E S S AY

Cruising in
the Age
of Consent

T H E H I STO RY P R OJ E C T: D O C U M E N T I N G LG B TQ B O STO N ; LU C I A N O M A R Q U E S / S H U T T E R STO C K

#MeToo is a reckoning with male behavior.
Where does that leave gay hookup culture?

By SPENCER KORNHABER
Illustration by Arsh Raziuddin

96 J U LY 2 0 1 9 T H E AT L A N T I C
T H E AT L A N T I C J U LY 2 0 1 9 97
H
UNTING FOR
answers to one of
life’s great questions,
the lesbian writer Rita
Mae Brown pasted on
a mustache in 1975
and walked into a bathhouse for gay men.
“The adventure attracted me, but besides
that I’ve been raised with the constantly
repeated notion that women’s sexuality
and men’s sexuality are absolutely differ-
ent,” she wrote in her essay “Queen for a
Day: A Stranger in Paradise.” The all-male
zone of Manhattan’s The Club would, she
hoped, teach her how male and female
sexuality diverged.
A robe hiding her female form, she
marveled at the sex being had around
every corner, from a dimly lit “maze” of
semi-blind groping to an “unbelievable
orgy room” of group activities to a corri-
dor of cubicles in which men lay waiting
for partners. Quickly, she began to form
theories. “Men look at each other dif-
ferently than men look at women,” she
observed. “The leer is gone, the thinly
disguised hostility of the street vanishes …
The transaction boils down to: curiosity,
no connection, disconnection.”
The way people touched felt foreign,
too. As a stranger reached for her groin,
Brown’s “first response was to turn around
and smash the offender’s face in.” Later,
to one man who hugged her from behind,
she whispered, “Thank you but I’ve been
here for an hour and I’m tired.” The man
left her alone. “The easiness of refusal
is incredible,” she wrote. “If you say ‘no’
it means ‘no,’ that’s all, and that simple
‘no’ also protects fragile egos. Sex isn’t a
weapon here, it’s a release.”
Read during today’s #MeToo wave,
Brown’s vision of a “paradise” packed
with men groping unabashedly yet
respectfully may sound like a hallucina-
tion. But many gay men might not find
the scene so strange. Yes, assimilation
and smartphones—and, before them,
legal crackdowns amid the AIDS crisis—
have thinned the ranks of spots like The
Club. Even so, 50 years after a police
raid on the Stonewall Inn catalyzed the
mainstream LGBTQ movement, gay
people still maintain spheres of separa-
tion from the wider world: nightclubs,
vacation spots, and dating apps where
like can meet like. In those places, folks
who otherwise might edit themselves for
the straight world find the miraculous-
seeming freedom to directly pursue their
98 J U LY 2 0 1 9 T H E AT L A N T I C
desires. This pursuit can take forms as
mild as dinner and a movie. It can also
involve a crossing of physical boundaries
that bears an undeniable resemblance to
the surprise kisses and below-belt grabs
called out in the recent reckoning with
sexual harassment.
In Provincetown, Massachusetts,
where I’ve spent portions of the past few
summers, I’ve found it impossible to avoid
comparisons. Long a queer haven, the
Cape Cod artist colony grew into an inter-
nationally renowned LGBTQ party spot
during the same era when Brown made
her New York–bathhouse visit. Now day-
trippers of all sorts (heterosexuals, too)
pop in, and the particular flavor of queer
varies from week to week: lesbians for
Memorial Day and the “Girl Splash” event,
ab-flaunting men around Independence
Day, scruffier types for July’s “Bear Week.”
What’s constant is that an otherwise iron-
clad rule of life gets flipped to glorious
effect. Instead of figuring that everyone is
straight, you can figure that everyone isn’t.
I’ll never forget my first run to the
Provincetown Stop & Shop, during Bear
Week. The store was as overlit and Clorox-
scented as any suburban supermarket, but
The #MeToo movement
has highlighted a stubborn
reality: Men violate
boundaries in ways that
women rarely do.
the near-total absence of women pushing
carts lent an almost science-fictional vibe.
Shoppers scanned not only the wares on
the shelves, but one another, in a way that
recalled Larry Kramer’s description of
“cruising” in his 1978 satirical novel, Fag-
gots: “You give it a little look, pretending
not to look, but being able to see, out of
the corner of your eye only, if anyone else
is pretending not to look back at you. If you
see someone else pretending not to look,
you look the other way. Only after a few
moments do you look back, to see if he’s
still looking.”
On offer in Provincetown are all the
summer adventures typical of a quaint
seaside destination: dining, sailing, pool
lounging, beach-going. There is also easy
sex for those who want it. Bars nestle
close enough to houses and hotels that
it’s common to meet someone, take him
home, and then go out again. Certain
establishments feature certain corners
where men huddle and unzip. Other spots,
though smaller than the bathhouse of
Brown’s essay, function a lot like The Club,
right down to her description of the orgy
room: “The silence amazed me. Seventy-
five to one hundred men packed [in] … and
not one word was spoken.”
Sex spaces such as these call back to
when queer life had to be furtive, for fear
of danger, but also when, almost paradoxi-
cally, gay men found safety and eroticism
by surrendering privacy together. Cruising
in gay America now mostly happens online,
but some patterns of behavior haven’t
died. Whether in a hushed hookup spot or
against the blare of a nightclub, encoun-
ters can begin with a nod or an eye-flick.
Some begin with a touch. To dance on a
summer night at Provincetown’s Atlantic
House, one of the country’s oldest gay
bars, is to feel the loss of bodily autonomy
that comes in any crowd supercharged by
the wide presumption of flirting. No one’s
lower back, at the very minimum, goes
ungrazed by strangers.
I haven’t experienced anything trau-
matic amid the casual manhandling. Still,
uneasy situations do arise. You might hear
someone at Tea Dance—a jam-packed
seaside cocktail hour—dissect the pre-
vious night with a joke about how what
happened was dicier than anything Aziz
Ansari was accused of. You might see a
couple fend off an uninvited set of limbs
inserting themselves into a leather-party
make-out session. Last summer, a man
wearing a kilt and nothing under it paid
a social visit to the house I was staying in
and, without warning, lifted his hem and
straddled a housemate who’d been read-
ing on the front lawn. The guy’s behavior
was gross, we agreed. It was also laughed
off as “gays being gays,” as my somewhat
rattled friend put it after he pushed his way
out from under the kilt.
Gays being gays sounds a lot like the
boys will be boys excuse-making that the
#MeToo movement has discredited. But
it also recalls Brown’s conclusions about
the bathhouse. There, she wrote, “you get
groped, but it’s gentle compared to the
kind of grabbing a woman gets on a sub-
way.” She understood gay male spaces as
different—not just because of the force of
the grabs, but also because of their context.
In the straight world, despite the “sexual
revolution” (she put it in quotation marks),
men were “geared to pursue you,” and
refusals were fraught. For women, sex
remained “a bargaining tool”—something
too socially significant to be casual, and
something that could be taken, possibly by
violence. At The Club, by contrast, every-
body really was after the same thing: sex
for the sake of sex. Brute coercion didn’t
appear to be an issue. She walked away
wishing that she had her own bathhouse
to go to—that such free pleasure might be
possible for women, too. And yet some-
thing still nagged at her. “Is this fuck pal-
ace the ultimate conclusion of sexist logic,”
she wondered, “or is it erotic freedom?”
Today, a related question looms for
gay men. The handsiness that can arise
between guys has been condemned as a
sign of male entitlement and predatory
sexuality. It has also been celebrated as
the liberated practice of a minority that
fought hard for the right to its desires and
for places to express them. In truth, gay
male spaces—physical, digital, cultural—
reflect a long and imperfect process of
managing what happens when masculin-
ity, homosexuality, and an often hostile
wider society intersect. They deserve
scrutiny both on their own terms and for
what they reveal about the problems that
gave rise to #MeToo.
E
V E N A S T H E queer movement
has popularized an ever more
fluid understanding of gender,
#MeToo has highlighted a stubborn
reality: Men violate boundaries in ways
that women rarely do. A 2010 Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention survey
found that even among lesbians who had
experienced sexual violence other than
rape, 85 percent of them reported that
their attackers had exclusively been male.
That’s not to say women don’t ever abuse.
Nor is it to suggest that patterns of sexual
misconduct neatly fit a binary concep-
tion of gender (bisexual and trans people
face some of the highest rates of sexual
assault). And lots of men, of course,
don’t harass. But the male gender is the
one that is most urgently being called to
account lately—and a room full of gay
men is a room full of men.
Sure enough, gay men joined the reck-
oning almost as soon as #MeToo went
supernova, in late 2017. Just weeks after
the fall of Harvey Weinstein, the actor
Anthony Rapp alleged publicly that Kevin
Spacey had tried to “get with me sexually”
when Rapp was 14 and Spacey was in his
20s. More than a dozen men, some pro-
fessionally subordinate to Spacey, came
forward with their own accounts of sexual
harassment and assault; many of them
said Spacey grabbed their crotch without
warning. (Spacey tweeted that he did not
remember the encounter with Rapp but
apologized for “what would have been
deeply inappropriate drunken behav-
ior.” Spacey’s representatives have since
denied at least two of the men’s allega-
tions, and Spacey is currently fighting two
lawsuits arising from other accusations.)
Some gay men have begun
to wonder whether their
own confabs are consent
catastrophes.
As the list of alleged same-sex predators
began to grow, the film director Bryan
Singer and the Metropolitan Opera con-
ductor James Levine appeared among the
names. (Both men deny any wrongdoing.)
These stories fit a familiar pattern of
powerful guys taking monstrous advan-
tage of their status. What, if anything, such
accusations reveal about queer men hasn’t
prompted much discussion beyond sug-
gestions that the closet (whether the victim
or the aggressor or both are in it) makes
reporting crimes harder. Yet as alarm has
intensified about drunken, horny sub-
cultures of straight folks—nightclubs, frat
parties, music festivals where women
report rampant abuses—some gay men
have begun to wonder whether their
own confabs are consent catastrophes.
Broaching that idea in public risks reviv-
ing old images of gay promiscuity and
predation at just the moment when such
stereotypes are losing their bite, thanks to
the growing visibility of the queer
experience in all its variety. But now that
harassment of every sort is on trial, the
issue seems unavoidable.
“How does Harvey Weinstein hap-
pen? Visit a gay bar with me,” the jour-
nalist Marc Ambinder wrote in a 2017
USA Today column about the way queer
guys grind and grope on the dance floor.
In a 2018 piece in the LGBTQ magazine
Wussy, the writer Alex Franco recounted
his memory of an app-facilitated hookup
that turned menacing when the other man
tried to prevent Franco from leaving. Gay
men, he wrote, “can either start the work
now, making clear-communicated con-
sent a foundation of our interactions, or
we can wait for a scandal to ignite.”
That unwanted advances frequently
harm gay men is already clear. According
to a CDC survey based on self-reports, the
share of gay men who have experienced
sexual violence other than rape is almost
as great as the share of straight and lesbian
women who have. Though gender differ-
ence is out of the picture, the worst cases of
same-sex abuse still tend to involve power
inequalities: disparities of wealth, age,
clout, physical size, and intoxication levels.
Race can figure in too, as when a black man
at a predominantly white bar risks being
taken for the threat rather than the victim
if he resists harassers. Gay men often don’t
report attacks to authorities out of fear of
being outed, mistreated by homophobic
cops, and subjected to stigmas that cast
male victims as weak.
Among competing explanations for
the particular maleness of predation,
one theory rests heavily on biology, and
the gay cruising mentality can serve as a
prop for that case. “Remove women, and
you see male sexuality unleashed more
fully, as men would naturally express
it, if they could get away with it,” the
columnist Andrew Sullivan wrote in an
online piece for New York magazine titled
“#MeToo and the Taboo Topic of Nature.”
“It’s full of handsiness and groping and
objectification and lust and aggression
and passion and the ruthless pursuit of
yet another conquest.” This testosterone-
focused view—which paints the #MeToo
movement as hopelessly naive about
gender— comes close to excusing male
lechery as inevitable. It also implies a
depressing perspective on homosexuality.
Those guys who were called sissies
throughout their youth? They grow up to
embody the very aspects of masculinity
now widely seen as destructive.
An alternative analysis of predatory
male sexuality comes to the same sad con-
clusion by pointing to nurture—the way
men are raised in a sexist society—rather
than nature. Here, too, gay men can be
deployed as an object lesson. In a 2017
essay for the queer web publication them,
the activist and writer Darnell L. Moore
fretted that even his quietest ogling
of attractive men was, fundamentally,
rooted in rape culture. “I was taught that
people are bodies, are things, are objects,
are ours to own and consume,” he wrote.
T H E AT L A N T I C J U LY 2 0 1 9 99
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“The ardent faith in the superiority of
maleness, manhood, and masculinity
(even among men who rightly deviate
from those ideas) is the reason so many
men believe the exterior and interior
parts of another person’s being are ours
to access and dominate.” Plenty of gay
scenes are indeed steeped in machismo:
Just check out self-proclaimed “Masc-
4Masc” Grindr users who sneer at lisps
and loose wrists. But the queer art of cruis-
ing the street—born of lonely, thwarted
yearning for touch—has always relied on
a silent, probing gaze. In Moore’s telling,
that gaze is inseparable from the piggish
entitlement of catcallers and casting-
couch creeps. By this logic, it’s not behav-
ior that most urgently needs reforming,
but desire itself.
MSRP
straight people’s will end up equating
safety with, to use McDougall’s term, the
“sex-phobic propriety” that gays have
battled against.
That battle over the past half century
has led to a radical cultural achievement.
Walk around Provincetown at the height
of summer and you’ll see gaggles of
drunk young bros, throuples in padlocked
chain collars, and also actual daddies
doting on their actual children. You’ll
see singlets and jackboots and tutus and
wigs. You’ll hear casually misogynistic
comments alongside exceptionally woke
ones, sometimes sparking loud argu-
ments about sexism. (Do straight guys do
this?) On display is the wide range of gay
male life—the variety of ways in which a
group of people move past being told that
they’re not men, that they must hide, that

A
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$18.99 men as a lab-pure reduction
of maleness— whether inborn
or socially constructed—is too simple.
Maybe many queer men do believe that
male valor is proved by conquest. Or
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maybe they’ve transcended tradition-
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ing out some evolutionary drive. Maybe
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they’re propelled by all of the above, to
different degrees, depending on who
INCREASE AFFECTION they are. In any case, sexism does not
Created by bear down on them in the same way
Winnifred Cutler, that it does on women. Gay men’s clas-
Ph.D. in biology sic sources of trauma and violence stem
from U. of Penn, less from being hit on than from being
post-doc Stanford.
Co-discovered literally hit by homophobes. Safety hasn’t
human pheromones typically meant freedom from carnal pur-
in 1986 suit; safety has meant the possibility of it.
(Time 12/1/86; and Which is to say that gay men have
Newsweek 1/12/87)
long needed to balance the free, equal,
Author of 8 books
on wellness and even crass seeking of sex against the
possibility of its abuse. If the #MeToo
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their desires with an eye toward the dan-
INCREASES YOUR ger those desires can entail, that’s not a
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2 attractive men I see regularly. They are so should question their leniency regarding
interested in me! It is amazing.” the grope,” the writer and dancer Ren-
♥ Victor (TX) “Women notice me more. I have nie McDougall observed in Slate. “But
noticed a 30% to 40% increase in
confidence. Don Juan and Casanova the sanitization of gay spaces—a total
are 2nd and 3rd to me!” cleaning up of our sometimes messy
Not in stores 610-827-2200 brushes with desire—would be a pro-
Athenainstitute.com found loss.” Many fear that treating gay
Athena Institute, 1211 Braefield Rd., Chester Spgs, PA 19425 ATM people’s #MeToo issues as identical to
their desires are perverse. In the process,
gay men have helped make room in the
broader culture for different kinds of
manliness. Situationally sensitive rules of
the road have developed— evidence, per-
haps heartening for #MeToo, that men
can be made to moderate themselves.
In 1975, Martin S. Weinberg and
Colin J. Williams of Alfred Kinsey’s
Institute for Sex Research visited gay
bathhouses across the U.S. and made
observations very similar to Brown’s
about the nonverbal cues that men used
to negotiate liaisons. “Sexual invitations
follow an etiquette involving simple and
nonabrasive rituals … that are charac-
terized by their gentleness,” they wrote.
“Usually they are not forceful or persis-
tent.” Such codes of conduct were often
“an import from the wider homosexual
culture,” which is to say that how people
cruised appeared to be learned behavior.
The generally nonjudgmental Kinsey
researchers compared getting a lay at the
baths to browsing at a shopping center,
but more than two decades later, in a 1999
essay about bathhouse design and eti-
quette, the artist Ira Tattelman wrote that
Weinberg and Williams had overstated
the “impersonal” aspect of cruising. “By
the late 1970s, men were lining up to get
into the baths and arriving at the baths in
couples,” attesting to a new “intersection
of private lives and public personas” for
gay men, he wrote. Sex could be social.
Even the most secretive kind of hook-
ups have relied on community. “One man
I interviewed was only half joking when
he argued that the Rambles in Central
Park was the safest place in New York City

100 J U LY 2 0 1 9 T H E AT L A N T I C
 at night,” the sociologist John Hollister
reported in a 1999 article on men who
have sex with men in public. “Some met
regularly with the same people and sat at
picnic tables watching who was follow-
ing whom, and occasionally intervening
if someone was threatened by a preda-
tor.” In his 1998 essay collection, Times
Square Red, Times Square Blue, the novelist
Samuel R. Delany described his decades-
long habit of having sex with men in the
seats of New York City’s now-shuttered
pornographic cinemas as not just titil-
lating but downright edifying. Strangers
across social strata made connections as
they got off together and kept watch for
troublemakers—predators, narcs, thieves.
Delany once brought along a female friend
curious to gawk (a reprise of Brown). “I
thought it would be more frenetic—people
just grabbing each other and throwing
them down in the shadows and having
their way,” she told him afterward. “But it
was so easygoing. And you didn’t tell me …
that so many people say ‘no.’ And that
everybody pretty much goes along with it.”
The Eros 1 theater feels a long way
away from 21st-century gentrified gay
bars, where a vodka-soda can cost $10 and
a too-sloppy make-out session can result
in expulsion. For queer folks to find one
another may once have involved groping
in the dark, but now all the courtship ritu-
als that straights partake in—from meet-
the-parents holiday dinners to elaborate
wedding preparations—are available. At
the same time, explicit adventuring
clearly retains its appeal. As before, what
What may look like free-for-
alls can actually be governed
by a sort of forbearance.
may look like free-for-alls can actually
be governed by a sort of forbearance. A
friend of mine noticed last summer that
during the sweatier shirtless gatherings
of Provincetown’s Bear Week, the grope
had been replaced by a chummier form
of contact. “Someone would lightly rub
your tummy and look at you as a way
of gauging if you were interested in
anything,” he observed. “You could just
touch their hand lightly and respond
‘No thank you’ without any ill will.” He’d
been annoyed by unwanted touching
at parties in the past, but found this
variant—rooted in a specific place and
set of people—charming.
Meanwhile, the anonymous cruise
has gotten an update with apps such as
Grindr and Scruff, where the hunt for
sex is assumed and where conversations
sometimes kick off with the sending of
an explicit picture (a male tendency noto-
riously irritating to women on Tinder).
Faces can be obscured, and the exchange
of names an afterthought. Though abuses
do occur, conduct on these platforms is rit-
ualized for safety and mutual understand-
ing. Many profiles include HIV status, and
asking when someone was last tested for
STDs is pro forma. Banter also inevitably
involves the question “What are you into?,”
which invites discussion of who tops and
who bottoms, whether both parties just
want to cuddle, and so on.
What are you into? could be thought of
as the unfussy, even hot, prelude to some-
thing often derided as a feminist pipe

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 dream: affirmative consent. The popular
sex columnist Dan Savage, who’s gay, fre-
quently advises straight people to import
this norm. It starts a conversation about
expectations, can be a form of dirty-talk
foreplay, and recognizes that a hookup
doesn’t necessarily mean penetration.
“If a man is getting with a woman, the
conversation about consent usually ends
with ‘Let’s go to bed,’ ” Savage told me.
“Because what’s next is assumed. It’s vagi-
nal intercourse.” But with gay men, “half
the time, when somebody says ‘What
are you into?,’ they just want to do oral,
or mutually masturbate, or some fan-
tasy thing.” Widen the conversation to a

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range of possibilities, he suggests, and a
less fraught sexual paradigm—less all-or-
nothing, conquest-or-defeat—emerges.
It was just this kind of openness about

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naming and pursuing one’s most visceral
desires that Brown coveted as she left The
Club in 1975. “Despite changing attitudes
toward sex, we can’t create our version of
Whiteboard Wall Paneling the baths because, for most of us, sex for
the sake of sex is still wrong—whether you
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What are you into? could be

PROMOTION
thought of as the unfussy,
even hot, prelude to some-
PLAY THE ATLANTIC CROSSWORD thing often derided as
a feminist pipe dream:
Our mini puzzle gets bigger and more challenging affirmative consent.
each weekday. See if you can solve this one—and
find more at theatlantic.com/crossword.
are a heterosexual woman or a lesbian,”
she wrote. “We scramble to invest sex with
1 2 3 4 5 Across love and we call men dogs because they’ve
been taught to separate the two.” Much has
1 With a huge margin
changed for women since then, of course,
6 Dog walker’s handle
6 including anti–“slut shaming” campaigns
7 Friendly feeling to cheer on the female pursuit of casual
8 Fabric use in jeans sex. Bathhouses catering to women of all
7 9 _____nous (just between us, in France) sexualities, though rare, have cropped up
to offer experiences that, by reputation,
Down seem aligned with Brown’s dream: “Our
8
1 Not-as-sharp-as-it-sounds piece Xanadu would be less competitive than
of grass the gay men’s baths, more laughter would
9 2 Saudi Arabia’s neighbor with the ring in the sauna, and you’d touch not only
capital Sanaa to fuck but just to touch.”
3 React dramatically in a silent Yet being allowed to “distinguish
movie, say between sex and love and her needs for
A Monday crossword
4 Moving around both,” as Brown put it back when that
from Caleb Madison
5 Proving a sound, to the previous clue freedom felt out of reach for a woman,
has not stopped the kind of abuses that
have inflamed #MeToo. Take the case

102 J U LY 2 0 1 9 T H E AT L A N T I C
 of Brooklyn’s much-publicized House of
Yes, a female-founded “temple of expres-
sion,” where sexually charged events
like the “Pants Off Dance Off ” take
place. Since its 2015 opening, the venue
has heard complaints about the same
male groping of women that has long
plagued nightlife. Now the dance floor
is patrolled by “consenticorns”—trained
volunteers wearing light-up horns, part
of a consent program that includes
cautionary signage and waivers— who
watch to make sure that everyone parties
respectfully, and are ready to intervene
if necessary. “People think of this as an
‘anything-goes’ kind of club,” one of its
co-founders, Anya Sapozhnikova, told
Vice. “But by ‘anything goes,’ we mean
extreme self-expression, rather than
extreme sexual harassment. There is
a difference.”
Consenticorns might seem like a
parody of safe-space coddling. But to
judge by the continued sold-out crowds
at House of Yes, and by the hot-and-heavy
atmosphere of the disco extravaganza I
dropped into recently, the initiative hasn’t
tamped down the fun. Indeed, in spirit if
not in specifics, the consenticorn agenda
resembles the sort of policing to protect
pleasure that queer subcultures have long
experimented with. Bringing casual sex
into the open—for the gay world, yes, but
also the straight one—was a first step. If
participants, and especially men, turn out
to need some taming, the goal is not to
chasten them but to enable more fun.
For gay guys, the choreography of
cruising—the nod of encouragement, the
welcomed touch, the ascertaining of who
wants what—will keep evolving as people
become freer to talk about the ways in
which it can go wrong. Recently, the friend
who told me about the Bear Week belly
rubs showed me an emailed invitation to
a private all-male sex party in a major city.
It warned that “NO MEANS NO,” but also
got specific with a rule “not to pile onto
another couple or group” without the par-
ticipants clearly expressing interest—the
opposite of the impromptu grab-and-parry
paradigm Brown described in the orgy
room of 1975. Yet laden with pictures of
muscled bodies and information about the
sex supplies on offer, the invitation could
hardly be called prudish, unliberated, or
panicky. Why would it be? The excitement
of any queer enclave relies not on risk but
on shared security, the core of a Xanadu
that many might welcome—and that is still
under construction.
Spencer Kornhaber is an Atlantic staff writer.

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