9 August 2022
What is cruising, aside from that awful 1980 movie with Al Pacino?
In very general terms, and with very broad strokes—I realized after I did some initial research that I could write an entire treatise on this topic—cruising refers to men seeking other men for sex. The sex is usually anonymous, often in public places, and brief—sometimes so brief as to preclude orgasm. And although I will refrain from defining what sex encompasses, I will simply note that cruising does not need to include acts of penetration to qualify. Orgasms can happen. That’s all I’ll say.
Again, in general terms, I think there are a few sociological preconditions that enable cruising. Dense population areas are a key factor.
Cruising can be transactional. Male prostitution is historically part of the cruising experience.
Where does cruising take place? Sometimes it is indoors. Ancient Rome’s public baths were said to be cruisy—there is believed to be evidence of this in the artwork and graffiti among the ruins of Pompeii. By the beginning of the 1600s in Japan, there were precursors to gay bars, called 蔭間茶屋 (kagema chaya, tea houses for apprentice actors, although, side note, 蔭間 delightfully and literally means within the shadows), where young male Kabuki apprentices could meet with paying clients. (I should note, however, that some of the clients were women—perhaps everyone loves twinks?)
This (half of a) woodblock print from Kunisada depicts an impassioned embrace between a man and a Kabuki actor, either a kagema or an onnagata. Kagema who completed their apprenticeships could go on to portray female roles in Kabuki, a position known as 女形 (onnagata, literally woman-form). Onnagata, like kagema, however, had intense fandoms and were often paid for their sexual favors too.
In 1726, the first cruising-related arrest occurred in London at what was known as a molly house, run by an inauspiciously named Mother Clap.
Molly houses were venues that included taverns, pubs, or private homes, where men could meet other men. There were also molly districts in eighteenth and nineteenth century London where businesses like molly houses catered to more customers in a concentrated area. In Dickens’ Oliver Twist, for example, Fagin boards in a house within a notorious molly district.
Note: there are competing theories as to why Molly, a nickname for girls named Mary, became associated with what we would know call homosexuals (a word that only dates back to 1869). One connection might be the Latin word mollis, which, along with catamitus, referred to the receptive partner in male/male sex.
Starting in the twentieth century, cruising also happened at movie theaters, something that occurred in both the United States and in Japan as early as the 1920s.
Public spaces—parks, under bridges, docks, empty warehouses, secluded beaches, and public toilets—have also hosted cruising, most of which occurred at night. Depending on the degree of seclusion, however, daytime cruising is also part of the history.
Why am I writing about this? And why now?
I write very specifically about my own experience with cruising in my memoir-in-progress, Crying in a Foreign Language: The Deity that Answered My Plea. How exposure to gay magazines in the early 1980s like Mandate taught me not only what cruising was but where—in my case, nearby Manhattan—it happened. I was an, for lack of a better word, adventurous teenager (although in hindsight, reckless might be the better adjective).
I discovered movie theaters, public restrooms, video booths in bookstores, and go-go clubs starting from when I was fifteen, even though I told no one. (I also told no one, myself included, that I was gay.)
And then I went to college in a small, remote town in northwestern Massachusetts, and I stuffed my libido into my closet, too, for four years.
Yes, I came out during my senior year there, but it wasn’t until my second year in Japan, in late 1989 or early 1990—cue (Gilda Radner’s rendition of) Barbra Streisand’s The Way We Were—misty, watercolored memories—that I returned to cruising.
I was figuring out Japan, getting to know the gay scene, and my friends (one in particular, and thank you, YK) were teaching me a lot.
One novel option, for example, was that there were (and still are) certain cars on certain trains, where men interested in men would congregate during their commute home. During my years in Japan, the one I was aware of was the first car leading out of Tōkyō on the Saikyō line. Gave new meaning to rush hour.
Memories… of the way we were.
Meeting Hiro in 1993 moved cruising away from my lived experiences and so I have to return to a question I posed earlier. Why now? Especially when so much of gay cruising seems to now happen via apps and websites.
Hiro and I spent the latter half of July in the northeast corner of the United States, a trip to see family and friends that included six states. The last four days of that trip were spent in Manhattan (although our AirBnB was minutes from a PATH station in Jersey City). One of our days involved a few visits to Grand Central Station—we had lunch at the Oyster Bar before meeting relatives taking the train down from Connecticut, and then we dropped those selfsame relatives off for their train ride home.
After saying farewell in the lower concourse, Hiro and I both needed to use the restroom. There were two open stalls on either side of an occupied one, and we entered our respective throne rooms. As I went about my business, I noticed a moving shadow on the floor of the adjacent stall. A fluttering, one might say. The occupant was attending to business of his own and he sought an audience—he peeked below the stall’s divider only to note my lack of interest.
When Hiro and I both left the washroom, I asked, with a chuckle, if he had noticed. He had not. He asked how I knew our neighbor was cruising. And my misty, watercolored memories of moments in Port Authority 41st Street Bus Terminal toilets in 1982 returned. Oh, honey. I know.
The bus terminal at 41st is much prettier nowadays.
