Crossings: Creative Ecologies of Cruising

It’s difficult to pinpoint the origins of cruising. While the term was used by men seeking casual encounters with other men in the parks and streets of New York City as early as the 1920s, historical records show the practice is much older. Cruising has existed for as long as anyone outside the dominant sex and gender systems has sought sexual encounters outside of sanctioned norms. This book offers a serious exploration of queer sex and sex cultures, exploring cruising as a mode of thinking with the body and communicating through sexuality.

A creative dialogue between a queer artist and a queer academic reminiscing about and thinking with their cruising experiences, Crossings takes queer sex practices and cultures seriously as ways of knowing and world-making. The result is an erotic hybrid form hovering between scholarship and avant-garde experimentation, between critical manifesto and sex memoir. Here, the voices of each author, merged together in one, invite the reader to inhabit the erotic spacetime between self and other, the familiar and the strange, desire and pleasure, climax and release. That is, the spaces and temporalities of cruising itself.

JOÃO FLORÊNCIO is a professor of gender studies and the chair of sex media and sex cultures at Linköping University, Sweden. He is the author of Bareback Porn, Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures: The Ethics of Becoming-Pig.

LIZ ROSENFELD was born in New York City and is based in Berlin. They are an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator.

GRACE LAVERY is a writer and academic. She is the author of several books, including Pleasure and Efficacy: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques and Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis.