Jack Parlett - The Poetics of Cruising: Queer Visual Culture from Whitman to Grindr

Jack Parlett

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis

London

Cover design by Sandra Friesen

Excerpts from Langston Hughes, Movies, Old Walt, 125th Street, Subway Rush Hour, Passing, Caf: 3 a.m., Harlem Sweeties, Island [2], and Subway Face from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, copyright 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes, reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, and Harold Ober Associates. All rights reserved.

Excerpts from Frank OHara, Song (Did you see me walking by the Buick Repairs), Poem [All the mirrors in the world], Grand Central, In the Movies, and Song (Is it dirty) from The Collected Poems of Frank OHara, copyright 1971 by Maureen Granville-Smith, administratrix of the Estate of Frank OHara, copyright renewed 1999 by Maureen OHara Granville-Smith and Donald Allen, reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Excerpts from David Wojnarowicz, Reading a little Rimbaud in a Second Avenue coffee shop, masturbation photo, Distance, Rimbaud in New York-film script, and Untitled film script published by permission of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz.

Excerpts from Eileen Myles, Hot Night, At Last, Basic August, How I Wrote Certain of my Poems from Not Me (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991) and The City of New York and The City from Evolution (New York: Grove Press, 2018), reprinted with permission of the poet.

Excerpts from Danez Smith, a note on the phone app that tells me how far i am from other mens mouths and & even the black guys profile reads sorry, no black guys from Dont Call Us Dead, copyright 2017 by Danez Smith, reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Graywolf Press, graywolfpress.org and The Random House Group Ltd.

Excerpt from Jericho Brown, Host from The New Testament copyright 2014 by Jericho Brown. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org; and Pan Macmillan, reprinted with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.

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Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner darkroom, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present.

Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (trans. James Grieve)

When a man recognizes another mans desire, he is also learning something about the others identity, not exactly what kind of person he is, but what kind of group he belongs to.

Leo Bersani, Homos

In 1976, twenty-two-year-old photographer Sunil Gupta moved to New York City from Montreal, where his family had relocated from India some years earlier. Although Gupta was already involved in both photography and gay politics, interests he had developed during his time as an undergraduate in Montreal in the years following gay liberation, he had ostensibly come to the city to study for an MBA. Living in the London Terrace building on West Twenty-Third Street in Chelsea, Gupta found himself at the heart of a gay public space such as hadnt really been seen before. It was the first time I was living in a city that seemed full of photography, he remembers, both in terms of the number of commercial galleries and museums exhibiting photography and the experiential plenitude of the city; the sense that the real life of the street was our theatre. Before long, the erotic and aesthetic site of the street, and one street in particular, became Guptas primary subject.

Christopher Street, which Gupta describes as his natural habitat during this period, spans the western section of Greenwich Village, extending all the way from Sixth Avenue to the Hudson River. By the mid-seventies, it was a well-known cruising area for gay men. It played host to a multitude of bars, clubs, shops, and social spots including, most famously, the Stonewall Inn at its easternmost end, and the Oscar Wilde Bookshop, the citys first gay bookstore, which opened in 1967 and moved to Christopher Street in 1973. Armed with his Leica camera, Gupta spent weekends walking up and down Christopher Street and photographing the men he saw. Although the resulting collection of images, simply titled Christopher Street 1976, possesses a documentary function, for Gupta the photographic act was not just a way of documenting cruising. It was like cruising itself, and the level of interaction it involved was familiar to him, as he was used to going up to people anyways. Some of the men in the photos look away, seeminglyor perhaps studiedlyunaware of the camera. Others look directly at it. Guptas photographic subjects were, in this sense, doubly solicited, both by the lens of the camera and by the man looking through the viewfinder.

Cruising, as I will go on to argue in the chapters ahead, is a profoundly optical phenomenon, a perceptual arena where acts of looking are intensified and eroticized. The presence of Guptas camera thus augments the latent theatricality of these encounters; the sense that his subjects, at the moment of transient and passing interaction, are playing not only to the real spectator before them but to the imagined spectators suggested by the medial figure of the camera. Guptas images light upon the cruise at its moment of initiation, not the hookup that will hopefully, if not invariably, follow. In this regard what they capture is an eroticism at its most incipient, yet on the other hand these images also mark an endpoint. Because Guptas subjects are mostly captured in passing, their disappearance is signaled just beyond the frame of the photograph that freezes them in time. A person walking down the street in any given city will likely experience this phenomenon numerous times a daya moment of optical interaction with a stranger, however brief, that is swiftly subsumed into the citys incessant flow of time and people. But Guptas images capture something more particular: a look that is charged and directed; a look that is the very currency of an entire sexual culture most commonlyand often nostalgicallyassociated with New York in the 1970s. Thus, while the photographs signal an abundance of potential sexual encounters, they in turn locate a quiet melancholy in such abundance. The sense, as Gupta put it recently in a talk, that there were so many men and so little time.