Cruising has long played an important role in the intellectual landscape of queer literary and cultural studies, particularly when it comes to scholarship produced by and about gay men. Indeed, the phenomenon is important enough to have provided a methodological model (and, in many cases, a title) for numerous queer studies monographs over the past quarter century, including Ben Gove’s Cruising Culture (2000), Michael Trask’s Cruising Modernism (2003), José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia (2009), and Jack Parlett’s The Poetics of Cruising (2022), to name but a few.Footnote ¹ Though different in historical and theoretical scope, these monographs tend to use the language of cruising in the same way: to signal an investment in the social, cultural, creative, and epistemological power of sexual circulation and promiscuity.Footnote ²

Yet even if it has become fashionable for queer critics to claim cruising as an interpretive methodology, most queer criticism has surprisingly little to say about the actual mechanics of cruising. How, for example, should the phenomenon be defined? How should it be distinguished from similar theoretical concepts such as flânerie or voyeurism? What actually happens in the act of cruising, and how does this act unfold? These are the questions that interest me in this essay. More concretely, I am interested in the optical quality of cruising, the way the look or the glance or the gaze of cruising functions in and around the moment of erotic contact. In other words, I am not particularly concerned with cruising as a form of sexual or intellectual promiscuity, nor do I mean to offer a thick, sociological or historical description of what Anna Lvovsky terms “cruising culture,” though I do follow Lvovsky in conceiving of cruising culture as culture (1). Instead, I am interested in the perceptual phenomenology of cruising—the way the cruising glance both engages and exceeds the register of the visual, functioning simultaneously as a medium of sight and as a medium of touch.

I argue that cruising involves a haptic mode of looking, one that paradoxically facilitates a kind of erotic contact at a distance. This notion of the haptic gaze, I propose, helps to explain certain aspects of the phenomenon that are often overlooked in scholarly work on cruising, such as its connection to the erotics of the gaze, its association with compulsivity, and its potential to foster markedly selfish forms of sexual experience. In making this argument, I examine a range of theoretical, sociological, and creative texts that deal with cruising, paying particular attention to two largely autobiographical books by John Rechy—Numbers (1967) and The Sexual Outlaw: A Documentary (1977)—and Frank Ripploh’s equally autobiographical film Taxi zum Klo (1981). Through an examination of these texts, I demonstrate that an attention to the optical mechanics of cruising might not only help to cultivate a clearer understanding of the phenomenon itself but also reinvigorate the field of cruising scholarship. What is more, I suggest that a more nuanced account of the way cruising encounters do unfold—at least for queer creatives such as Rechy and Ripploh—rather than the way they should unfold might put pressure on the scholarly tendency to view cruising, as most gay male scholars do, as a force of unqualified good. Such a critical reassessment, in turn, might give rise to a more thorough appreciation of the richness, complexity, and ethical ambivalence of cruising as it is actually practiced and imagined.

For most gay male scholars, cruising represents a radically prosocial practice. Laud Humphreys, for example, suggested as early as 1970 that “there exists a sort of democracy…endemic to impersonal sex,” since “[m]en of all racial, social, educational, and physical characteristics meet…for sexual union” (13). Dennis Altman—whose book The Homosexualization of America appeared in 1982—described cruising in almost identical terms, claiming that it involves “a certain sexual democracy, even camaraderie”: “The willingness to have sex immediately, promiscuously, with people about whom one knows nothing and from whom one demands only physical contact, can be seen as a sort of Whitmanesque democracy, a desire to know and trust other men in a type of brotherhood far removed from the male bonding of rank, hierarchy, and competition that characterizes much of the outside world” (79, 79–80). More recent accounts of cruising, too, have treated it as a uniquely egalitarian form of sexual praxis, since it requires gay men to “open themselves up to difference” and engage in “contact between cultures, classes, races, and nationalities” (G. Brown 925; Newman 180). Indeed, Leo Bersani suggests that, insofar as “in cruising—at least in ideal cruising—we leave our selves behind,” the practice “exemplifies a distinctive ethic of openness to alterity” (“Sociability” 28), and Tim Dean claims that “we all, gay and nongay, have something to learn” from its “relational ethic” (176). Driven by a form of sexual desire that seems to transcend social difference, cruising expresses for many gay scholars an impulse toward queer utopia.Footnote ³

This understanding of cruising is in large part facilitated by its intimate relationship with the phenomenon of contact.Footnote ⁴ “[C]ontact,” as Samuel Delany puts it in his cruising memoir Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, describes a kind of fleeting, ephemeral, unplanned encounter in public space, “the intercourse—physical and conversational—that blooms in and as ‘casual sex’ in public rest rooms, sex movies, public parks, singles bars, and sex clubs, on street corners with heavy hustling traffic, and in the adjoining motels or the apartments of one or another participant, from which nonsexual friendships and/or acquaintances lasting for decades or a lifetime may spring” (123). This mode of social relation is distinct from the carefully controlled connections that occur in what Delany calls “networking”: whereas networking is an intentional behavior—it is “what people…do when those with like interests live too far apart to be thrown together in public spaces through chance and propinquity” (128)—contact revolves around chance encounter and encourages engagement across difference. Like Humphreys, Altman, and Dean, Delany claims that contact is a “necessary” component of queer sexual culture in “a democratic metropolis” (127). This is because, as Robert Reid-Pharr puts it, cruising, for Delany, “encourage[s] contact across differences of race, gender, religion, ethnicity, and especially class.”Footnote ⁵ Not only does this kind of contact “provoke…and underwrite…the security, possibility, contentment, and astonishment that are the necessary ingredients of successful urban life” (Reid-Pharr xii); it is “what gives one a faithful and loving attitude toward one’s neighborhood, one’s city, one’s nation,” and “the world” (Delany 126), fostering the kind of “ecological ethics” that, for Bersani, makes cruising such a useful mode of relation (“Sociability” 30).Footnote ⁶ To understand cruising as a form of contact, then, is to foreground the way peripatetic movement and ephemeral experience produce its ethos of democratic sociability.

Such a utopian approach to cruising is, of course, not without its critics. For, as Bersani himself notes, “[a]nyone who has ever spent one night in a gay bathhouse knows that it is (or was) one of the most ruthlessly ranked, hierarchized, and competitive environments imaginable. Your looks, muscles, hair distribution, size of cock, and shape of ass determined exactly how happy you were going to be during those few hours” (“Is the Rectum” 206). A far cry from “Whitmanesque democracy,” most cruising cultures rely on “hierarchies of exclusion” that, though sometimes different from those that shape broader society, are nonetheless very real (McGlotten 13). Indeed, though chance encounter plays a role in cruising, many cruisers are actually more purposive than cruising scholarship tends to suggest. Even the most vocal proponents of cruising as a form of radically egalitarian contact (such as Delany and Dean) do not actually have much to say about spontaneous sexual encounters on the street; rather, they build their theories around the kind of cruising that goes on in semipublic spaces such as bathhouses, sex clubs, and porn theaters—pay-to-play spaces that men expressly visit to cruise. Even if cruising involves “opening oneself to the world” (Dean 210), then, this opening remains calculated and intentional, for, as Dean himself admits, cruising is not a “Dionysian, indiscriminate activity” but a “carefully self-regulated and fully socialized behavior, with its own etiquette and conventions” (185). In other words, a tension exists between the picture painted by queer studies of cruising as a utopian sexual practice—one that, through random and promiscuous engagement with others, fosters connection across social difference—and the more exclusionary, “end-directed” cruising that takes place in many cruising cultures (Nott 345).

For a telling illustration of such end-directed cruising, one need look no further than Rechy’s work. In Rechy’s fiction (which is largely autobiographical) and creative nonfiction, cruising is not driven by a desire for connection but rather depicted as a form of combat. In his experimental “prose documentary” The Sexual Outlaw, for example, Rechy’s protagonist, Jim, sees himself as a “gladiator”; when he visits a cruisy beach, he conceives of the space as an “arena” (15, 24). Rechy’s novel Numbers doubles down on this understanding of cruising. The protagonist, Johnny Rio, compulsively cruises the hiking trails in Griffith Park during a brief visit to Los Angeles. Not only does Rio dub a particular section of the park “the Arena”; he actually clashes with other cruisers there. After begrudgingly giving another man a golden shower, for example, Rio and his partner immediately become “bitter enemies,” “blazing” with “anger” (254). And whenever another attractive young man appears in the park, Rio immediately identifies him as competition: “In one sharp look—and only one—they became rivals, declare war” (144). In stark contrast to Delany’s account of cruising as a “relaxed and friendly” experience (127), Rechy frames it as a cutthroat battle for sexual dominance—one with clear winners and losers.

This battle is so cutthroat because, for Rechy, the stakes are nothing less than the continued existence of the self. This self-centeredness is particularly evident in Numbers. Before Rio embarks on his cruising odyssey, he feels “curiously that he had ceased to exist, that he existed only in the mirror”; when, years ago, he was a regular of the Los Angeles cruising scene, “others had confirmed his existence with admiration” (23). It is his “enormous” need “to be admired, wanted, adored,” then, that drives him back to Griffith Park (33). Once there, he engages strictly in selfish forms of sexual contact, his “sex scene” being distinctly “one-way”: “Johnny isn’t a hunter; he’s used to being hunted…. He could never, never allow anyone—male or female—the pleasure of feeling he wanted him/her enough to initiate the pursuit” (130, 45). Between scores, he makes periodic trips to the park restroom, where, “impatient to be alone with the Mirror,” “he kisses his own reflection” (137, 138). In Rechy’s writing, cruising is not about a loss of the self, the “will[ing],” as Bersani might put it, of one’s “own lessness”; instead, it is about a kind of existential narcissism, a desire to reinvigorate the power and value of the self (“Sociability” 30).

Rechy thus pushes back against the utopianism of cruising scholarship in several ways. First of all, he demonstrates that cruising is not necessarily about connecting with others across social difference; in fact, it is not about connecting with others at all. Rather, it is just as often about using others to bolster one’s ego and resolidify the boundaries of the self. Such an understanding of cruising, of course, already haunts Delany’s account of his experiences in Times Square porn theaters. For even as Delany extols the democratic virtues of cross-class contact, his encounters with working-class and homeless men seem, like Rio’s “sex scene,” disconcertingly “one-way,” shaped, as they are, by the conspicuous economic imbalance between Delany and his partners. As Ricardo Montez puts it, Delany’s cross-class desire “frames itself as empathetic with the other but in reality is only about the self. This desire allows Delany meaningful relations without fully considering the men with whom he comes in contact” (427).Footnote ⁷ Second, Rechy highlights the limits of theorizing cruising as a radically democratic practice, since Rechy’s protagonists are highly selective about their partners. Rather than have sex with anyone, they carefully and explicitly weigh the pros and cons of prospective partners against one another; more than once, for example, Rio rejects a man’s advances because the man is too kinky or not attractive enough. This selectiveness foregrounds what is perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Rechy’s writing on cruising—the fact that, for Rechy, cruising is not aimless or random. In fact, Rechy’s cruisers are hyperfocused, intent on performing particular sexual acts with particular types of men. From Dean’s perspective, then, they embody the very worst kind of cruiser: whereas “aimless cruising”—Dean’s preferred kind—“entails a centrifugal openness,” “cruising as a single-minded quest insulates the self from alterity by centripetally narrowing the attention, often to crotch level” (211). Simply put, Rechy’s writing about cruising—which represents some of the most explicit and most widely read creative work on the subject—cannot be readily explained by conventional scholarly accounts of the phenomenon.

What is a queer studies scholar to make of this tension? If Rechy conceives of cruising not as an openness to alterity but as a “narrowing [of] the attention, often to crotch level,” what kind of theoretical apparatus must be built to account for his position? The key, I think, lies in the dynamics of narrowed attention, the way cruising revolves, on a fundamental level, around specific kinds of hyperfocused looking. After all, while the verb to cruise is often used intransitively by queer studies scholars—meaning, roughly, “to circulate aimlessly” or “to search for semipublic sex”—it can also be used in a transitive sense, meaning “to solicit sexual contact with a look.” This is the sense in which Rechy most frequently uses the term in Numbers, as when, for example, an “attractive man begins to cruise” Rio (74).Footnote ⁸ Thinking seriously about this kind of cruising—by which I mean cruising as a transitive perceptual phenomenon rather than an intransitive spatial or sociosexual practice—requires turning away from the sociological perspective of Delany and the psychoanalytic perspectives of Dean and Bersani and taking a more phenomenological approach. And while this shift necessitates a revision of long-standing scholarly assumptions about what cruising is and how it ought to be discussed, such a shift is also necessary to make sense of an author such as Rechy, who is deeply interested in cruising’s transitive nature. More importantly, embracing such a shift helps to push back against the prescriptive tendencies of so much existing scholarship on cruising, which, more often than not, claims that everyone should cruise (and that everyone should cruise in a particular aimless, open way). Taking Rechy’s purposive, transitive cruising seriously provides a way to describe cruising interactions more honestly and realistically, shifting attention away from what should happen in such interactions and toward what often does happen in them.

I am not, of course, the first person to consider “the important role the senses play” in cruising (Atkins and Laing 624). Indeed, even as scholars tend to prize cruising for its supposedly radical social potential, most acknowledge that it is “a profoundly optical phenomenon,” a “combination of gazes and movements” that reduces sociosexual encounters to a series of nonverbal cues (Parlett 3; Bech 106). Evelyn Hooker, for example—whose sociological studies of “the homosexual community” in the 1960s represent some of the earliest academic work on cruising—notes that, at a gay bar,

Humphreys, too, is struck by “the silence of the interaction,” the way, “[t]hroughout most homosexual encounters in public restrooms, nothing is spoken” (12). Even Dean admits that “[m]uch of what goes on in a sex club is silent, because, unlike elsewhere, verbal language is not required for seduction. Communication in such spaces is primarily visual and tactile” (35). As Henning Bech hyperbolically puts it, “[I]t is impossible to be homosexual without having a gaze” (108). And while Bech obviously overgeneralizes here, he is, I think, correct in claiming that to cruise means to “use your gaze…in the right way, for a right way there is” (105).

What, one might ask, does this “right way” look like? On some level, it looks like the coy, carefully patterned exchange of glances described by Hooker. Such an exchange is central to the various how-to accounts of cruising that were published throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Bech’s When Men Meet: Homosexuality and Modernity, for example, describes the experience of bar cruising in terms strikingly similar to those of Hooker:

Charles Silverstein and Edmund White’s The Joy of Gay Sex describes cruising on the street in much the same way:

For Bech and for Silverstein and White, to use one’s gaze the “right way” is to think carefully and consciously about its semiotics, to offer and withhold one’s looks in a calculatedly seductive way.

Yet cruising does not simply rely on a particular pattern or rhythm of looking; it also requires a look of a particular intensity. This look, as Elspeth H. Brown puts it, “is a frank look, bordering on the stare, held past the moment of polite friendliness. There is an affective intensity, invitation, and duration to the look that distinguishes it from other visual exchanges between strangers” (304). The look is so intense because, as Bech points out, it is “a matter of seduction”: “the gaze must be more audacious, it must linger—not too long, but longer than otherwise, then be taken away again slightly slower than otherwise, as if sticking voluptuously to the other’s and only reluctantly tearing itself away from its string of toffee” (107). To cruise in the transitive sense, in other words, means to look at someone a little too closely, a little too long. It is to allow one’s gaze to cling to another person as if it were a viscous, material substance.

If cruising involves a mode of looking that, in and of itself, is almost tangible, it should perhaps come as no surprise that, for some gay men, “the process of cruising…is as important, if not more so, than the climax” (Brasell 60); indeed, “the moment of optical contact between strangers” sometimes constitutes “the event itself” (Parlett 46). Consequently, the cruising glance does not, as Bech puts it, always need to be used “as a means to achieve further contact”:

Indeed, cruising of this sort calls into question “the notion,” as Mica Hilson puts it, “that a sexual encounter requires direct physical contact” at all (55). In other words, while this form of cruising does involve contact, it is not the social and physical contact that makes the phenomenon so appealing to Dean and Delany; rather, it involves eroticized eye contact. Investing the look itself with erotic intensity and pleasure, such cruising reorganizes the relationship between visual perception and sexual contact.

I thus propose that we think of cruising as, to borrow a phrase from Maurice Blanchot, “contact at a distance” (32). In coining the term contact at a distance, Blanchot expands on the philosophical concept of action at a distance, which “occurs when spatially separated bodies impress a force on one another…without an intervening material or immaterial substance between them” (Ducheyne 678). Versions of the question that this phenomenon poses about the nature of causality—namely, the question of how “distant bodies” can “be present to each other” (Tallarico 255)—have appeared in philosophical and scientific writings from Greek antiquity to the present.Footnote ⁹ The idea of contact at a distance takes action at a distance one step further, imagining a form of distant action that paradoxically occurs through embodied touch.

For Blanchot, this is facilitated by a specific kind of visual perception. Whereas simple “[s]eeing presupposes distance, decisiveness which separates, the power to stay out of contact and in contact avoid confusion,” sometimes “what you see, although at a distance, seems to touch you with a gripping contact”; in these situations, “seeing is a kind of touch,” a form of “contact at a distance” in which “what is seen imposes itself upon the gaze, as if the gaze were seized, put in touch with the appearance” (32). In this mode of perception—which Blanchot terms “fascination” (33)—sight becomes, as Brigitte Weingart puts it, “literal eye-contact” (78); the look becomes “a medium of affects” that “can have psychological and even physical effects” (78, 77). In other words, fascinated visual perception entails a kind of “virtual touch,” producing an “experience in which feelings of touch” are “elicited through the visual senses, transcending the presence of physical contact” (Bennett 247).

This tactile form of looking, or haptic sight, gathers through the eye sense impressions that would typically be gathered through touch. In haptic sight, there is, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari put it, no “opposition between two sense organs,” for “the eye itself has a…nonoptical function” (494). Instead, the eye functions as a kind of skin, “problematiz[ing] the distinction between the visual and the tactile” (Bora 106). Haptic sight is, at its core, a kind of contact at a distance: treating the gaze as an agent of physical touch, it turns the act of looking into an act of touching.

The scholarly field where this mode of looking has played the biggest role is, perhaps unsurprisingly, film studies. In particular, it figures conspicuously in the work of critics such as Laura U. Marks and Jennifer M. Barker, who, dissatisfied with psychoanalytic accounts of film spectatorship, have attempted to develop a more phenomenological theory of cinema.Footnote ¹⁰ For Marks and Barker, film spectatorship is not a purely visual phenomenon; rather, it functions as a kind of physical contact, appealing “to embodied knowledge, and to the sense of touch in particular” (Marks, Skin 129). Indeed, the theory of “haptic visuality” that Marks outlines in her work is a theory of “a visuality that functions like the sense of touch” (22). Interestingly enough, both Marks and Barker conceive of this visuality as distinctly sexy. For insofar as, in haptic spectatorship, “[w]e and the film are adjacent to one another, pressed against each other, in contact” (Barker 31)—indeed, we “caress” the screen “by moving the eyes” along it “softly and fondly” (32)—“the tactile relationship between the film and the viewer is fundamentally erotic” (34). Not only does phenomenological film theory conceive cinematic spectatorship as contact at a distance; it specifically conceives it as a form of erotic contact.

It in some ways makes sense, then, that Marks and Barker describe the experience of spectatorship in terms uncannily similar to those of cruising. On the one hand, haptic spectatorship involves the kind of “aimlessness and serendipity” that, for so many queer studies scholars, is a defining feature of intransitive cruising (Barker 32). For, in haptic spectatorship, the gaze wanders across the surface of the screen, “mov[ing] without a particular destination” (Barker 32); it is “more inclined to move than to focus, more inclined to graze than to gaze” (Marks, Skin 162). On the other hand, this propensity to “graze” rather than “gaze” involves an abdication of visual mastery, a “respect,” in Marks’s words, “for otherness, and concomitant loss of self in the presence of the other” (Touch 21). As another phenomenological film critic puts it, “[t]he ethics of haptic visuality”—which are strikingly similar to Dean’s “ethic of openness to alterity”—“correspond with a kind of looking which yields to a body that cannot be possessed, motivated by a searching gaze which fails to rest on a single entity or body” (Quinlivan 69). The look of the haptic spectator, then, is more or less the look of the cruiser, a kind of erotic, oculocentric contact at a distance that, according to Marks, opens the self up to the other in an ethical way.

If scholars such as Marks and Barker already implicitly theorize the erotics and ethics of embodied spectatorship as the erotics and ethics of cruising, one need only take a small step to arrive at a theory of cruising as a form of haptic contact at a distance. Yet the theory of haptics outlined by Marks and Barker—like so many theories of cruising—is not neutral; indeed, Marks and Barker present it as a more ethical alternative to imperialist, phallocentric theories of cinema that frame spectatorship as a form of visual mastery. It thus falls into the same trap as much cruising scholarship, prescribing haptic contact as a mode of ethical relation rather than simply describing its effects. How can this ethical optimism be reconciled with the fact that, as I have argued, cruising does not always lend itself to a “loss of self in the presence of the other”? How might the idea of haptic visuality be brought into conversation with the kind of cruising depicted in Rechy, which is purposive, end-directed, and distinctly selfish?

One way, I think, is to examine the cinema of cruising. Ripploh’s autobiographical film Taxi zum Klo, for example, grapples with many of the questions regarding contact and visuality with which I have been concerned. The “first popular post–gay liberation film to break through to mainstream audiences” (Russo 270), Taxi zum Klo follows a lightly fictionalized version of Ripploh, who works as a schoolteacher, as he navigates both West Berlin’s lively cruising scene and a new, uncharacteristically domestic relationship with a man named Bernd (based on and played by Ripploh’s real-life boyfriend, Bernd Broaderup). At its core, the film is about the pleasures and dangers of cruising. And while it illustrates many familiar elements of cruising (such as its association with geographic circulation and its impetus toward physical contact with strangers), it also goes out of its way to highlight the role of eye contact in cruising encounters. What is more, the film offers another example of the sort of purposive cruising portrayed in Rechy, since Ripploh’s need to cruise is depicted as almost compulsive. It thus portrays cruising as a kind of intentional contact at a distance.

This is perhaps most clearly illustrated in the scene in which a leatherman cruises Ripploh—who at this point in the film has already moved in with Bernd—at an ATM. Ripploh is standing in the ATM booth when the leatherman appears at the booth’s window. The leatherman stares at Ripploh. Ripploh looks up with a slight smile on his face and makes eye contact. After he pockets his money, Ripploh leaves the booth and finds the leatherman—who, it is now revealed, wears chaps over jeans—standing outside on the sidewalk. The leatherman lights a cigarette and strikes an obvious pose, inviting Ripploh to look him over. When Ripploh turns to leave, the leatherman follows him, and Ripploh glances over his shoulder to make sure he is there. The next scene—which is the most sexually explicit in the film—shows Ripploh and his partner engaging in a variety of sex acts, from kissing and frottage to oral and anal sex. Halfway through this encounter, Bernd comes home. Instead of interrupting Ripploh and the leatherman (as one might expect him to), he presses his eye to a chink in the bedroom door and watches them have sex. Just as the scene is about to end, he begins to masturbate.

This sequence illustrates both how important a certain kind of looking is to cruising and how looking can take the place of physical contact. Like Hooker’s bar cruisers, Ripploh and the leatherman “agree to a sexual exchange” without saying a word to each other. Indeed, the scene follows the kind of shot-countershot pattern that is typically used to depict dialogue in classical cinema, zooming in on the face of one man and then the other, framing their charged glances as a form of nonverbal conversation. The leatherman’s intentional posing after this exchange serves to highlight the visuality of the encounter, inviting Ripploh first to gaze at his leather-clad body, then to touch it. This progression from look to touch, of course, might seem to fly in the face of the argument I have been making, since it frames eye contact as a mere prelude to physical contact. But while Ripploh makes the leap from eye contact to genital contact, Bernd does not. He does, however, take obvious sexual pleasure in the act of looking. Bernd thus becomes implicated in Ripploh’s sexual encounter not by physically joining in—as, in the next scene, Ripploh suggests he should have—but merely by watching. In other words, he derives sexual pleasure not from physical contact but from optical contact.

Behind the play of looks within these scenes is the extradiegetic look of the camera itself, which engages in its own kind of haptic cruising. In the ATM scene, for example, the camera’s shot-countershot pattern not only frames the glances of Ripploh and the leatherman as a form of dialogue but also locates the viewer in the place of the cruiser. Alternately positioning the viewer as Ripploh and the leatherman, the scene’s camerawork implicates the viewer in their exchange of looks. Something similar happens in the following sex scene, much of which seems to be shot from the perspective of Bernd. Indeed, the camera frequently takes on a cruisy look of its own throughout the film, peering through gloryholes in public restrooms and lingering caressingly on men’s bodies in bathhouses. Embracing the kind of erotically tactile cinematography that is so important to Marks and Barker, the film unfolds through a series of both diegetic and extradiegetic cruises.

The film’s tactility is tied to the purposiveness of the cruising it depicts. For Taxi zum Klo, much like Numbers, frames cruising not as a “relaxed and friendly” activity but as a compulsion. Ripploh cannot seem to keep himself from cruising, no matter how much he knows he should stop. In one of the film’s most memorable sequences, for example, Ripploh, who is supposed to be recovering from an unidentified (but likely sexually transmitted) disease, sneaks out of his hospital room in order to cruise.Footnote ¹¹ Hailing a taxi, he goes from public restroom to public restroom—hospital gown tucked into his pants, cab meter conspicuously ticking—in search of anonymous sex. Even when he knows he should stop cruising for his own health and for the health of others, he cannot help himself.

This compulsion culminates near the end of the film, when Ripploh takes Bernd to a drag ball. At the ball, Ripploh abandons Bernd in order to flirt with other men, and, for much of the ball, Bernd simply stands by himself, looking around awkwardly. Finally, he decides he has had enough and leaves. In the final scene of the film, Ripploh—who, despite everything, does seem to love Bernd—worries that his promiscuity has driven Bernd away forever and hopes that the two of them will still be able to reconcile. Yet the film ends with Ripploh looking into a mirror, removing his makeup and wondering, “Können wir mehr als uns nur wiederholen?” (“Can we do more than just repeat ourselves?”; my trans.). Even faced with the possibility of losing Bernd, he is unsure that he can force himself to stop cruising.

This understanding of cruising as an irresistible compulsion plays an important role in Rechy’s Numbers as well. At first, Rio tries to rationalize his desire to cruise. Treating his time in Griffith Park as a game, he tells himself that if he can make sexual contact with thirty men in ten days, he will be done with cruising for good. Once he achieves this goal, he declares that from now on, he will only have sex “with people with identity—men or women—people I know, not people without names—not just ‘numbers.’” He is so emphatic about this resolution because the longer he spends in the park, the less he feels in control of his own desires: “That was the spooky part; that’s what the Park was all about…and the numbers. Losing control and losing identity. But I’m in control again, and that’s what I won” (235). Faced with the threat of losing control, Rio rationalizes his time in the park as a means of shoring up his identity and mastering his desire.

Yet at the same time, Rio’s actions resist rationalization. Even after he accumulates thirty “numbers,” he finds himself irresistibly drawn back to the cruising grounds: “it was suddenly as if a force beyond himself was pulling him physically to the Park” (243). At this point, he can no longer even attempt to rationalize this pull, since there is “[n]o ‘reason’” for him to return (244). Tellingly, this unrationalizable pull is not entirely unfamiliar to Rio; in fact, he has felt it to a greater or lesser degree since the beginning of the novel. On Rio’s initial drive into Los Angeles, for example, “[h]e tells himself to slow down, but he doesn’t. He feels carried on a current—not so much he who is driving but he who is being driven—as if the highway is pulling him” (15). When, after arriving in the city, he visits a porn theater, he also finds himself irresistibly drawn to the notoriously cruisy balcony: “Johnny tells himself insistently he doesn’t want to go upstairs,” “[b]ut already he’s gotten up, already he’s pushing the door to the lobby” (40). Put simply, Rio, like Ripploh, experiences the need to cruise as a compulsion.

This line of reasoning, of course, complicates the reading of Rechy that I outlined earlier. For, yes, the extreme purposiveness of Rio’s mission in Los Angeles pushes back against conventional scholarly accounts of cruising as open-ended and nonteleological. And, yes, Rio engages in this form of cruising in an attempt to shore up his identity and master his desires. Yet insofar as Numbers—like Taxi zum Klo—depicts cruising as a compulsion, it also shows this project of self-mastery to be a fraught endeavor, one driven by a force within the self that resists mastery. In other words, Rio’s cruising may, at its core, be motivated by narcissism, but this narcissism troubles and exceeds the control of the rational self. What is more, Rio experiences this excess not, as Dean would have it, as “a source of pleasure” but as one of “traumatic disruption” (210). Indeed, Numbers suggests that the compulsion to cruise vacillates between narcissistic self-validation and traumatic loss of self-control.

One could, if one were so inclined, follow in the footsteps of Dean and Bersani and theorize this ambivalence in psychoanalytic terms. After all, the uncontrollable, repetitive behaviors of purposive cruising could easily be explained by Sigmund Freud’s concept of the repetition compulsion, and the half-conscious motive Rio provides for his actions in Griffith Park—“To stop the flow! A stasis in time! A pause! The liberation of orgasm!”—is more or less a textbook expression of the death drive (Rechy, Numbers 149). Yet I would like to approach cruising’s compulsive nature from a different angle, because even as it might be explained in psychoanalytic terms, it gestures just as readily toward the discourse of sexology. On the one hand, the understanding of cruising as compulsive was, as recently as the 1990s, taken by some to be sexological common sense: as the Descriptive Dictionary and Atlas of Sexology puts it, “Some sexologists feel that cruising is a sexual addiction” that involves “a repeated and never-satisfied search for an idealized or lost sexual partner or experience” (“Cruising”). On the other hand, this understanding of cruising also recalls some of the very earliest work in the field of sexology—such as that of Carl Friedrich Otto Westphal—which, as I have argued elsewhere, often framed homoerotic desire as itself a “compulsive misdirection of attention” (Kindig 278). Rather than consider the compulsive behaviors of cruising in psychoanalytic terms, then, it might be more productive to follow the lead of the scholars whose work appears in a recent special issue of GLQ, The Science of Sex Itself, and approach them from a sexological perspective (Kahan and LaFleur).

This approach, in the end, is productive because sexology is more closely linked to that form of contact at a distance that has been the focus of this essay. While psychoanalysis has much to say about the pleasures and perils of voyeurism and scopophilia, early sexologists actually described the queer gaze in strikingly haptic terms. Albert Moll’s early sexological writings, for example, documented a behavior among “Uranists” (or male inverts) that closely resembled modern cruising: “If Uranist A encounters man B who pleases him, he turns, looks at him, and forces his attention. If B is also a Uranist he understands A’s maneuvers and responds in like manner.” In such an encounter, the two Uranists—like Ripploh and the leatherman—“recognize each other by a sort of eye language”; even more interestingly, “Uranist A” seems capable of exerting a kind of action at a distance on Uranist B, “forc[ing] his attention” with a mere look (84). Richard von Krafft-Ebing took this line of reasoning a step further, suggesting that, for some male inverts, “even only the sight of the loved person” might “induce the act of ejaculation” (223). To approach cruising from a sexological perspective, then, is to situate it within an intellectual tradition that has long linked homosexuality to both compulsion and action at a distance.

Ultimately, it is useful to reconceptualize cruising as a form of contact at a distance because it makes sense of two key features of the phenomenon that are often overlooked by cruising scholarship. On the one hand, such a framework explains how and why so much cruising fails to live up to the prosocial ideal of aimless, sociable contact that Delany, Dean, and Bersani describe—why it is instead sometimes characterized by selfishness, purposiveness, and a hyperfocused desire for sexual encounters “necessarily and compulsively repeated” (Worton 39). On the other hand, it accounts for the unique intensity of the cruising look, the way eye contact itself functions as an erotic encounter for some cruisers. What is more, in accounting for both of these features, this approach to cruising clarifies why compulsion figures so prominently in cruising narratives such as Numbers and Taxi zum Klo: not only is the purposive cruiser driven by an irresistible compulsion to cruise—pulled to the park or the public restroom almost against his will—but the cruiser’s gaze is also capable of compelling the actions of others, forcing, as Moll puts it, the attention of other cruisers. Many of cruising’s fundamental characteristics are thus best explained if the phenomenon is understood as a form of haptic sight, a kind of compulsive, erotic contact at a distance.

If cruising is conceptualized in this way, the nostalgia with which many queer studies scholars write about the phenomenon begins to seem a bit strange. Indeed, much of the ethical posturing around cruising implicitly or explicitly frames it as a more just alternative to the exclusivity of online sexual cultures. Dean, for example, positions open-ended cruising against the “cruising as an instance of networking” that, at least when he was writing in 2009, was encouraged by hookup sites such as Craigslist: “When other persons are thus commodified [online], the possibility of genuine contact appears remote…. [C]ruising online enables one to have sex with strangers without contact” (191, 194). Shaka McGlotten suggests that “[h]ookup sites and cruising apps reduce social worlds of public sex to bad faith erotic free markets” (5). Dean and McGlotten, of course, are emblematic of a much broader trend in cruising scholarship that tends to celebrate in-person cruising for the way it introduces chance and surprise into sexual encounters. For whereas “Internet hookups create an impression of unprecedented control over one’s erotic engagement with others,” in-person cruising seems to involve a relinquishment of control, a willing of one’s own lessness (Dean 193).

I have argued that the distinction between cruising as a form of egalitarian contact and other, less open-ended forms of sexual networking is, at best, a tenuous one, since much in-person cruising entails selection, exclusion, and hyperfocus. Yet to conceive of cruising as contact at a distance is also to call into question the clear-cut distinction Dean and McGlotten make between in-person sexual contact and virtual sexual contact. If, after all, in-person cruising involves a kind of touch that does not require touch—a form of contact that does not require physical proximity—is it really so different from the virtual contact involved in Internet cruising? To think of cruising as contact at a distance, in other words, is to reimagine the relationship between in-person and online cruising, to reframe the difference between these two behaviors not as one of kind (i.e., contact versus networking) but as one of degree (i.e., short-distance versus long-distance contact).

This revision is useful for two reasons. On the one hand, it helps to explain the popularity of online cruising, since it suggests that the pleasures derived from online cruising are very similar to those derived from in-person cruising. This is not an insignificant achievement, since online cruising has become a major source of pleasure for many men seeking sex with other men. This is in large part because, as one sociological study puts it, it allows men to “offset sexual risk while still being able to ‘get off’” (Robinson and Moskowitz 555). In other words, the virtual contact facilitated by online cruising functions in much the same way eye contact functions in in-person cruising: it minimizes the possibility of adverse social and sexual effects while still offering cruisers what Bech would term “pleasure, excitement,” and “affirmation.” On the other hand—and perhaps more importantly—theorizing cruising as contact at a distance helps to shift scholarly attention away from the prescriptive and toward the descriptive. For insofar as much cruising scholarship positions the supposed ethicality of in-person cruising against the unethical exclusivity of online cruising, it is more concerned with how cruising should work than how it does work. If, however, in-person cruising and virtual cruising simply represent different manifestations of the same phenomenon, it would behoove scholars to stop worrying about which form of cruising people ought to be practicing and begin thinking about how cruising actually occurs, exploring how and why many cruisers in fact take pleasure in acts that do not involve genital contact.

To put things bluntly, I think Muñoz is correct when he suggests that “books of criticism that simply glamorize the ontology of gay male cruising are more often than not simply boring” (19). This is because such books limit the scope of intellectual possibility when it comes to theorizing casual sex. Rather than embrace the ethical and conceptual messiness of actual cruising practices, they rehearse the same old story about cruising’s radical prosocial potential. And insofar as they fetishize cruising not for its practical impact but for its abstract potential, they simultaneously remove it from the realm of actual praxis and stall critical conversation about its real-world effects. Ironically, then, they might be said to engage in the theoretical equivalent of that purposive, single-minded cruising of which they are so critical, compulsively repeating the same intellectual moves over and over again. To reinvigorate the field of cruising scholarship, those of us who study the phenomenon must renew our attention to cruising itself. We must take seriously the multiple modes of contact that constitute the practice, and we must explore the social, sexual, and intellectual possibilities—both good and bad, both pleasurable and frightening—that these modes of contact open up.