Cruising as Moral Practice

Jordan Osserman reads two recent queer theory books exploring the form and chemistry of sex.

By Jordan OssermanSeptember 7, 2025

• Gender & Sexuality

• Cultural Studies

I WAS CRUISED for the first time at the age of 14 on a family vacation in Miami, when I went by myself to buy a smoothie. As I was sauntering along on the hot sidewalk, fruity beverage in hand, a man stopped me and asked, “¿Que hora es?”

I’d taken two years of middle-school Spanish and understood that he was asking for the time, but I hadn’t paid enough attention in class to provide a grammatically correct answer. I took out my phone and showed him the time. “¿Tu eres gay?” he replied.

I didn’t know the Spanish word for homosexual, but “gay” sounded like “que,” which translated his question into something nonsensical: “Are you what?” He repeated himself, pronouncing it deliberately: “¿Tu eres gay?”—i.e., “Are you gay?”

Panic washed over me. “No, no, no, lo siento,” I replied. My smoothie hit the pavement as I turned and ran.

About 15 years later, I was lying on the couch, speaking to my psychoanalyst about my conflicted relationship with the activity of cruising—the urge that takes me from my desk in the middle of the day to the nearby restrooms where horny men circulate, and then to the “post-nut clarity” when I realize how much time I’ve wasted. “I think everybody I’ve ever regretted having sex with looks like that man in Miami,” I blurted out.

My analyst—a good Lacanian who practices the variable-length session—ended the session there. Something was illuminated—the “crossings” between desire and disgust.

João Florêncio and Liz Rosenfeld’s new book Crossings: Creative Ecologies of Cruising takes a happier view of this subcultural queer practice. They define cruising as “transgressing borders to creatively produce new kinds of multitudes”; as “a sex-cultural formation that wholly refuses a separation between the public and the private, instead inhabiting the space right where the two spheres become porous to one another”; and as “a way of making a home for oneself and others.”

The book is a provocative and sometimes moving creative collaboration. Based at Sweden’s Linköping University, Florêncio is a gay cis male scholar from Portugal who has published extensively on queer sexual subcultures. Rosenfeld is a genderqueer artist, writer, and educator, with a long history of participating in (or “infiltrating,” depending on whom you ask) gay male cruising spaces while attempting to disguise the fact that they are—or were—female-bodied. (The author has recently started taking testosterone and reflects on how their experiences in these spaces—and their evolving sexual interests—have shifted alongside the changes in their body.)

In their acknowledgments, the two authors describe their book as “a love letter between two comrades.” Beyond this, it is hard to define what, exactly, the book is: the back cover calls it “an erotic hybrid form hovering between scholarship and avant-garde experimentation, between critical manifesto and sex memoir.” Divided into four sections (“Space,” “Time,” “Matter,” and “Breath”), it is replete with testimonies and reflections on their experiences of cruising, alongside more theoretical explorations of the practice’s political potential and limits.

The book’s most notable feature may be its voice. The authors describe personal experiences that are often clearly attributable to one or the other of them (we know it is Rosenfeld for whom “my belly is my most empowered sex appendage” and Florêncio whose Grindr hookup asked him, “Where are you from[?] … ’cause you aren’t White, mate”), but they do not explicitly identify which of them is writing at any given moment. Their rationale: “We cruise, become porous to each other, and come together on the pages of this book. We surrender our individuality to the erotics of cruising, to the plural and indiscernible.”

“Porous” is one of their key words, used to emphasize a type of universalism—a radical openness and blurring of boundaries. Cruising encourages porosity and, as such, is the opposite of—and even an antidote to—the world’s exclusionary practices and tendencies. This argument has been made in different vernaculars over the years in queer theory, perhaps most notably (and controversially) in earlier scholarship on gay male “barebacking,” or condomless sex. Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips framed the practice as a kind of “impersonal narcissism”—a counterintuitive celebration of ego-loss by means of anonymous sex—while Tim Dean quipped that it “involves not just hunting for sex but opening oneself to the world.”

That we can, however, so often tell which author in Crossings is speaking—primarily through identity “giveaways”—calls into question some of their hopeful ways of politicizing cruising. In addition, as they themselves acknowledge, cruising can be infused with neoliberal rationality (“to count our loads as if they were figures on a spreadsheet”), thus reinforcing discrimination. Bersani, whom they quote, put it best:

Anyone 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, and rejection, generally accompanied by two or three words at most, could be swift and brutal, with none of the civilizing hypocrisies with which we get rid of undesirables in the outside world.

The best way to interpret Rosenfeld and Florêncio’s not fucking one another might then be as a commentary on cruising’s possibilities and contradictions; the fucking must happen—and it isn’t always “inclusive” or pretty—but their wish to watch each other is a way of bearing witness and honoring the other, and as such is part of their creative practice.

Indeed, in the tenderest moment of the book, they hang out one night in the darkroom of a popular gay bar in Berlin. Florêncio gives someone a blow job and Rosenfeld remarks, “I just watched. I can’t believe I just watched.” Expanding on the scene later, the intimacy between these two nonconjugal lovers becomes palpable:

While I watched you engaged in full blowjob action, I must admit I felt a little guilty, because I was distracted. I wanted to give you my full attention, whether you knew I was watching or not. I didn’t need you to know I was watching. But I thought at least you might feel someone’s eyes on you, another gaze sweeping the space. I have no idea if you are into being watched, but I know I am, and I like to give what I like to receive. I believe in Karma that way. […]

I tucked into an empty booth, texted you that I had gone to get a drink and told you to “take your time, you hungry bottom.”

Crossings left me wondering if my own ambivalence and, at times, embarrassment around cruising reflects my psychoanalytic perspective (for Freud, sexuality is always shot through with conflict)—or am I just overly neurotic?

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Maurice Nagington’s The Moral Lessons of Chemsex: A Critical Approach (2024) takes this question to further extremes. The term “chemsex,” popularized in British public health discourse, is loosely synonymous with “party and play” (or “PnP”) in the United States. It refers to the use of drugs like methamphetamine and GHB to enhance and prolong gay sex, typically in group settings. In the UK, it has become a cultural flash point, fueling moral panic and state intervention.

Nagington, a lecturer in health sciences at the University of Manchester, challenges the popular framing of chemsex as addiction or pathology, arguing instead that chemsex subcultures contain their own valuable moral frameworks, with lessons for the wider society. As with Crossings, utopian definitions pepper the book: chemsex “can have transformative and reparative potentials,” “foster new forms of collectivity and mutual care,” “allow exploration of new potentials for subjectivity,” and (here’s that porosity again) teach us “that we are fundamentally porous beings, constantly penetrated and transformed by our encounters with others.”

Nagington spent a year conducting qualitative interviews with chemsex participants, solicited via Grindr, in his hometown of Manchester in the UK. (Florêncio, too, has written about this subject, albeit without the quantity of empirical data that makes Nagington’s approach unique.)

It is easy to accept Nagington’s argument that pathologizing and moralizing about chemsex is unhelpful. It is much harder to accept his positive gloss when so many of his richly textured examples point elsewhere: the men he interviews speak of losing friends, partners, and livelihoods to drug use, with some ultimately deciding on abstinence and others forging what sound like shaky if livable compromises: “knowing I enjoy getting high … and managing to keep on top of it so that it doesn’t manage me.” (Notably, the book does not feature participants whose usage is sporadic and relatively inconsequential—likely a large population that may not have opted to participate in Nagington’s study.)

Indeed, Nagington’s thesis is at once challenged and illustrated by one of his interviewees, Andrew:

[S]ome of these [people you encounter at a chemsex party] are no longer a manager or a professor or […] the best flute player or something. People’s social statuses and the things that define people just go away. When you’re high, when you feel great, you don’t feel high and great because you’ve accomplished something, because you’ve made this much money and you’ve got that job.

Andrew’s comment is compelling in its incorporation of the negative: drug-fueled orgies are not “reparative” in any traditional sense; rather, they momentarily dissolve socioeconomic hierarchies that—talented flutists notwithstanding—we might indeed be better without. A potentially desirable outcome emerges through destruction. The comment sounds more like a page out of the “antisocial” camp of queer theory—associated with Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), which argues that queerness should embrace the death drive and reject “reproductive futurism”—and less like the cuddly “world-making” celebrated both by Nagington and by Florêncio and Rosenfeld.

On a different note, Nagington rightly points out that the problems chemsex users encounter must be placed in their wider social context: it’s often not (just) the drugs in and of themselves but also failures of care and welfare that underlie problematic usage. He offers the example of Seamus, who reflects on the misery of the comedown:

[Chemsex] just goes on and on, and on and on, and on, and you just find yourself then there’s a sudden stop, everybody’s gone their own ways and you’re left. And that’s when the mind starts working, it’s the demons come out or whatever you want to call them; and you pick up pieces, or you’re trying to pick up the pieces, from there.

Nagington thinks Seamus’s struggle speaks to the hyperindividualized world in which chemsex takes place. “How he feels suddenly isolated with no social support,” Nagington writes, “is not an unavoidable feature of chemsex.” It’s certainly true that, in another context, Seamus could find better sources of support after a session. But even in a chemsexual socialist utopia, the party will eventually come to an end. And the confrontation with absence will necessarily ensue when the houselights come on, and when “mommy” closes her bedroom door. Some recognition of the universality of this dilemma might have helped Nagington maintain his social-constructivist approach to chemsex without slipping into idealism.

Nagington’s strength, however, lies in his willingness to listen when his interviews serve a purpose other than his own. Interviewing Barry, who appears “extremely nervous,” Nagington puts him at ease with contextual questions, and notices how—as with any good psychotherapeutic process—“as the interview progressed, [he] asked fewer and fewer questions, and [Barry] gave lengthier answers.” It emerges that Barry, who feels “conflicted” about chemsex and the way his usage became “entwined in a particularly abusive relationship,” signed up for Nagington’s study, he says, “so I can give my head a bit more understanding and I can stop shaming myself.” As he learns about Barry’s traumatic childhood, Nagington chooses to break his script by introducing the idea of chemsex as a “coping mechanism”—an interpretation drawn from public health discourse that, elsewhere, Nagington stridently opposes. The effect is dramatic: Barry reflects that the interview experience is a “fucking revelation, because, as I say, I know I’ve not had an easy life, and a lot of it coming up to the age of 30 just wasn’t my fault. Things have happened that are completely out of my grasp … I obviously have been using it to sort of block out that. I’m just a fucking junkie aren’t I?”

Adopting an explicitly psychoanalytic register, Nagington draws on Jean Laplanche’s notion of the “binding and unbinding” of overwhelming or traumatic experience. Whereas “one of the most pleasurable experiences of sex is to feel unbounded,” a feeling “often heightened during chemsex,” this had crossed over into excess in Barry’s case. Pointed language—however imperfect —helped him assign meaning to his otherwise traumatically indescribable experience.

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Queer theorists have bemoaned the field’s tendency to avoid explicitly addressing sex in favor of emphasizing its implications for identity. Both of these books put an end to that regrettable trend. In so doing, they explore whether and how language can adequately describe the extreme bodily intensities involved in sexual experience—Florêncio and Rosenfeld through their experiments in form, and Nagington through a theory he develops of “visceral solidarity,” the “indelible, alinguistic connections between bodies.”

My own adolescent experience touches on this question. As I came to understand in subsequent analytic sessions, part of the reason the smoothie incident left an indelible trace in my mind was its nonsensicality: an untranslatable word—“gay” —became saturated with meaning, more than I could then process, and yet eventually I would recognize myself in and through it.

Early in the book, Nagington discusses the haunting example of John, who spoke of descending into addiction after a partner discovered his HIV-positive status and told him, “Oh you’re just going to be one of those slammers now aren’t you?” The signifier “slammer” meant nothing to John at first, but it left him thinking, “What is that? What is this thing that he’s telling me I’m going to be?” Later, he understood it as slang for injecting drugs, and struggled to avoid this destiny.

Such experiences are not entirely beyond language. They speak to the boundary between meaning and its breakdown—where sex, according to psychoanalysis, finds its place. As Grace Lavery writes in her foreword to Crossings, “to be seduced, to be led, to be hailed in one language and to reply in another: these are fixtures of what João Florêncio and Liz Rosenfeld assemble as the archive of cruising.” If, as these works suggest, queer theory is finally ready to talk about sex, we must be prepared for a confusion of tongues.