This traumatizing scandal and my inexperience with cruising hits me while I walk through the hotel’s revolving door. Public gay cruising, in my view, takes the typical ways men command power over public space, and rather than leverage such power to victimize women and girls, re-codifies it into an offer of liminal refuge from heterosexual life. For many people living in more repressive worlds than mine, it still functions this way. Stories of bareback sex in city parks and hooking up in bathhouses are our fables - stories of a time when cruising functioned as a vital, singular means for gay men to not just get off, but to discover each other and prove to each other that we weren’t alone in our perversions.
That said, I fantasize about it a lot and consider it an important part of my queer lineage. I can’t help but make my way to the hotel.Īdmittedly, I don’t have that much experience with sex in public places. Then again, why should I care what somebody’s face looks like just to jerk off in a public bathroom with them? Nonetheless, I ask for a face pic anyway. I get a message that I’d probably ignore were it not for my particular circumstance: “near ? jerking off in lower level bathroom.”Ĭompelling dick pics accompany the request, but I’m generally distrustful of someone who doesn’t volunteer a photo of their face early in the conversation.
Then my phone buzzes away the blank, insecure space in my brain, sparkles of dopamine pouring in. This is fine, my well-adjusted inner voice tells me, and not at all a reasonable metric of how desirable you are. Despite being a fresh face in an extremely dense neighborhood, I cannot seem to get a response on my app from any hot guys in the immediate vicinity. I have about 30 minutes before I’m supposed to meet a client the train happened to be efficient on this one occasion, of course. It’s cold, too, so my hands are going numb from idly refreshing a gay cruising app that I’ll identify by name when they start paying me to. And so, I find myself wandering between Seventh and Eighth Avenues peering into a sterile chain cafe too overwhelmed by tourists for me to sit in peace. But for some reason, this magical possibility seems like enough of a basis to still pursue it all the time.