Intimacy in the Public's Eye

Abstract

Gay cruising and public sex has been around longer than ethnographers and historians have been able to document with modern technologies — such as artists Slava Mogutin, Florian Hetz, and Adrián Sanchez; and scholars Shaka McGlotten, and Jeremy Atherton-Lin. The queer body experiences specific and unique experiences when sexually cruising, and the culture for desire is quite prominent. Throughout this essay, I will explore about gay cruising and the documentation of its complex and rich history, about porn culture and the cold product of its transactions; as well as how the desire for pleasure is deeply human, while its temporality, simplicity and physical manifestation is often lost through modern technologies. Porn has historically been seen through a lens of puritanism, and artwork displaying nudity and the unclothed human body is societally viewed, in public, as foul and corrupt, although many, in private, watch for pleasure. A focal point of this essay is to discuss and explore why the public eye approves public sexual encounters, both queer and heterosexual, in clubs, parks and outdoors to be unhygienic and grimy, while these experiences and encounters are portrayed as high-art and are allowed when ‘curated’ in and created for spaces dedicated to heterosexual people: porn. While I have compiled an extensive list of essays, ethnographic research, and transcribed interviews with close friends and family, I have found myself swimming in ethnographic essays, blog posts, homoerotic artist profiles, and the psychoanalysis of the “gay man’s brain.” There are generations of stories that are publicly available on the internet, but I find it more endearing when I engage with them personally.