited
and simple plot (Reed Woodhouse accused the novel of being ‘langurously
71
72
73
J. Bryan Lowder, ‘What Was Gay?’, The Slate, (May 12 2015),
<http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/05/can_you_be_homosexual_wit
hout_being_gay_the_future_of_cruising_drag_and.html> [Acessed online January 12 2018]
42
underplotted’74) but before Malone’s first cruising encounter, nothing really
happens at all. Even the attraction he feels for Michael is portrayed as ultimately
futile - ‘his entire love had progressed, like the growing and dying of a plant, from
indifference to love to extinction, and not one embrace, not one kiss, not one word
had been exchanged between him and his beloved’75 - until he goes cruising and is
finally able to admit his gayness.
Shortly after this encounter, Malone moves to New York and everything changes.
Although he still cruises, it is not in the same heartless way he gives a blow job to
the man in Dupont Circle. In New York, he becomes a prisoner of love:
He was a literal prisoner of love; Lying in his bed late at night, utterly
exhausted, he would rise — completely against his will — to run up to the
park on Fifteenth Street because there might be a boy standing under a tree
there looking for love; He loved everything while this erotic fever lasted…
He saw sunsets from his roof. In spring he loved the rains that left the
subway stations damp and chilly, and he stopped in the men’s rooms and
made love there.76
74
Reed Woodhouse, Unlimited Embrace: A Canon of Gay Fiction, 1945–1995 (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), p.121.
75
76
43
Malone goes from being a repressed homosexual to being a ‘prisoner of love’77.
His cruising takes on a different manifestation. Whereas before he would get in his
car and drive around, he now rises from his bed, and runs, physically runs, to the
park just on the off-chance there might be a boy waiting from him. The crudeness
with which he describes his early sexual encounter in Dupont Circle is replaced by
the naively sweet phrase ‘make love’. He is no longer looking for pure sexual
release, he is looking for love.
Then he meets Sutherland who takes a shine to him, introducing him into the
underground queer world. Sutherland is an enigmatic character, a veteran of
cruising bathrooms and parks, but he is no doubt of the city; in fact, it is impossible
to imagine him existing in a small town. ‘There is no love in this city,’ Sutherland
declares to Malone, ‘only discotheques.’78 And yet Sutherland is being
disingenuous when he claims this, as this passage about his background shows.
Sutherland is very much in love, but with the city - he takes the city inside him,
just like a lover:
77
78
44
He had fallen in love with New York City passing through it as a child, and the
distinct smell of its damp, vivid air, the sea gulls circling the masts of his ship
as it pushed up the Hudson River to its berth. He had fallen in love with the city
then, and even though it was now a different city, this residue of affection
remained, overlaid by the loves of his adolescence and manhood. At five
o’clock now… he awoke from the party of the previous night, doused his face,
and rushed downstairs to meet the handsome men coming home from work,
and have, if not sex, at least cocktails.79
The urban landscape that Holleran depicts is bleak and unforgiving, but also
contains a hazy, dreamlike quality - perfect for a novel that would come to be seen
as elegaic. This is partly the influence of Sutherland whose affection for the city is
infectious - he has loved it since he was a child, even though it has changed
immeasurably since then. After a long night of dancing, Holleran describes the
cornices of the buildings as being ‘all gold-edged’80 and personifies the ‘blood-red
sun’81, that rose and ‘perched in the fire escape of a factory building silhouetted on
the corner.’82 New York City as the ‘third character’ is the cliché of rom-com
nightmares, but in Dancer from the Dance’s case has a ring of truth. Or perhaps,
more accurately, it is simply that the importance of setting in the novel cannot be
overlooked. The idea that Holleran’s novel could take place anywhere else apart
79
80
81
82
45
from New York is impossible - and not only because the novel is intended as a
recollection of Holleran’s personal experiences in New York in the 1970s. New
York is just as vital to the novel as Malone and Sutherland, and the three of them
exist as an unbreakable triumvirate.
However, although I have argued in this chapter that cruising in parks is central to
the formation of Malone’s gay identity, and cruising in bathrooms central to the
continuing preservation of Sutherland’s, Holleran’s book ends with the recognition
that cruising is not for all gay men; that in fact, there are countless ways of ‘being
gay’ that do not involve cruising. In this haunting paragraph, from a letter by one
of unnamed observers that appear throughout the novel, the following admission is
made:
I used to say there were only seventeen homosexuals in New York and we
knew every one of the them; but there were tons of men in that city who
weren’t on the circuit, who didn’t dance, didn’t cruise, didn’t fall in love
with Malone, who stayed home, and went to the country in the summer. We
never saw them. We were addicted to something else.83
83
46
Critics describe Holleran as an elegist, ‘long before elegy became the dominant
and inevitable genre of gay fiction.’84 There is a sense that even at the time of
publication, Dancer from the Dance was a novel that was looking to the past and
attempting to memorialise; a sense in which the novel is a love-letter to a city that
no longer exists in the same way. And he was right. Just three years later, in 1981,
San Francisco resident Ken Horne died of Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS) and the CDC
would retroactively designate him the first patient of AIDS in the United States.
After that, for all intents and purposes, the golden ‘Age of Promiscuity’ was over.
Hysteria swept the United States, and indeed the rest of the world, and the carefree
days of fucking unprotected in bushes and public toilets soon came to an end. In
Holleran’s 1990 novel, aptly titled Grief, he writes, ‘I used to think that the eighties
were like a very nice dinner party with friends, except some of them were taken
out and shot while the rest of us were expected to go on eating.’85 Writers in 1980s
and 1990s produced some of the most haunting and beautiful illness narratives of
the late twentieth century but they were not cruising novels. It was only in the 21st
century that the cruising novel made a comeback - which leads us to Garth
Greenwell and What Belongs To You.
84
Alan Hollinghurst, ‘So I’m Shallow’, The New York Times
<https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/07/27/nnp/19692.html> [Accessed online February 2
2018]
85
Laura Miller, Andrew Holleran’s ‘Grief’, Salon, (July 29 2006),
<https://www.salon.com/2006/07/29/holleran/> [Accessed online June 20 2018]
47
Chapter 3: Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs To You
In the realm of gay fiction, Greenwell is a relative newcomer. His debut novel
What Belongs To You has prompted much discussion amongst critics and readers
alike, although his total body of fiction comprises just one full-length novel and
several short stories (he is also a keen reviewer and essayist.) What Belongs To
You, published in January 2016 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is a revised version
of an earlier novella entitled Mitko, depicting an American teacher’s encounter
with the eponymous Bulgarian rent-boy Mitko while cruising the streets of Sofia.
They meet in the bathrooms under the National Palace of Culture where the
narrator pays twenty leva in exchange for the briefest of sexual encounters,
although inevitably their paths cross again. The second section begins with a knock
on the door in the narrator’s classroom and goes on to chart his troubled childhood
growing up in Kentucky and his fractured relationship with his father, written over
40 anguished pages in one long unbroken paragraph. The third section returns to
Mitko and the present day, narrating the slow and painful breakdown of their
romantic and sexual entanglement. In the final pages, the writing is characterised
by a bleak and desperate sadness, startling in its intensity and raw emotion.
48
What makes What Belongs To You a ‘cruising novel’? Partly it is because the
events of the novel open with this powerfully narrated cruising encounter -
everything that happens in the novel from this point onwards, both good and bad,
depend on this singular act. This is not unlike the beginning of Dancer from the
Dance where the act of cruising acts as a springboard for the rest of the novel.
However, unlike Malone, the narrator of What Belongs To You already knows that
he is gay. In this sense, the novel is not a coming-out novel. Cruising does not act
as a catalyst for self-discovery in terms of sexuality; the narrator of Greenwell’s
novel knows and accepts that he is gay and doesn’t experience the same anguish
that Malone does over his desire to pursue men sexually.
The novel takes its title from a scene in Thomas Mann’s German novella, Death in
Venice, where Aschenbach, the main character, visits a barber who attempts to get
him to dye his hair as a way of recapturing his lost youth. The barber notes
feelingly that Aschenbach is ‘entitled to return’86 to his natural colour, before
asking: ‘Will you permit me simply to return what belongs to you?’87 Greenwell
remarks in an interview that the question struck him as being ‘redolent with so
many possible meanings, with all the longings—not just for youth, but for beauty,
86
Thomas Mann, ‘Death in Venice’, Great German Short Stories, (New York: Dover
Publications, 2003), p.53
87
Thomas Mann, ‘Death in Venice’, Great German Short Stories, p.53
49
love, a different life.’88 As the story progresses, it becomes clear that the title’s
relationship to the novel is increasingly complicated. From the opening section, we
are forced to confront the extent to which a body can be commodified or purchased
by someone else through the exchange of money; in later sections, Greenwell
addresses larger questions of identity and belonging - can the narrator truly say he
belongs to anyone or any place?89 But the barber of Mann’s novel seems to be
asking a question so similar to the questions Yeats’ ponders in ‘Among
Schoolchildren’, and by extension, Holleran in Dancer from the Dance. Both
Holleran and Greenwell, then, are writers who meditate on the loss of youth and
beauty and question the meaning of existence.
Both novels share in common an autobiographical element, particularly in relation
to their protagonists . Indeed, like Holleran and his protagonist Malone, it is often
difficult to separate the narrator of his novel from the author - Greenwell also spent
time working as a teacher in Sofia, his own childhood in the American South was
similarly troubled and his relationship with his father similarly fractured.
88
Jonathan Lee, Accessing the Ecstatic, Guernica Online, (January 13 2016),
<https://www.guernicamag.com/accessing-the-ecstatic/> [Accessed online August 21 2017]
89
Jonathan Lee, Accessing the Ecstastic, (January 13 2016)
50
I have chosen Greenwell’s debut novel What Belongs To You as representative of
post-AIDS cruising literature, partly because the novel is such a powerful paean to
gay cruising and partly because I believe the discussion Greenwell has provoked -
through his novel but also through interviews and articles he has penned - have
contributed significantly to the contemporary reimagining of cruising. Nearly forty
years exist between the publication of the two novels, and public perception
surrounding cruising has altered significantly. Gay hook-up apps make it easier to
search for a sexual partner immediately, the police (in the West at least) are no
longer quite as heavy-handed in their attempts to arrest gay men for cruising, new
legislation has made gay marriage legal and gay relationships, broadly speaking,
are accepted in society. What of writing about cruising? Greenwell himself points
out that there is a significant gap between what he calls ‘trailblazers’ like Edmund
White and Andrew Holleran, and his generation, in terms of the novels that
document gay life.90 The reason for this, Greenwell maintains, is AIDS.91
The 1980s and 1990s were, unsurprisingly, dominated by a proliferation in AIDS-
related novels, the majority of them (although not exclusively) produced by men in
90
Rich Juzwiak, ‘This Is Just a Great Sermon on the Desperate Urgency of Public Gay Identity’,
The Gawker, (3 April 2016),
<http://gawker.com/this-is-just-a-great-sermon-on-the-desperate-urgency-of-1762965937>
[Accessed online March 21 2017]
91
Rich Juzwiak, ‘This Is Just a Great Sermon on the Desperate Urgency of Public Gay Identity’,
The Gawker, (3 April 2016)
51
the gay community. Writers like Paul Monette, Michael Callen and David Feinberg
wrote extensively in the form of autobiographies, memoirs and personal essays,
partly as a way of working through what Harrington calls the ‘cultural and spiritual
dislocations’92 brought on by their illness, and partly as a way of bearing witness to
a collective trauma. During this time, representations of cruising in literature took a
backseat. Films like William Friedkin’s 1980 Cruising AIDS shone a limelight
onto the culture and practices of the gay community, bringing out of the shadows
the underground scene of cruisings bars. At the time, there was widespread
backlash to the film for fear it painted the gay community as depraved and deviant,
despite much of the film taking place on location in real leather bars, with real
members of the leather community. In response to this, and to the later AIDS
crisis, there has been a push for inclusivity characterised by the assimilation of
gayness into the mainstream; a concerted effort to neatly repackage gay culture and
iconography and make it palatable to heteronormative society.
For Greenwell, this is a shame because it forecloses much of the kind of ‘radical
potential in queer life.’93 That kind of radical potential inheres in spaces like
cruising bathrooms and parks, which Greenwell argues, ‘need to be written about
92
Anne Harrington, The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine, (New York: Norton,
2008), p.230
93
Rich Juzwiak, ‘This Is Just a Great Sermon on the Desperate Urgency of Public Gay Identity’
52
with much more nuance.’94 In parks and bathrooms, he first discovered spaces
where he could have sex with other men, places that would allow him to
experience queerness as ‘something that could be a source of joy and intimacy and
human connection.’95 Similar sentiments about cruising in public places are echoed
by other gay artists such as Dino Dinco, who decided to document cruising spot
Elysian Park through a series of photographs. Like Greenwell, he strongly
associates certain cruising spots with his childhood, describing himself as a ‘horny
queer who grew up in nature.’96 The experience of cruising, he says, is ‘poetic and
beautiful and primal.’97
The re-emergence of the cruising novel
And so we arrive in 2017, where reviews of What Belongs To You have been
nothing short of laudatory, described by Jeffrey Zuckerman of The New Republic
as ‘the great gay novel of our times.’98 Greenwell himself had seven months earlier
94
Alex Clark, ‘Cruising parks need to be written about with much more nuance’
95
Alex Clark, ‘Cruising parks need to be written about with much more nuance’
96
Hannah Harris Green, ‘How the Art of Signaling is Changing: Digital Challenges for Queer
Communities’, Medium Online, January 26th 2017 <https://howwegettonext.com/how-the-art-of-
signaling-is-changing-9d3b02551103> [Accessed online August 16 2018]
97
Hannah Harris Green, ‘How the Art of Signaling is Changing: Digital Challenges for Queer
Communities’
98
Jeffrey Zuckerman, The New Republic, ‘Beneath The Pain of Exclusion’, January 19 2016
<https://newrepublic.com/article/127952/garth-greenwell-what-belongs-you-great-gay-novel-
times> [Accessed online August 12 2017]
53
bestowed the same honour on Hanya Yanigahara’s novel A Little Life in his review
for The Atlantic, demonstrating that the search for the great gay novel continues
unabated.99 Dwight Garner for The New York Times describes the novel as
‘incadescent...an old tale made new and made punishing’.100 Most reviewers heap
praise on the novel’s startling opening section, the interaction between Mitko and
the narrator because of the rawness and intensity with which it is written. The
narrator’s blind lust for Mitko emanates from its pages and it is always difficult to
witness such sheer desperation, even from a fictional character.
Greenwell was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1978, at the very height of this
‘Age of Promiscuity’ - the era between the 1970s to mid-1980s when gay male
culture espoused the benefits of participating in a variety of sexual practices with
multiple sexual partners. Greenwell himself is unafraid to posit himself as a gay
writer, and What Belongs To You a gay novel, even as his novel’s success in
mainstream literary circles and best-seller lists suggest that there has been a shift
away from such rigid categorisation.
99
Garth Greenwell, ‘A Little Life: The Great Gay Novel Might Be Here’, The Atlantic, (May 31
2015), <https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/05/a-little-life-definitive-gay-
novel/394436/> [Accessed online August 16 2018]
100
Dwight Garner, Review: ‘What Belongs To You’, A Story of Desire and Outcomes’, The New
York Times, January 19 2016, <https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/20/books/review-what-
belongs-to-you-a-story-of-desire-and-outcomes.html> [Accessed online March 25 2018]
54
In interviews and articles, Greenwell speaks and writes extensively on cruising
culture and his own experiences in parks and bathrooms, both as a teenager while
still exploring his sexual identity, and then later, as an adult, moving from
relationship to relationship and encounter to encounter. There are moments when
Greenwell blurs the line between reality and fiction, speaking seamlessly of both
himself and his novel: ‘When I found this cruising bathroom in Bulgaria where the
novel begins, I immediately knew what it was. I barely spoke Bulgarian, but I
descended into this place, and I suddenly had a complete fluency.’101 This sense of
both alienation and familiarity is mirrored by the narrator as he struggles through
the uncertain first meeting with Mitko in a ‘pidgin of Bulgarian, English and
German.’102 Mitko and the narrator’s meeting is a prime example of Delaney’s idea
of contact in the city. The narrator, as an American teacher at an international
school, would have been unlikely to meet rent-boy Mitko in any other kind of
social setting. Greenwell appears to agree when he writes that ‘distance-based
apps, especially in dense urban centers, often offer nothing beyond a particular
neighborhood or block, canceling out much of the radical potential of cruising
zones.’
101
Troy Nankervis, ‘Author Garth Greenwell: Cruising has been in my life since I was 14’,
Attitude, (26 January 2016), <http://attitude.co.uk/author-garth-greenwell-cruising-has-been-
central-in-my-life-since-i-was-14/> [Accessed online February 26 2017]
102
Greenwell, What Belongs To You, p.5
55
Their conversation is both slow and halting, interspersed with a variety of non-
verbal gestures - smiles and handshakes and meaningful glances, along with a
‘lewd’103 gesture, the exact nature of which is left up to the reader’s imagination. It
soon becomes clear that Mitko desires payment for his services. While this should
shift the balance of power back into the narrator’s favour - Mitko is providing a
service, for which the narrator is paying a price - it ends up skewing the balance
even further:
When he returned I asked his price for the act I wanted, which was ten leva
until I unfolded my wallet and found only twenty-leva notes, one of which
he eagerly claimed. Really what did it matter, the sums were almost equally
meaningless to me; I would have paid twice as much, and twice as much
again, which isn’t to suggest that I had particularly ample resources, but that
his body seemed infinitely dear.104
Although the narrator initially rejects Mitko’s offer of money for sex ‘not out of
any moral conviction but out of pride’,105 it is clear from the start that this pride is
destined for collapse. The double meaning of the word ‘dear’ seems pertinent - the
103
104
105
56
narrator both regards Mitko’s body with a deep affection and places a price on it
that is far higher than what might seem reasonable. Some haggling over the exact
price occurs, the narrator’s evident excitement mounting with every passing
moment, until finally, with the money paid, the narrator reaches for Mitko and
finds him ready and willing, a process he describes as ‘astonishing...that any
number of soiled bills could make that body available, that after the simplest of
exchanges I could reach out and find it within my grasp.’106 It is not the act of
payment itself that fills the reader with unease, but the readiness with which the
narrator abandons his pride, his willingness to accept any price offered and the
naked helplessness of his desire. The metaphorical significance of paying for
Mitko’s body with ‘soiled bills’ suggests that the transaction is in some way
inevitably tainted. There is also the matter of what services, exactly, are being paid
for - it soon becomes clear that the narrator is the one who will be performing the
sex acts, sinking to his knees in the dirty stall to give Mitko a blowjob. He is
paying for the pleasure of providing pleasure, even as he knows that Mitko is
‘performing a desire he didn’t feel’,107 even as he recognises himself partaking in a
performance of pretending to believe Mitko’s passion is genuine. This sense of
inevitability, an involuntary and often unwilling surrender to lust, permeates the
opening chapter, even before we learn that Mitko cuts short the encounter by
106
107
57
faking an orgasm, well before he has given what the narrator believes he is owed in
exchange for the soiled bills. The chapter ends with the narrator on his stained
knees in the bathroom, continuing to fantasise about Mitko even after he has been
abandoned.
This first scene in the bathroom sets the tone for the rest of the novel. What
Belongs To You is a tale of sexual obsession, standing alongside other great tales of
sexual obsession including Nabokov’s Lolita. The narrator is helpless before his
longing for Mitko, blinded by his lust and desire. In conversation with The Paris
Review, Greenwell discusses the curious alignment between sex and desire:
I remember very clearly thinking about sex all the time when I was twelve or
thirteen and feeling an intense desire that I was pretty sure I would never be
able to act on. I remember asking myself, Will I ever be able to do any of
these things? Will I ever find anyone with whom to do these things? It really
did seem possible that the world would never accommodate my desires. And
so in that way, desire was separated from sex. And then when I did finally
have sex, I found that the world accommodated those desires in these weird
marginal spaces, where sex wasn’t exactly analogous with desire—places
like cruising bathrooms and parks—and where there can be a circulation of
58
bodies that, if it’s about desire, it’s about a kind of desire that can be
detached from specific people.108
Like Greenwell, then, the narrator of What Belongs To You can hardly believe that
the world can accommodate his desires and when he finds Mitko, he is unwilling to
let go. Greenwell draws on the setting of the bathroom, too, in What Belongs To
You - the narrator describes the sense of warning that drew him to both Mitko and
the bathrooms:
Warning, in places like the bathrooms at the National Palace of Culture…is
like some element coterminous with the air, ubiquitous and inescapable, so
that it becomes part of those who inhabit it, and thus part and parcel of the
desire that draws us there.’109
The ‘warning’ that mingles in the air in the NDK bathroom (as the Palace of
Culture is called) is both the warning of the emotional anguish and betrayal that the
narrator will experience as a result of his affair with Mitko, but also the warning of
generations of gay men before who have been caught in police raids in similar
108
Nicole Rudick, Bodies in Space: An Interview with Garth Greenwell, (January 19 2016),
<https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/01/19/bodies-in-space-an-interview-with-garth-
greenwell/> [Accessed online January 21 2017]
109
59
bathrooms. Public bathrooms have always been sites of expulsion, of violence, of
fear, but also, for gay men, sites of lust and longing. Public bathrooms are spaces
where bodies and bodily fluids inevitably collide - they are sites of necessity, but
also sites of desire.
Towards the end of the novel, bathrooms feature again when the narrator and
Mitko take a trip to McDonald’s. By this point, the narrator is aware he has
contracted syphilis from Mitko who is experiencing symptoms and unable to afford
the required medication. The conversation over the table is haltered and awkward;
the narrator wants to help Mitko get treatment, Mitko’s pride prevents him from
accepting his offer of money. They reach an impasse. The narrator escapes to the
bathroom, hoping for a moment of solitude, before hearing a knock on the door:
I had known it was he when the door opened, it never occurred to me it
could be anyone else, as it never occurred to me to tell him to stop, or
occurred with so little force it was lost in the sweep of my excitement. There
wasn’t a lock on the door, we could have been interrupted, and maybe the
risk heightened my pleasure as Mitko pressed his whole length against me,
placing his feet beside mine and leaning his torso into my spine, his breath
hot on my neck.
60
Here, again, the excitement mingles with warning as the narrator acknowledges
that the risk heightens the thrill of cruising. Throughout the novel, the scenes in
which the narrator and Mitko meet are always charged with possibility, danger and
passion. This, Greenwell says, is a feeling that is impossible to replicate through
online cruising and digital apps, because as he says, ‘swiping left…is always a
degraded response to another human person… In a bathroom or park or video
store, with the reality of other bodies around me, fucking or longing to fuck, I’m
almost never bored, I feel quick with animal alertness.’110 At the time of Holleran’s
novel, these apps had yet to be invented, but now they are part and parcel of the
gay cruising world. Greenwell works through these feelings onto his narrator, who
feels a similar repulsion for the world of digital cruising. In one memorable scene,
Mitko arrives to meet with the narrator and instead of giving his full attention to
the narrator, uses his laptop to look up pictures of his ex-boyfriends on various
dating websites. There proceeds an exchange between them, where the narrator
becomes increasingly jealous and possessive – when Mitko shows him a video
from one of his favourite French singers, which he and his ex-boyfriend had also
loved, the narrator is at first ‘moved by the thought that he was granting me access
to a private history, and so to the intimacy I longed for with him, and that this
110
Greenwell, ‘How I Fell In Love With The Beautiful Art of Cruising, Buzzfeed Online, (April
4 2016)
61
music, so connected to his past, might allow that intimacy passage across our two
languages.’111 But this doesn’t happen, and instead the narrator becomes
increasingly alert to the fact that his time with Mitko is essentially a ‘transaction’112
and that he is being lured into a sense of sentimentality that is entirely
inappropriate to the exchange. The narrator wants to forget that he is paying for
Mitko; he wants to believe that Mitko belongs to him; Mitko’s use of Bulgarian
dating apps and Skype to chat and arrange dates with other men is a constant
reminder of the essentially transactional nature of their relationship. The
introduction of technology into their relationship, even when it attempts to bridge
the gap between them, only serves to drive them further apart.
111
112
62
Chapter 4: The future of the cruising novel
Long before I began writing this dissertation, the world of gay cruising had already
changed irrevocably by the rise of digital apps like Grindr, Scruff and Hornet,
which make connecting with a new sexual partner as easy as swiping right on a
screen. There is concern from some quarters that the current generation of gay men
have lost the ability to ‘read’ cruising signals because they no longer have to rely
on visual codes and clues when seeking a sexual partner. James Norman in a 2015
Guardian article discusses the proliferation of gay apps in Melbourne and ends by
saying: ‘I worry that under the addictive neon glow cast by flickering pixel of
bodies in dating apps we have inadvertently sacrificed some of the edgier aspects
of our culture to be replaced by the curse of being alone with our phones, chasing
superficial titillation.’113 What lies at the heart of this concern is that an essential
part of gay culture is being lost. Even before the rise of mobile apps, websites like
cruisingforsex.com, launched in 1995 by Bob Sienwickinz, have eroded and
remade the queer public landscape in real time.114 These apps and websites have
made the availability of men searching for sexual partners far easier and more
113
James Norman, ‘Goodbye to all the gay bars. Are dating apps killing queer culture?’ The
Guardian Online, (15 July 2015),
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/15/goodbye-to-all-the-gay-bars-are-
dating-apps-killing-queer-culture> [Accessed online January 4 2018]
114
Hannah Harris Green, ‘How the Art of Signaling is Changing’, (January 26 2017)
<https://howwegettonext.com/how-the-art-of-signaling-is-changing-9d3b02551103> [Accessed
online August 22 2018]
63
transparent - key information like height, weight, hair colour, body type and even
HIV status can be shared, simplifying the entire hook-up process. In Los Angeles,
they have also resulted in a significant decrease in the amount of sting operations
launched by police to catch gay men cruising for sex in public places.115 This does
not mean that public cruising is now in any way completely ‘safe’ - having sex in
public places, while not strictly illegal in the UK, is still fraught with
complications. Any type of sex that might ‘outrage public decency’116 is still
prohibited, although police are increasingly taking a ‘softly-softly’ approach, only
intervening when there are direct complaints from bystanders.117 However, for gay
men, the dangers of engaging in public sex are not limited to fear of police
intervention. The ever-present possibility of homophobic violence or sexual
assault, contracting unwanted sexually-transmitted diseases, and the chance that
the encounter may lead to public exposure all exist when gay men set out to cruise
for sex.
Despite this, it appears that cruising as a practice is still alive and well. Although
official statistics are difficult to come by, anecdotally it seems the practice is still
flourishing amongst younger members of the gay community. There exist a large
115
Hannah Harris Green, ‘How the Art of Signaling is Changing’, (January 26 2017)
116
In Brief, Outraging Public Decency, <https://www.inbrief.co.uk/offences/outraging-public-
decency/> [Accessed online August 22 2018]
117
Julie Bindel, The Tricky Business of Policing Sex in Public, BBC Online, (16 September
2014), <https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29205198> [Accessed online August 22 2018]
64
number of websites dedicated to helping young gay men cruise safely, giving them
information on the most popular times and areas. A quick tour of a number of
famous cruising spots in London reveal large numbers of men, both young and old,
loitering watchfully before disappearing into the bushes, either alone or with a
partner.
It is heartening, therefore, to see that art and literature about cruising is
increasingly coming out of the shadows after lying low in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
Greenwell is one of the trailblazers in this respect, but plenty of other writers are
also tackling the topic. Meanwhile, it’s not just novelists that are making cruising
the subject of their art – multimedia artist John Walter created ‘Alien Sex Club’, a
‘large-scale installation based on the shapes of cruise mazes, found in sex clubs
and gay saunas’118, during 2015 Pride in London. Later that same year, British
Asian artist Prem Sahib launched Side On, which brought the ‘gay underground to
the public institution’119, with work that references cruising spots such as
bathhouses, saunas and public urinals. Meanwhile, in New York, at party to
commemorate 2016’s Pride parade, New York-based queer Black artist Jacolby
118
Stephen W Thrasher, ‘Out from the shadows: why cruising had a cultural moment in 2016’,
The Guardian Online, (29 December 2016)
<https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/dec/29/cruising-gay-culture-2016> [Accessed
119
Stuart Brumfitt, gay cruising meets minimalism in prem sahib’s ica show, i-D, (24 September
2015) <https://i-d.vice.com/en_uk/article/mbv89a/gay-cruising-meets-minimalism-in-prem-
sahibs-ica-show> [Accessed online August 21 2018]
65
Satterwhite created an immersive art installation – styling visitors in Helmut Lang
leatherware and placing them in front of a green screen, where they were then
superimposed into a scene from Central Park in the 1980s. This kind of nostalgia
for the primal and visceral experience of cruising for sex outdoors is made all the
more ironic because the installation took place at a party thrown by digital app,
Grindr. As Satterwhite explains, ‘Compositing real human beings in a digital forest
space that is referencing pre-digital cruising for an app that mediates real hookup
encounters was a funny joke to me.’120
This doesn’t mean that all novels containing cruising tell a positive story for the
gay community. The younger gay generation, building on the foundation of
coming-out novels and AIDS narratives written by their literary ancestors, are
increasingly turning their hand to ‘exposing the personal, emotional trauma that
haunts the gay community today, as opposed to examining the narrative of the
societal outcast.’121 The body of literature being produced points to a much more
diverse community of writers in terms of age, race and socio-economic class
backgrounds, but the themes they grapple with seem to be overwhelmingly about
120
Author Unknown, ‘Cruising, BDSM and Grindr: An Interview with Artist Jacobly
Satterwhite’, New York-Art Inspection, July 8 2016,
http://www.standardhotels.com/culture/jacolby-satterwhite-grindr [Accessed January 10 2017]
121
Kevin Bertolero, New Developments in the Contemporary Gay Novel, (May 9 2017),
<https://medium.com/anomalyblog/new-developments-in-the-contemporary-gay-novel-
8f1612d85be0> [Accessed online August 21 2018]
66
confronting the ‘epidemic of gay loneliness.’122 While they no longer necessarily
cast the gay man as the social outsider, they still deal with central themes like
shame and loneliness, although the source of this shame has shifted (from external
forces) to internal (self-shaming). Greenwell’s narrator grapples with shame
throughout the novel, filled with self-loathing and regret, yet still returning
repeatedly to the Mitko and source of his shame - he is the principal architect of his
own suffering. Novels like Hanya A Little Life and Drew Nellins Smith’s Arcade,
which also feature cruising extensively, are, in many ways, still ‘sad’ stories. They
are intense and complex and beautifully written, but they are do not present
cruising as glamorous - and perhaps neither should they. The act of cruising for sex
can be read as a response to, as well as prompt, a range of human emotion and this
is precisely why it makes fertile ground for such rich and nuanced literature.
Thus, while I remain captivated by Dean’s positive spin on the ethics of cruising
and agree with Delaney’s argument for cruising spaces being vital in a modern
sexual democracy, in the world of gay literature, it is difficult not to see the
cruising novel as a means of tackling the sense of isolation and alienation that the
individual cruiser feels. Even Greenwell, who writes with such passionate intensity
122
Michael Hobbes, The Epidemic of Gay Loneliness, Huffington Post Online, (May 2 2017),
<https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/gay-loneliness/> [Accessed online August 22
2018]
67
about cruising, describes it as an ‘art of loneliness and an assuagement of
loneliness.’123 While I have argued that Holleran’s sees cruising as central to
Malone’s unity of existence and cruising in public toilets an essential part of
Sutherland’s campy fabulousness, it is impossible to ignore the fact the ways in
which, in the novel, cruising is a direct response to loneliness. Malone only begins
cruising in the first place as a result of having been heartbroken by the gardener’s
disregard for him, and his plaintive remark that he must align himself with the
cruisers in the park in order to have Life, is clearly a response to his own feelings
of alienation. Meanwhile, even after moving to New York and finding Sutherland,
Malone expresses doubt that being gay can ever exist free from self-hatred. While
preparing for a game of bridge one night, Malone tentatively asks, ‘Do you
sometimes not loathe being – gay?’124, to which Sutherland wittily replies, ‘My
dear, you play the hand you’re dealt.’125
Greenwell, and a younger generation of gay writer, have almost certainly been
raised under the influences of these earlier gay writers - Holleran, Edmund White,
Christopher Isherwood, Larry Kramer, to name just a few. It thus that this sense of
shame, isolation and longing has been internalised, even as the gay community
123
Greenwell, ‘How I Fell In Love With The Beautiful Art of Cruising, Buzzfeed Online, (April
4 2016)
124
125
68
continues to make positive strides, both politically and socially. In the realm of gay
fiction, representative and honest writing about cruising is still rare – but is
emerging.
Jose Esteban Munoz in his book Cruising Utopia: The There and Then of Queer
Futurity describes witnessing a talk by art historian Douglas Crimp at Yale
University in 1989. Crimp says the following about the sense of nostalgia for the
golden-era of cruising:
Freud tells us that mourning is the reaction not only to the death of a loved
person, but also ‘to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of
one, such as a fatherland, a liberty, an ideal…Can we be allowed to include,
in this ‘civilized’ list, the ideal of perverse sexual pleasure itself rather than
one stemming from its sublimation? Alongside the dismal toll of death, what
many of us have lost is a culture of sexual possibility: back rooms, tea-
rooms, movie houses, and baths; the trucks, the piers, the ramble, the dunes.
Sex was everywhere for us, and everything we wanted to venture: Golden
showers and watersports, cocksucking and rimming, fucking and fistfucking.
69
Now our unfamed impulses are either proscribed once again or shielded
from us by latex.126
The activities and spaces that Crimp lists have all been degraded and rendered
outside the mainstream by heteronormativity; listing them in this way, speaks to
Crimp’s belief in a queer utopia, which he describes as long since lost. But many
gay men, even throughout the painful years of the AIDS crisis, maintained these
spaces and activities, even as they responded to an increased awareness of
contraceptives and the importance of safe, consensual sex. The fact that the
cruising novel, in all its glory, has experienced a cultural re-emergence is testament
to the fact that the queer lifeworld of earlier generations continues to nourish and
inspire the queer lifeworld of today.
Jose Esteban Munoz, Cruising Utopia: The There and Then of Queer Futurity, (New York:
126
New York University Press, 2009), p.33
70
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‘Out and About: An examination of gay

cruising in Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance

Candidate Number: Y18852

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements

Cruising and the city-space…………………………………………………4

Cruising and the stranger in modernity…………………………………..…5

What is cruising? …………………………………………………………...8

Chapter 1: A brief history of cruising……………………………..……12

The figure of the flâneur ……………………………………………...…..14

The importance of contact: Jacobs and Delaney………………..……..….16

Chapter 2: Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance ……………………..….27

Gay fiction after Stonewall…………………………………………….….28

Cruising and the formation of Malone’s identity……...……………...…..38

Chapter 3: Greenwell’s What Belongs To You……...…………...……..48

The re-emergence of the cruising novel……………………………….….53

Chapter 4: The future of the cruising novel………………………...….63

my time at King’s. I am eternally indebted to my incredible family, particularly my

finished without you.

The present dissertation examines representations of gay cruising through a close

act as representations of particularly fascinating periods in cruising and gay

publication of the two novels.

Cruising and the city-space

practice of cruising to flourish. George Chauncey in his groundbreaking work Gay

and London, an examination of cruising across a range of cultural material

including Whitman’s notebooks and Hockney’s graffiti, presents the idea of

cruising as a specifically urban practice, a ‘counter-discourse in the literature of

(whether sexual or non-sexual) is central, both structurally and thematically. In

between his two main characters.

Cruising and the stranger in modernity

flirtatious. Additionally, it is a question I have returned to time and time again

surface level, Dean’s question flies in the face of conventional wisdom

of respectability politics - the attempts by marginalised groups to police their own

extreme or outlandish gay sexual practices, cruising included. But it is also a

and moral desires.

chapter, ‘Cruising as a way of life’ resonates. In this chapter he differentiates

psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche in order to advocate a positive ethics of the practice,

one that ‘far from being ethically irresponsible, may be ethically

exemplary.’5Although, strictly speaking, cruising can be practiced by anyone,

pursuit that experiences a complicated relationship with law enforcement and

across categories like race, class and gender.

homosexuality was officially delisted from the classification of mental disorders in

warning to the heterosexual community, particularly at the height of the AIDS

in which we live, an understanding of and relationship with strangers and

strangeness is more important than ever.

It may be useful to begin by clarifying a definition of ‘cruising’. Cruising, in

cruising as an art-form is particularly relevant. Gay men have an art-form of their

gayborhood Haight Ashbury in San Francisco, stresses the importance of visual

cruising codes - for example, the bandana strategically placed in a backpocket.

your eyes, not with your voice’10.

mutual recognition amid the otherwise alienating effects of an anonymous crowd.11

is not always realised.

chapter, I discuss the cultural history of cruising, focusing on cruising as a key

component of cross-class contact in twentieth century American cities and the

representational problems it created. Drawing on the work of sociologists and

I would like to begin with an attempt to locate my contemporary analysis of

cruising literature within the wider historical perspective of cruising as a practice.

recorded, at least not through what we might consider ‘traditional’ methods.

Cruising is a distinctly visual practice, sometimes accompanied by a verbal one,

fleeting moment in time. A comprehensive history of gay cruising may be

modernity has been explored by other scholars of the twentieth century.

cruising’s complex relationship to the growth of sprawling, industrialised Western

be diverse appropriations of it, and so it should be,’14 says Turner in a 2006

“Private city”’, Stein depicts a compelling account of Rittenhouse Park in