Ungrievable Intimacies: What the History of Cruising in Public Toilets Tells Us About the Contingency of Sex

• In Event: Publics, Sex, and the History of Sexuality

Abstract

How might exploring the history of cruising in public toilets help us think differently about the history of sexuality, public memory, and sexual politics today? This paper draws on examples from the past century of sex between men in bathrooms in the United States alongside materials such as memoirs, sociological studies, activist periodicals, and vice squad policing manuals to advance three theoretical and historical provocations. First, it builds on Judith Butler's exploration of grievability to propose a theory of (un)grievable intimacies, a cultural logic through which sexual cultures and intimate formations are remembered/forgotten and celebrated/castigated. Second, it emphasizes the contingency of sex, interrogating the foundational distinction between culturally constructed sexuality and sex acts as ahistorical "somatic facts" that undergirds much of the history of sexuality and emphasizing the historicity of both specific erotic acts and the systems of meaning that determine what "counts" as sex. Third, it introduces the concept of erotic affordances to explain the role that environment and infrastructure play in dialectically producing sexual acts and cultures. Tracing the rise and fall of a stigmatized, criminalized, and extremely common and widespread American sexual culture challenges key assumptions undergirding erotic historiographies, and suggests that between the respectability of disavowal and the pastoralism of reclamation, a more nuanced and historically informed sexual politics might emerge.

Author

• Nikita Shepard, Elon University