Cruising Risk, Surviving Desire

Cruising tearooms—public restrooms used for anonymous sex—involves a series of intuited and felt gestures and glances. An assemblage of sexual play, coded body movements, and the threat of exposure, cruising relies on the intimate negotiation between a person’s desire and the risk of semipublic sexual encounters. With the long history of paranoid normative fears of queer desires, cruising has always been more than exhibitionism for queer people as it offers a critical way for queer people to be with each other. Because of the risk produced by normativity, queer theory and art have positioned risk as the motivating and propelling energy for queer desire. However, beginning with the infamous bathroom cruising police sting in 1962 Mansfield, Ohio, this chapter examines the intimacy between risk and desire for queerness and argues for a reconsideration of cruising’s positioning in and for queer thought. Using Robert Yang ’s cruising simulator videogame, The Tearoom (2017) as a guiding text, along with ethnographic studies, police footage, and pornography, cruising becomes a pedagogical tool for the mutuality of risk and desire in queerness.