Cruising Culture: Promiscuity and Desire in Contemporary American Gay Culture

we look back at this period and see only three features: drugs, attitude, and kinky sex. We pathologize the men and the culture of the 1970s from what we consider the superior morality of the 1990s. Huge numbers of men who participated most intensely in gay culture in the 1970s are dead and thus unable to provide voices that would broaden recollections and perspectives on those years. Many men died ugly and painful deaths, yet never stopped valuing the erotic experiences of those years and died with no regrets.72

While White realistically draws attention to the intermittent selfishness, excess and attitude of that era – qualities which can, of course, be unearthed in various forms in any period of history – his novel partly functions as a corrective to such smug justifications of an anti-promiscuous agenda for the present with a simplistically anti-promiscuous reading of the past. Indeed, The Farewell Symphony’s implicit defence of gay promiscuity, in all its difficult complexity, against this prevalent gay and straight cultural marriage-and-monogamy mandate became explicit when Kramer attacked White in his 1997 ‘Sex and sensibility’

article for writing a novel that ‘parades before the reader what seems to be every trick he’s ever sucked, fucked, rimmed, tied up, pissed on, or been sucked by, fucked by, rimmed by, tied up by – you get the idea.

There are so many faceless, indistinguishable pieces of flesh that litter these 500 pages that reading them becomes, for any reasonably sentient human being, at first a heartless experience and finally a boring one.’73

In response to Kramer’s wilfully selective accoun

promiscuity than Rechy’s fiction. To be more specific, although both writers express an erotic fascination with butch (and/or straight) men, unlike Rechy’s variously defensive and self-conscious machismo, Wojnarowicz only ever indirectly identifies with conventional forms of ‘masculinity’. (More on this

nor our joy in each other . . . [T]hat meant we had to write it ourselves, learn by living it out’120; Rechy’s observation in City of Night of heterosexual women’s

. ‘Let me tell you,’ describes

[sic] Ira L. Jeffries, who came out in Harlem in the 1940s, ‘Harlem’s lesbian and gay community was thriving until certain white business men realised the money we generated and wanted to tap into it. Starting in the 1960s, our clubs were either systematically closed or mysteriously burned down. Finally, there was nothing left, so we were all forced to go downtown.’108)

I have so far tracked dominant and marginalised modern American understandings of promiscuity largely through etymology and ideology, rather than through the existing documentation of material sexual practices. While the ensuing chapters will explore particular gay male concepts and practices of promiscuity in more detail, I include here a necessarily brief outline of twentieth-century gay promiscuity in America, to contextualise those later specific examples.68

In the context of American history, incidences – and fantasies – of male same-sexual promiscuity have been invoked ever since the seventeenth-century Anglo-European colonisation of the New World. Jonathan Goldberg has notably dissected ‘the colonialist’s [narratives of ] promiscuous natives and degenerate underclasses’, who were recurrently – if by no means primarily – demonised for alleged same-sexual activities strenuously disavowed within the colonisers themselves.

some gay men think promiscuity is a revolutionary ideal that can transform the world, release human energy, and make the planet a better place to live. . . . Others think promiscuity is the freeway to hell.’52

A 1982 article in The Advocate on potential links between sexual practice and the newly discovered virus exemplifies this well-advised gay suspicion of the term as it declares: ‘one word is like a hand grenade in the whole [health crisis] affair: promiscuity