July 3, 2025 • 32 mins
Can cruising actually lead us towards queer liberation? Professor João Florencio thinks so, and this week he’s joining Gabe and Chris to talk about the politics of cruising, and offer tips for how to cruise while the world is entering its fascist flop era. He’ll also talk about what cruising was like four centuries ago, the connections between Gen-Z sex-phobia and conservative gays like Andrew Sullivan, and what he really thinks about RFK Jr.’s “War on Poppers”. A provocative masterclass on cruising with one of the world’s foremost sexpigs and scholars.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, viewers, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions is an explicit podcast about
queer sex. Filter dirty words and unfiltered descriptions of sexual activities.
If hearing about orgies, anonymous sex, kink, fetish, and more
offends your sensibilities, you might want to skip this. Viewer
discretion is advised. It's definitely not for kids.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Put JR pussy, put your put your pussy up, Put
JR pussy put put Jo busy.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Welcome to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. I'm Gabeln Sadez and I'm
christodtison Rosso.
Speaker 4 (00:31):
Each week we explore the sublime world of queer sex, cruising,
and relationships.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
We talked to queer folks of all kinds.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
We'll ask some questions, swap sex stories, share intimate revelations,
and provide practical advice that you can use at home.
Let Jo put joust job put job.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
So, Chris. I would love to kick us off with
a question. I think I know the answer.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Okay, but have you had any fun cruising experiences since
our last season.
Speaker 4 (01:00):
I've had some great cruising experiences. I've also been traveling
a lot since we've last wrapped up, been in Mexico
a few times, Florida a couple of times. I've had
some good times. Let's just say I've had fun.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
What about you? Have you been cruising? Yeah, but like
oddly it's been like dryer for me since the last season.
Speaker 4 (01:18):
Do you think that your dry spell has anything to
do with you being on this podcast? Like, do you
think that folks are afraid to approach you because they're
afraid it's gonna come here at the roundtable?
Speaker 3 (01:27):
I would hope not. I would hope not. This is
a desperate sos.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
If you've been trying to fucking you haven't because you
think I'll talk about you on this podcast, please approach
me anyway.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
I probably will. But yeah, No, it's a you know,
a mixture of like depression and work. Really okay, I
think that's it cool co co cool.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Yeah, you know, because I was like a slut and
the November came around, I was like depressed for a
few months.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
Yeah, none of that Mexican. Then I felt galvanized and
then I was like, well I have to fuck because
of not me?
Speaker 5 (01:49):
Who?
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Right?
Speaker 3 (01:50):
You know what I mean?
Speaker 1 (01:51):
Like that, it's it's a it's a radical act, heavy burden.
It's responsibility. Well, now that we've gotten that out of
our system, I am really excited to dive. In last season,
one of our most popular episodes was our Cruising one
oh one episode with Leo Herrera, who taught us all
about the basics of cruising and some of the ways
beginners can make the most of their cruising experience.
Speaker 4 (02:10):
But cruising is such a rich and yes hot subject.
There are so many brilliant thinkers who've expanded our understanding
of all the complexities of cruising.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
And today we will be talking with one.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Joel Florencio is a professor of Gender Studies and Chair
of Sex, Media and Sex Cultures at Lynnshipping University in Sweden.
His research focuses on the body, media technologies and sex
in contemporary culture.
Speaker 4 (02:32):
As a writer and researcher, he's covered everything from kim
sex culture to ancient Roman sex. His new book, co
written with artist Liz Rosenfeld, is called Crossings Creative Ecologies
of Cruising.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
We have lovingly been calling him Professor Pig while prepping
for this episode. Please welcome to the Sniffy's Cruising Confessions podcast.
Joel Florencio. Joel, how are you hey?
Speaker 2 (02:51):
I'm great. Thank you excited about this?
Speaker 3 (02:54):
Yeah, thank you so much for calling in.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
You've written about sex, pigs, and chem sex, and now
your new book with Lizrae Folk is focused on cruising.
I think one of the things that we've all enjoyed
most about your work is that you are in academic
but you also put your own experiences with sex and
cruising and porn into your work. How much of your
day is spent cruising or looking at sexual media and
(03:16):
how much is spent writing about those experiences.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Let me tell you I have a very bad work
life balance because those things tend to mix into one another.
When I'm doing research, I'm mostly looking at porn, sex media,
talking about it, reading about it, which is also not
different from my leisure time watching porn is maybe, I mean,
more than half of my day these days. To me,
the world is always like something that I'm part of
(03:40):
rather than something I observe from the out side. That's
really where kind of my work starts from. And I
think that kind of honesty is valuable. There's a lot
of value in trying to acknowledg where you're coming from.
And that's where I come from, and that's where my
questions come from, and it makes sense to tell my
readers this is what happened. So here's the questions that
I now have about it.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
Your work sort of touches on this idea of porn
or sex media as a kind of queer archive, like
an historical archive, And I'm curious in your work, what
do you think porn or sex media can tell us
that maybe other historical documents might not be able to.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
That's a really good question because a lot of our histories,
if you think of like histories of homosexuality, you know,
there are histories of activism, there are histories of you know,
heroic figures, but you know, most fagots were not engaging activism.
Most fagots were looking for dick no correct. So there
needs to be a kind of an understanding that if
(04:37):
we want to tell the histories of homosexuality, we cannot
grasp everything that homosexuality has been if we're only looking
at activist records, or even the flip side of that is,
you know, court records, criminal records, and medical records, which
is basically the sources of like the history of sexology.
What is left is you know, trash, smutty culture that
(05:00):
is historically really have no value for most of academic disciplines,
but you can learn a lot, you know. I have
this project now called The Europe That Get Born Built,
and it's looking at at post war dirty magazines and
their circulations across Europe and how important they were to
shape a kind of a shared gay European imaginary, much
(05:22):
more than activist magazines, much more than like activist rhetoric.
It was, you know, the dirty pigs that made the
facts come together in more than one sense.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
Right, Thank you to the pigs.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Thank you to the pigs so much. I would love
for you to tell us about your new book. You're
recently in New York for a reading with your co
author Liz Rosenfeld, So tell us a bit about how
this project keep a life and how it's been sharing
this book.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
I've known Liz. We met in Berlin twenty seventeen. Maybe
from the first moment we met. We just started talking
a lot about sex and cruising and kind of bonded
over that as well as kind of bitching a lot
about things we didn't like in in cruising spaces and
kind of sex places more generally, and at some point
we were like babes, I think we need to write
a book, of course, as you do as you do.
(06:10):
I mean, I'm an academic and I'm obviously like, okay,
how can I turn this into work? And you know,
and Liiz has been doing performance and video work on
cruising for many years. Liz and I are very close friends.
We never fucked, but we're very close friends, and we
kind of approach this book as like the two of
us cruising each other.
Speaker 4 (06:31):
How did you decide on the voice of the book? Right, Like,
how did you decide that this is the way that
we were going to tell these stories.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
It's written the first person. You never really know who
really is writing, whose stories belong to whom Obviously some
puns you can guess. But it's this kind of collective
voice that we think is also very much the kind
of the voice of cruising. You know, when people get
together in a room or in a park and just
become something that is kind of more than one. And
(06:58):
we really wanted it to like the product of both
our minds and very different life experience that overlap in
any ways to kind of produce these these different voice,
perhaps queerer voice, And that's a faggot in the transmask faggot.
So that felt to us that kind of pointed the
book in the direction that we wanted, which was kind
(07:19):
of this idea that spaces of cruising gout actually spaces
of like openness and possibility. It's about, you know, opening
yourself to others. It's also like somehow like a baby, right,
and so the baby has to have both DNA's right, Yeah,
so that voice is really our authorial DNA of each
of us kind of mixed together.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Reading it felt like when you're in a dark room
and you're touching someone and then you think you're still
touching them, but you realize that someone else, someone else,
and you're kind of like, this feels great too.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
It's precisely that there's something quite beautiful about our kind
of willingness to reach out to strangers and to bodies
that we don't know. So, yeah, you got it, we
got it.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Yes, How does your own cruising story begin? What was
the first time you went out and were like, all right,
let me get my toes in and see what this
is about.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Okay. So I was kind of a baby faggot born
in a very rural part of Portugal, you know, like
the nearest even gay bar was was in Lisbon, which
is like an hour and a half away drive. So
I was entering a public toilet somewhere in rural Portugal
and realizing that something was going on, and I kind
(08:34):
of trying to make sense of what was going on,
and then soon joining it. So it was kind of
very organic. I hadn't I didn't even know what cruising
exactly was. I just kind of grasped it. So maybe
there's this kind of baby faggot radar that was like, oh,
there's more people doing things that you will enjoy, and
it was really extremely formative. Obviously, part of it was
(08:56):
already happening online through like chat rooms. Thank god that
was dial up internet by dance, so there was ways
of meeting people. But to me, the most exciting and
the most thrilling were finding myself in places where these
like spaces of sex and spaces of something else like
collapse into one another. So you know, train stations, I
(09:18):
love trading stations, I love truck stops, you know, restrooms
in shopping malls and you know Portugal in general, but
by that time had very very small kind of gay scene,
but this stuff was everywhere, so that's really how it
kind of started. It was a lot to like throwing
myself into the deepend in that sense.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
One of the things we found intriguing about your writing
is your assertion that cruising is very important to queer
history in terms of our origin story. Could you talk
a little bit about cruising and how we understand it historically,
because I think the term feels new, but this sort
of practice feels old.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
The term itself, you know, not very certain where it
comes from. I know that it was being used in
New York in the early twentieth century, nineteen twenties at least,
but yeah, the practice itself, whether I was named, that
was very much widespread throughout European history. Michael Rokee has
a book called Forbidden Friendships from ninety six that really
focuses on this. Sodomy was so widespread in Florence in
(10:15):
the fourteen hundreds that they had to create a special
police called u Fichudela note, which is at the Office
of the Right, whose job was just going around kind of,
you know, calm down the sodomites. So they have records
and that's how we know. Just in the space of
what like seventy years between fourteen thirty two and fifteen
oh two, at least seventeen thousand men in Florence were
(10:38):
accused of sodomy. Three thousand were convicted. That was a
huge portion of the male population in Florence. You know,
some people argue that the vast majority of men in Florence,
at one point or another will have engaged in sodomy.
So this was happening, you know, in the outskirts of
the city, in drinking spaces, in gardens all over, right,
(10:59):
not in the center, but at kind of the edges
of the city. And what is also interesting about this
is that this was always places that were also populated
by sex workers, the poor, all the degenerates. Right, they
had this incredible power to be a political risk. The
city wanted to regulate sodomy because sodomy created a challenge,
(11:20):
to say, the family, and like inheritance, so very much
like an economic challenge. What happens if like an aristocrat
starts like fucking a working class young man on the streets,
what kinds of allegiances can be forged?
Speaker 3 (11:35):
There?
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Could someone in the kind of an upper class start
paying more attention to these young men with whom they
were engaging in sodomitic relationships and perhaps pay us attention
to the family, to the wife, and to this kind
of material duty of reproducing, of sharing inheritance, etc. So
that this was a real problem at the level of
economics of the city and of wealth. It was a
(11:57):
threat to the maintenance of you know, the kind of
class system of Florence too. It's also very related to
what like Sam Delaney writes in Times Square Red, Times
Square Blue, when he's writing about being in a place
with someone who's not like you, maybe recognizing something of
you in this person who is different from you can
completely kind of disrupt the ways in which society is structured.
(12:18):
You see similar things like this. For instance, in like
post war Italy and France, lots of people who went
to political organizing meetings for like homosexual movement, not because
they were really kind of pure political beings, but because
they wanted to fuck so because these were spaces where
he could cruise. You know, May sixty eight, the birth
of these like revolutionary communist movements in Paris. I mean
(12:39):
they write about it. You know, we went for the politics,
but we really also went for the dick. Those two
things that are not separable. We shouldn't be ashamed of
talking about them, and we shouldn't be ashamed of how
sex can be a great gateway drug into like radical politics.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
These mentaling systems of power and class difference through economy.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Yeah, that's so fascinating right throughout history.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
First of all'm struck by the fact that there were
women's sex workers in the spaces where gay men we're
fucking in Florence.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
I think we've put an end to the women in
gay spaces debate.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
When gays stopped being faggots and started being gays. We
forget about who we came from and who was there
with us when we started making concessions in order to
gain fuller political citizenship and political participation. That the dominant
movement thought that we would have to clean ourselves from
associations without the groups, and that I think was a mistake.
(13:34):
As you can see from what's happening today right they're
coming for all of us.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
Something that struck me was a crazy roup cruising opens
us queers a delicious portal to time. The sentence really
stuck with me, and I'm wondering what you think spending
a lot of time in a cruising space can teach
us as queer people.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
Yeah yeah, yeah yeah. In the you know, straight world,
it's the time of work, the time of you know,
being productive society. It's the time of social reproduction bringing
more people into the world. It's the time of being born,
going to school, finding the love of real life, marrying,
having children, retiring, all of that. So this is a
kind of very strict idea of what time is and
(14:16):
how time should go.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
Well.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
I think it's interesting about queer sex sculptures, including cruising,
is how it's like time that you are wasting. It's
not productive, there's no profit at the end. It can
be time that you waste simply because you can't score too.
You know, you just turn up and you spend like
you know, time in a place and then maybe the
thing you want that is not there, but maybe you
(14:38):
just went there as well for the thrill of it.
You just maybe went there to watch it is something
quite beautiful too, just to be there and to to
kind of be in that space. I mean, I love
seeing people fuck, like whole festival. Last year, there was
this one night it was quite late, I don't know,
early morning. I just sat outside the cruising area just
hearing people having orgasms. You know, that was something so
(15:02):
beautiful about this. It was just like a whole crowd
of people just screaming, and not just guys. You know,
it was really a whole kind of diversity of screams
of pleasure, and it was just people were lost in
their own pleasure, in the pleasure of people, the people
they were with. So that's kind of what I think
what losing oneself in these temporalities really kind of allows
(15:25):
you to experience to kind of maybe allowing yourself to
like be taken off the righteous temporal path. You know,
certainly anyone who's like, you know, a good boy would
be you know, sleeping, ready to go to work.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
Yeah, but other good boys could be you know, like.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
Other good boys could be taking those loads.
Speaker 3 (15:43):
You know, that was not a good boy that I
thought you were talking about. There's two types boys.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
All Right, we're going to take a quick break, but
when we come back, we'll hear some more practical advice
from Juao about making the most of your cruising.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
Experience and get a few hot stories out of him.
So stay tuned. Will be right back.
Speaker 4 (16:04):
Now we've heard about Draw's new book, Crossings the creative
colleges are cruising, and we know that job does a.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
Lot of his own research.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
So in this act we are going to pump Professor
Florencio over his likes, dislikes, and best practices when it
comes to cruising.
Speaker 3 (16:18):
What is your ideal cruising experience.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
I like cruising that happens in unexpected places, which comes
with each challenges, especially if you're the bottom, you know.
I like the thrill of figuring it out, the glances,
the thrill of the chase, is it is it not?
It's kind of like building up of sexual tension. And
when this is happening in places where other people are
there but they don't even know that is happening, that's
(16:41):
quite a turn on. And I think there's something more
more open in these places rather than say going to
a leather night, Robert night this or that night, or
like this club is for this, this club is for that.
That can make cruising very regimented with too many rules
and regulations and who can come in, who can't come in,
who can fuck with whom? Public spaces to me are
(17:03):
really the the ideal place.
Speaker 4 (17:06):
You've done a lot of traveling, and you've done a
lot of research on cruising space is what has been
your favorite cruising spot, like your hidden gym.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
There's parks that I very much like. I mean Hampstead
Heat in London is one of those classic ones. George
Michael was there was arrested there, so no places with history.
I like to my places with history, you know, commune
with the spirit of our ancestors and hasn't hide in Berlin,
another park has a quite nice cruising area that is
(17:35):
actually quite mixed in the sense of you know, it's
not just there's lots of trade there. There's lots of
people who don't go to gay spaces who go there
for cruising, and I think that's really kind of one
of the reasons why I like this. You know, you
don't need to pay money to go cruise. Cruising is
like a ride, you know almost places like light like
parks really give you that experience.
Speaker 3 (17:56):
All Right, we've heard about some of your cruising likes.
Speaker 4 (17:58):
What are some of your dislike It's like, what type
of behavior do you not like to see when you're
in cruising spaces?
Speaker 2 (18:04):
Yeah, I don't like very hot spaces. I think you know,
we've been like fighting for our rides or whatever. For
such a long time, a cruising space needs to be
air conditions. It's the least. I'm a girl of a
certain age by now, I don't. I don't put myself
to really hot places. They still have not discovered their
(18:26):
conditioning in Germany. But I was at lab perhaps the
most infamous, filthiest gay male sex club that I've ever
been here. We know her. Yeah, I was in full run.
But the place was packed and I did is like
massive like with of paupers, and it was so hot
I almost fainted. I had to run out to like
get fresh air, like no. But apart from you air conditioning,
(18:51):
there's lot of behaviors I don't like, you know, I
don't like abuse. You sadly see it a lot. I
wish people didn't bring things we don't like to see
in the world world into these spaces. We see these
kinds of you know, ways of dealing with people that
you know, people are not like disposable object. And I
think it's important that we, you know, remember that even
in our own kind of fantasies, that there is a
(19:12):
space between fantasy and and reality, and you don't treat
people like shit. Cruising etiquette is something that we developed
and that we should really be proud of. And if
we forget about it, you should go back to gay
school too to remember it, to re learn it. You know,
there's ways of rejecting someone's advancing without being a dig
(19:34):
At our best. We were doing like instent politics before
can sin become a thing for everyone else? You know,
we had ways of saying yes and no, not definitive
right that at every moment you can say, Okay, this
is enough, but this is not no longer for me,
or something like that. And we knew all of that
without without even nuttering words with developers are doing all
of that without turning it into you know, laws of
(19:54):
how to do this or that, and you should be
proud of that, and you should deploy it a lot,
a lot more so.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
You talked a lot about your early cruising experiences and
how you sort of just fell into it.
Speaker 3 (20:03):
You didn't really go seeking it out. It found you.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
So I'm curious during there's early days, was there ever
a cruising experience or a hookup where you learned something
about yourself that you didn't know before. You found a
new kink or fetish, or explored your body in a
new way where you're like, oh wow, this.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
Yeah, that's one that of all of them, that's really
memorable to me. Venice two thousand and four, I was
doing kind of you'rea broad there as an undergraduate student,
and we were in one of these like you know,
silly small clubs of Venice because there's not many, and
so everyone goes to the same and somehow I kind
of hooked up with this guy and then you kind
of walk out together and you know, Venice at night,
(20:42):
there's nobody on the street, and obviously what you think
there's nobody on the street, you just want to fuck.
So we just we walked in, we just leaned against
a wall. It just like started fucking. It was a
little like courtyards, and half way through we start hearing
giggling and so look up. That was like like two
or three girls, like, you know, their early to mid twenties,
(21:05):
I guess, at the window, just watching and having the
time of their lives. And that really turned me on
so much. Yeah, I was like, okay, yeah, I kind
of like being watched, and so we kind of started
performing for the audience, and you know, that was good.
Speaker 3 (21:23):
I love that. I hope you've got great reviews for
the performance, truly.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
Yeah, the performers, you know what I mean?
Speaker 1 (21:29):
Yeah, exactly, Yeah, best courtyards for cruising, please take a tour. So, Joe,
I don't know if you have been seeing the same
and the places that you've lived, but I do feel
like in the US we're seeing younger generations voicing these
sort of anti sex impulses, usually criticizing cruising and people
(21:49):
who spend a lot of time hooking up and looking
for sex right, wasting time. As you sort of mentioned,
they've used sex as a sort of non productive, actively
harmful thing. I mean, obviously they're gradations and complications to this,
but it does seem like there's this sort of anti
sex swing happening right, particularly targeting sex media and public cruising.
So what is one thing that you wish younger people
(22:12):
would know about cruising before criticizing it.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
I love to talk about this, and they talk about
the zoomers or the dimmer careers, you know, with a
kind of approach to the fear of sex that is happening.
But it's also not just them. I mean, hello, Larry Kramer, y, Yeah,
I know if I can say this, but you know,
but Larry Kramer did very many good things, but also
you know Larry Kremer Andrew Sullivan, they are queers. They
(22:36):
have had positions on sex and promiscuity that are very
much along the lines of what these young kids are saying.
So I don't think it's necessarily generational. I think it
manifests generationally because there is such a general cultural panic
around sex because of the Internet. And this is something
that happens all the time. It happened when you know,
(22:57):
the printing press was invented, it happened when photography was invented,
when cinema was invented. Every time visual technologies are developed
that make access to images or to to kind of
content as we call it these days, more easily, and
what democratized then the fear of sex. Sex is going
to be seen by more people. What is it going
to do to them? With the Internet and digital culture alongside,
(23:20):
you know, very important conversations that we need to continue
to have around like consent. There's a kind of an
unfortunate flip sight to that, which is that younger people
are being told about sex as primarily a site of
harm and a side of risk. I encountered this a
lot like teaching undergraduates in the UK especially, no one
(23:41):
knows how to do sex. And in the UK, I
mean it's ridiculous how little young adults know when they
come to university, especially the straight kids. The fear they
had of sex and they're born was unbearable. They couldn't
even talk about it to each other because there was
scared of being like Judge. There's you know, slots. It's
(24:01):
not all gen Zers that think like this, and I've
spoken to many gen Zers who are completely different and
are a lot more open with their sexuality. But the
dominant discourse around sex is that you know that sex
is always primarily a site where we will be harmed,
rather than thinking about sex as a place where you
(24:22):
are allowed to feel pleasure, where you're allowed to experiment,
where you're allowed to learn about yourself and your body.
Learn about how to be with other people in very
vulnerable positions is something really important. That's how what it
means to be with people growing up. I learned a
lot from you know, my early twenties, late teens, early twenties,
from people who are in their thirties right. They were
(24:43):
the guys who taught me a lot about sex, what
sex can be of good things and difficult things about sex,
the messy stuff about sex. And I learned all of
that through them. And that's kind of something we've done
since we've existed as like a culture or a community,
if you want to call it that. It kind of
to each other things. And I don't want to be
(25:03):
like sounding like an old fag, but because of the
ways in which sex has been the platform so much,
you can't have sex talk, you can't have sex images
in social media. Content is so restricted to specific places.
If your main point of contact with the world is
a smartphone in our computer, there's a lot in not
getting between that and the fear mongering around sex, which
(25:25):
comes from very genuine places of concern. It just reduced
sex to this really bad thing.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Okay, So before we let you go, I do have
one last question, and I think we've kind of addressed it.
The US and several European countries are going through a
lavender scare style moral panic. We've seen it before, we
are unfortunately seeing it again. We're seeing laws targeting everything
from queer books to poppers in the US now. So
my final question for you is, how do you cruise
when the empires on the verge of collapse.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
RFK Junior really did come for poppers, and I mean,
and it's likely that he's coming for prep with the
defunding of HI programs. I have a hope for this moment, right,
this kind of right wing turn, this like radical right
wing turn, will help our gay brothers remember that they
are and have always been faggots, and that perhaps we
(26:13):
kind of can go back to the moment where we
were in solidarity and in the same places with other
people who are not, you know, just the gay men,
like the particular kind of you know, good gay man
when they came for the paupers. I posted something on
Blue Sky along their lives of that's it. Finally the
guys are going to become politicized now.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
You know.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Don't take the fucking poppers away from us. I can
only see one solution, which is that we kind of
realize that the people who left behind in order to
become middle class white gay men, that they remember that
we are now all in the same both or that
the things that they are coming for also affect those
of us with privileged lives. And so I hope that
(26:55):
this makes us think about the choice that we've made,
and that we really evered openness to the very spaces
of cruising that we go to and maybe, you know,
maybe this is the spaces of cruising, like once again
you can kind of build a movement.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
I love that you mentioned that, and I you know,
I think during the sixties and seventies, so many of
the galvanizing movements happened when, like you know, I think
of Canada a bathhouse was attacked.
Speaker 3 (27:18):
I think of the US.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
Everybody in that era described stonewall as like the messy,
grimy bar.
Speaker 3 (27:24):
Where you went to go do disgusting things.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
So it's like those places are always the site of
galvanizing movements. And you know, I kind of hate that
we're back in this moment in some cyclical way, but yeah,
it does give me hope. I think you're right.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
People don't know about this. I mean, the Catalans are
really proud of this because they say, we're really where
it started, not Stone. Like the first protest, the first
LGBT protests in Spain, it was in Barcelona in nineteen
thirty three, and it's a bunch of like transsex workers, yeah,
who are like walking the streets near a Urhino Public Urhino,
(28:00):
and and something happened there that the next day all
these these like trans hookahs uh went down marched down
to the public urinal in protest. This is the thing
we have always organized around around these places of sex
because they were so important to us in the case
of sex workers, for their own livelihoods too. And if
(28:20):
that's what it takes it, then that's what it takes.
Though it's sad that the gays, the gays, you know,
I'm not talking about the facts, im talking about the guy. Yeah,
that the gays are like, oh shit, fuck they came
for paupers, like, yeah, they came for everyone else before before,
you you know, but.
Speaker 3 (28:37):
Mind first they came for the poppers and I did not. Well,
thank you so much for joining us today, Joe. We
really really appreciate having so much like you. Thank you,
thank you. This has been such a treat.
Speaker 4 (28:50):
When we come back, we're gonna hear an actual cruising
compassion from one of our listeners.
Speaker 3 (28:54):
Stay tuned.
Speaker 5 (28:55):
Yeah, a few weeks ago, I visited a guy's place
and he said his boyfriend and all his friends are
out partying. So we hooked up and in the aftercare
his boyfriend and all their friends came over and I
(29:19):
was the after party until eight am. Oh I got
there at ten pm. Oh for ten hours I was
taking loads.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (29:31):
And that's the story. Oh, that's that's I mean, what
a true.
Speaker 4 (29:36):
And what's interesting is that he said in the aftercare
I became the after party.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
And that doesn't feel like much of a soft landing.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
No, you know what, if you're doing something that requires
aftercare taking, like several loads for many hours afterwards, is
very bold.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
It's very daring.
Speaker 4 (29:54):
I love the eagerness though, right, like, yeah, you're not thirsty,
thirsty because she I mean, I'm I do love.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
How to sink to the story was They're like, I'm
just going to share with you in Olympian feat of
load taking and that we'll speak for itself.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
Correct.
Speaker 3 (30:08):
I don't need to add frills.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
You didn't need to know names, We didn't need to
know who was wearing, what, where it happened.
Speaker 3 (30:13):
Do you think the boyfriend pre planned this with his boyfriend? Honestly?
Speaker 1 (30:17):
Okay, I was hooking up a couple that I knew
once and one of them was like, hey, come over,
my boyfriend's out. You should come fuck and then the
boyfriend was like, Hey, so and so told me you're
coming over. How would you feel if I happened to
show up a half hour earlier? And I was like,
I don't mind that, but I do feel like i'd
be lying to your boy you know what I mean?
If I come over and I'm like, oh, it's just us, Oh,
(30:38):
oh my god, there's your boyfriend.
Speaker 3 (30:41):
I'm not trying to act, you know what I mean.
Like if we're role playing, that's one thing, but I'm sad,
you know what I mean, Like I need a rate
for that kind of performance, truly.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
So I do definitely think there could have been a
bit of a subterfuge or a bit of a mislead there.
But if you're open to it and you're down, then
you know what happy accident? Right, Well, thank you so
much for submitting that story.
Speaker 3 (31:03):
I wish I was you. I wish I had that stamina.
Speaker 4 (31:06):
If you want to hear your own cruising confessions on
an upcoming episode of this podcast, you can call our
Cruising Confessions hotline at three zero two two one nine
three eight nine eight. That's three zero two two one
nine three eight nine eights. Yes, please do Colin we
cannot wait to hear from you. All right, So this
was such a great episode.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
It was so good.
Speaker 3 (31:29):
Professor Pig.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Professor Pig, he's such a smart person and the way
he manages to take these like really esoteric ideas about
like the politics of fucking and queerness and all these
historical stories and then just kind of smash it down
into like a little sloody.
Speaker 3 (31:45):
Into this little thing. Yeah, no, that's exactly I felt
the same point. Yeah, I was like, great, give me
that slutty little nugget.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
And this is why we're friends.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
This is why we are friend's co hosts, wives, sisters.
Speaker 3 (32:01):
Yeah, we are our own polycule. We're a polycule of two.
I love it.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
All right, Well, we do want to thank our guests today,
Professor Joel Florencio. You can get his books, including his
new one Crossings Creative Ecologies of Cruising wherever books are sold,
and please do buy them at a bookstore. Sniffy's Cruisy
Confessions is directed by Adam Barron, produced by Amanda Kuper
and Cameron Femino, and executive produced by Eli Martin.
Speaker 4 (32:24):
Cruising Confessions is presented by Snippy's The Ultimate Map based
cruising platform for gay by curious people Ready to cruise,
check out the map at snippies dot com and fall
snitches at Snippy's app.
Speaker 3 (32:34):
Cruisers are a community. Do your part in keeping us safe.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
Learn more about protecting your sexual health at Healthy Sexuals
dot com.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
Put Jo put put Jo put, Joe put
Hey, viewers, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions is an explicit podcast about
queer sex. Filter dirty words and unfiltered descriptions of sexual activities.
If hearing about orgies, anonymous sex, kink, fetish, and more
offends your sensibilities, you might want to skip this. Viewer
discretion is advised. It's definitely not for kids.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Put JR pussy, put your put your pussy up, Put
JR pussy put put Jo busy.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Welcome to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. I'm Gabeln Sadez and I'm
christodtison Rosso.
Speaker 4 (00:31):
Each week we explore the sublime world of queer sex, cruising,
and relationships.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
We talked to queer folks of all kinds.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
We'll ask some questions, swap sex stories, share intimate revelations,
and provide practical advice that you can use at home.
Let Jo put joust job put job.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
So, Chris. I would love to kick us off with
a question. I think I know the answer.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Okay, but have you had any fun cruising experiences since
our last season.
Speaker 4 (01:00):
I've had some great cruising experiences. I've also been traveling
a lot since we've last wrapped up, been in Mexico
a few times, Florida a couple of times. I've had
some good times. Let's just say I've had fun.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
What about you? Have you been cruising? Yeah, but like
oddly it's been like dryer for me since the last season.
Speaker 4 (01:18):
Do you think that your dry spell has anything to
do with you being on this podcast? Like, do you
think that folks are afraid to approach you because they're
afraid it's gonna come here at the roundtable?
Speaker 3 (01:27):
I would hope not. I would hope not. This is
a desperate sos.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
If you've been trying to fucking you haven't because you
think I'll talk about you on this podcast, please approach
me anyway.
Speaker 3 (01:35):
I probably will. But yeah, No, it's a you know,
a mixture of like depression and work. Really okay, I
think that's it cool co co cool.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Yeah, you know, because I was like a slut and
the November came around, I was like depressed for a
few months.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
Yeah, none of that Mexican. Then I felt galvanized and
then I was like, well I have to fuck because
of not me?
Speaker 5 (01:49):
Who?
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Right?
Speaker 3 (01:50):
You know what I mean?
Speaker 1 (01:51):
Like that, it's it's a it's a radical act, heavy burden.
It's responsibility. Well, now that we've gotten that out of
our system, I am really excited to dive. In last season,
one of our most popular episodes was our Cruising one
oh one episode with Leo Herrera, who taught us all
about the basics of cruising and some of the ways
beginners can make the most of their cruising experience.
Speaker 4 (02:10):
But cruising is such a rich and yes hot subject.
There are so many brilliant thinkers who've expanded our understanding
of all the complexities of cruising.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
And today we will be talking with one.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Joel Florencio is a professor of Gender Studies and Chair
of Sex, Media and Sex Cultures at Lynnshipping University in Sweden.
His research focuses on the body, media technologies and sex
in contemporary culture.
Speaker 4 (02:32):
As a writer and researcher, he's covered everything from kim
sex culture to ancient Roman sex. His new book, co
written with artist Liz Rosenfeld, is called Crossings Creative Ecologies
of Cruising.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
We have lovingly been calling him Professor Pig while prepping
for this episode. Please welcome to the Sniffy's Cruising Confessions podcast.
Joel Florencio. Joel, how are you hey?
Speaker 2 (02:51):
I'm great. Thank you excited about this?
Speaker 3 (02:54):
Yeah, thank you so much for calling in.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
You've written about sex, pigs, and chem sex, and now
your new book with Lizrae Folk is focused on cruising.
I think one of the things that we've all enjoyed
most about your work is that you are in academic
but you also put your own experiences with sex and
cruising and porn into your work. How much of your
day is spent cruising or looking at sexual media and
(03:16):
how much is spent writing about those experiences.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Let me tell you I have a very bad work
life balance because those things tend to mix into one another.
When I'm doing research, I'm mostly looking at porn, sex media,
talking about it, reading about it, which is also not
different from my leisure time watching porn is maybe, I mean,
more than half of my day these days. To me,
the world is always like something that I'm part of
(03:40):
rather than something I observe from the out side. That's
really where kind of my work starts from. And I
think that kind of honesty is valuable. There's a lot
of value in trying to acknowledg where you're coming from.
And that's where I come from, and that's where my
questions come from, and it makes sense to tell my
readers this is what happened. So here's the questions that
I now have about it.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
Your work sort of touches on this idea of porn
or sex media as a kind of queer archive, like
an historical archive, And I'm curious in your work, what
do you think porn or sex media can tell us
that maybe other historical documents might not be able to.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
That's a really good question because a lot of our histories,
if you think of like histories of homosexuality, you know,
there are histories of activism, there are histories of you know,
heroic figures, but you know, most fagots were not engaging activism.
Most fagots were looking for dick no correct. So there
needs to be a kind of an understanding that if
(04:37):
we want to tell the histories of homosexuality, we cannot
grasp everything that homosexuality has been if we're only looking
at activist records, or even the flip side of that is,
you know, court records, criminal records, and medical records, which
is basically the sources of like the history of sexology.
What is left is you know, trash, smutty culture that
(05:00):
is historically really have no value for most of academic disciplines,
but you can learn a lot, you know. I have
this project now called The Europe That Get Born Built,
and it's looking at at post war dirty magazines and
their circulations across Europe and how important they were to
shape a kind of a shared gay European imaginary, much
(05:22):
more than activist magazines, much more than like activist rhetoric.
It was, you know, the dirty pigs that made the
facts come together in more than one sense.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
Right, Thank you to the pigs.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Thank you to the pigs so much. I would love
for you to tell us about your new book. You're
recently in New York for a reading with your co
author Liz Rosenfeld, So tell us a bit about how
this project keep a life and how it's been sharing
this book.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
I've known Liz. We met in Berlin twenty seventeen. Maybe
from the first moment we met. We just started talking
a lot about sex and cruising and kind of bonded
over that as well as kind of bitching a lot
about things we didn't like in in cruising spaces and
kind of sex places more generally, and at some point
we were like babes, I think we need to write
a book, of course, as you do as you do.
(06:10):
I mean, I'm an academic and I'm obviously like, okay,
how can I turn this into work? And you know,
and Liiz has been doing performance and video work on
cruising for many years. Liz and I are very close friends.
We never fucked, but we're very close friends, and we
kind of approach this book as like the two of
us cruising each other.
Speaker 4 (06:31):
How did you decide on the voice of the book? Right, Like,
how did you decide that this is the way that
we were going to tell these stories.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
It's written the first person. You never really know who
really is writing, whose stories belong to whom Obviously some
puns you can guess. But it's this kind of collective
voice that we think is also very much the kind
of the voice of cruising. You know, when people get
together in a room or in a park and just
become something that is kind of more than one. And
(06:58):
we really wanted it to like the product of both
our minds and very different life experience that overlap in
any ways to kind of produce these these different voice,
perhaps queerer voice, And that's a faggot in the transmask faggot.
So that felt to us that kind of pointed the
book in the direction that we wanted, which was kind
(07:19):
of this idea that spaces of cruising gout actually spaces
of like openness and possibility. It's about, you know, opening
yourself to others. It's also like somehow like a baby, right,
and so the baby has to have both DNA's right, Yeah,
so that voice is really our authorial DNA of each
of us kind of mixed together.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Reading it felt like when you're in a dark room
and you're touching someone and then you think you're still
touching them, but you realize that someone else, someone else,
and you're kind of like, this feels great too.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
It's precisely that there's something quite beautiful about our kind
of willingness to reach out to strangers and to bodies
that we don't know. So, yeah, you got it, we
got it.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Yes, How does your own cruising story begin? What was
the first time you went out and were like, all right,
let me get my toes in and see what this
is about.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Okay. So I was kind of a baby faggot born
in a very rural part of Portugal, you know, like
the nearest even gay bar was was in Lisbon, which
is like an hour and a half away drive. So
I was entering a public toilet somewhere in rural Portugal
and realizing that something was going on, and I kind
(08:34):
of trying to make sense of what was going on,
and then soon joining it. So it was kind of
very organic. I hadn't I didn't even know what cruising
exactly was. I just kind of grasped it. So maybe
there's this kind of baby faggot radar that was like, oh,
there's more people doing things that you will enjoy, and
it was really extremely formative. Obviously, part of it was
(08:56):
already happening online through like chat rooms. Thank god that
was dial up internet by dance, so there was ways
of meeting people. But to me, the most exciting and
the most thrilling were finding myself in places where these
like spaces of sex and spaces of something else like
collapse into one another. So you know, train stations, I
(09:18):
love trading stations, I love truck stops, you know, restrooms
in shopping malls and you know Portugal in general, but
by that time had very very small kind of gay scene,
but this stuff was everywhere, so that's really how it
kind of started. It was a lot to like throwing
myself into the deepend in that sense.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
One of the things we found intriguing about your writing
is your assertion that cruising is very important to queer
history in terms of our origin story. Could you talk
a little bit about cruising and how we understand it historically,
because I think the term feels new, but this sort
of practice feels old.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
The term itself, you know, not very certain where it
comes from. I know that it was being used in
New York in the early twentieth century, nineteen twenties at least,
but yeah, the practice itself, whether I was named, that
was very much widespread throughout European history. Michael Rokee has
a book called Forbidden Friendships from ninety six that really
focuses on this. Sodomy was so widespread in Florence in
(10:15):
the fourteen hundreds that they had to create a special
police called u Fichudela note, which is at the Office
of the Right, whose job was just going around kind of,
you know, calm down the sodomites. So they have records
and that's how we know. Just in the space of
what like seventy years between fourteen thirty two and fifteen
oh two, at least seventeen thousand men in Florence were
(10:38):
accused of sodomy. Three thousand were convicted. That was a
huge portion of the male population in Florence. You know,
some people argue that the vast majority of men in Florence,
at one point or another will have engaged in sodomy.
So this was happening, you know, in the outskirts of
the city, in drinking spaces, in gardens all over, right,
(10:59):
not in the center, but at kind of the edges
of the city. And what is also interesting about this
is that this was always places that were also populated
by sex workers, the poor, all the degenerates. Right, they
had this incredible power to be a political risk. The
city wanted to regulate sodomy because sodomy created a challenge,
(11:20):
to say, the family, and like inheritance, so very much
like an economic challenge. What happens if like an aristocrat
starts like fucking a working class young man on the streets,
what kinds of allegiances can be forged?
Speaker 3 (11:35):
There?
Speaker 2 (11:36):
Could someone in the kind of an upper class start
paying more attention to these young men with whom they
were engaging in sodomitic relationships and perhaps pay us attention
to the family, to the wife, and to this kind
of material duty of reproducing, of sharing inheritance, etc. So
that this was a real problem at the level of
economics of the city and of wealth. It was a
(11:57):
threat to the maintenance of you know, the kind of
class system of Florence too. It's also very related to
what like Sam Delaney writes in Times Square Red, Times
Square Blue, when he's writing about being in a place
with someone who's not like you, maybe recognizing something of
you in this person who is different from you can
completely kind of disrupt the ways in which society is structured.
(12:18):
You see similar things like this. For instance, in like
post war Italy and France, lots of people who went
to political organizing meetings for like homosexual movement, not because
they were really kind of pure political beings, but because
they wanted to fuck so because these were spaces where
he could cruise. You know, May sixty eight, the birth
of these like revolutionary communist movements in Paris. I mean
(12:39):
they write about it. You know, we went for the politics,
but we really also went for the dick. Those two
things that are not separable. We shouldn't be ashamed of
talking about them, and we shouldn't be ashamed of how
sex can be a great gateway drug into like radical politics.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
These mentaling systems of power and class difference through economy.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Yeah, that's so fascinating right throughout history.
Speaker 1 (13:04):
First of all'm struck by the fact that there were
women's sex workers in the spaces where gay men we're
fucking in Florence.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
I think we've put an end to the women in
gay spaces debate.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
When gays stopped being faggots and started being gays. We
forget about who we came from and who was there
with us when we started making concessions in order to
gain fuller political citizenship and political participation. That the dominant
movement thought that we would have to clean ourselves from
associations without the groups, and that I think was a mistake.
(13:34):
As you can see from what's happening today right they're
coming for all of us.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
Something that struck me was a crazy roup cruising opens
us queers a delicious portal to time. The sentence really
stuck with me, and I'm wondering what you think spending
a lot of time in a cruising space can teach
us as queer people.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
Yeah yeah, yeah yeah. In the you know, straight world,
it's the time of work, the time of you know,
being productive society. It's the time of social reproduction bringing
more people into the world. It's the time of being born,
going to school, finding the love of real life, marrying,
having children, retiring, all of that. So this is a
kind of very strict idea of what time is and
(14:16):
how time should go.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
Well.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
I think it's interesting about queer sex sculptures, including cruising,
is how it's like time that you are wasting. It's
not productive, there's no profit at the end. It can
be time that you waste simply because you can't score too.
You know, you just turn up and you spend like
you know, time in a place and then maybe the
thing you want that is not there, but maybe you
(14:38):
just went there as well for the thrill of it.
You just maybe went there to watch it is something
quite beautiful too, just to be there and to to
kind of be in that space. I mean, I love
seeing people fuck, like whole festival. Last year, there was
this one night it was quite late, I don't know,
early morning. I just sat outside the cruising area just
hearing people having orgasms. You know, that was something so
(15:02):
beautiful about this. It was just like a whole crowd
of people just screaming, and not just guys. You know,
it was really a whole kind of diversity of screams
of pleasure, and it was just people were lost in
their own pleasure, in the pleasure of people, the people
they were with. So that's kind of what I think
what losing oneself in these temporalities really kind of allows
(15:25):
you to experience to kind of maybe allowing yourself to
like be taken off the righteous temporal path. You know,
certainly anyone who's like, you know, a good boy would
be you know, sleeping, ready to go to work.
Speaker 3 (15:38):
Yeah, but other good boys could be you know, like.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
Other good boys could be taking those loads.
Speaker 3 (15:43):
You know, that was not a good boy that I
thought you were talking about. There's two types boys.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
All Right, we're going to take a quick break, but
when we come back, we'll hear some more practical advice
from Juao about making the most of your cruising.
Speaker 3 (15:56):
Experience and get a few hot stories out of him.
So stay tuned. Will be right back.
Speaker 4 (16:04):
Now we've heard about Draw's new book, Crossings the creative
colleges are cruising, and we know that job does a.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
Lot of his own research.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
So in this act we are going to pump Professor
Florencio over his likes, dislikes, and best practices when it
comes to cruising.
Speaker 3 (16:18):
What is your ideal cruising experience.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
I like cruising that happens in unexpected places, which comes
with each challenges, especially if you're the bottom, you know.
I like the thrill of figuring it out, the glances,
the thrill of the chase, is it is it not?
It's kind of like building up of sexual tension. And
when this is happening in places where other people are
there but they don't even know that is happening, that's
(16:41):
quite a turn on. And I think there's something more
more open in these places rather than say going to
a leather night, Robert night this or that night, or
like this club is for this, this club is for that.
That can make cruising very regimented with too many rules
and regulations and who can come in, who can't come in,
who can fuck with whom? Public spaces to me are
(17:03):
really the the ideal place.
Speaker 4 (17:06):
You've done a lot of traveling, and you've done a
lot of research on cruising space is what has been
your favorite cruising spot, like your hidden gym.
Speaker 2 (17:14):
There's parks that I very much like. I mean Hampstead
Heat in London is one of those classic ones. George
Michael was there was arrested there, so no places with history.
I like to my places with history, you know, commune
with the spirit of our ancestors and hasn't hide in Berlin,
another park has a quite nice cruising area that is
(17:35):
actually quite mixed in the sense of you know, it's
not just there's lots of trade there. There's lots of
people who don't go to gay spaces who go there
for cruising, and I think that's really kind of one
of the reasons why I like this. You know, you
don't need to pay money to go cruise. Cruising is
like a ride, you know almost places like light like
parks really give you that experience.
Speaker 3 (17:56):
All Right, we've heard about some of your cruising likes.
Speaker 4 (17:58):
What are some of your dislike It's like, what type
of behavior do you not like to see when you're
in cruising spaces?
Speaker 2 (18:04):
Yeah, I don't like very hot spaces. I think you know,
we've been like fighting for our rides or whatever. For
such a long time, a cruising space needs to be
air conditions. It's the least. I'm a girl of a
certain age by now, I don't. I don't put myself
to really hot places. They still have not discovered their
(18:26):
conditioning in Germany. But I was at lab perhaps the
most infamous, filthiest gay male sex club that I've ever
been here. We know her. Yeah, I was in full run.
But the place was packed and I did is like
massive like with of paupers, and it was so hot
I almost fainted. I had to run out to like
get fresh air, like no. But apart from you air conditioning,
(18:51):
there's lot of behaviors I don't like, you know, I
don't like abuse. You sadly see it a lot. I
wish people didn't bring things we don't like to see
in the world world into these spaces. We see these
kinds of you know, ways of dealing with people that
you know, people are not like disposable object. And I
think it's important that we, you know, remember that even
in our own kind of fantasies, that there is a
(19:12):
space between fantasy and and reality, and you don't treat
people like shit. Cruising etiquette is something that we developed
and that we should really be proud of. And if
we forget about it, you should go back to gay
school too to remember it, to re learn it. You know,
there's ways of rejecting someone's advancing without being a dig
(19:34):
At our best. We were doing like instent politics before
can sin become a thing for everyone else? You know,
we had ways of saying yes and no, not definitive
right that at every moment you can say, Okay, this
is enough, but this is not no longer for me,
or something like that. And we knew all of that
without without even nuttering words with developers are doing all
of that without turning it into you know, laws of
(19:54):
how to do this or that, and you should be
proud of that, and you should deploy it a lot,
a lot more so.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
You talked a lot about your early cruising experiences and
how you sort of just fell into it.
Speaker 3 (20:03):
You didn't really go seeking it out. It found you.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
So I'm curious during there's early days, was there ever
a cruising experience or a hookup where you learned something
about yourself that you didn't know before. You found a
new kink or fetish, or explored your body in a
new way where you're like, oh wow, this.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
Yeah, that's one that of all of them, that's really
memorable to me. Venice two thousand and four, I was
doing kind of you'rea broad there as an undergraduate student,
and we were in one of these like you know,
silly small clubs of Venice because there's not many, and
so everyone goes to the same and somehow I kind
of hooked up with this guy and then you kind
of walk out together and you know, Venice at night,
(20:42):
there's nobody on the street, and obviously what you think
there's nobody on the street, you just want to fuck.
So we just we walked in, we just leaned against
a wall. It just like started fucking. It was a
little like courtyards, and half way through we start hearing
giggling and so look up. That was like like two
or three girls, like, you know, their early to mid twenties,
(21:05):
I guess, at the window, just watching and having the
time of their lives. And that really turned me on
so much. Yeah, I was like, okay, yeah, I kind
of like being watched, and so we kind of started
performing for the audience, and you know, that was good.
Speaker 3 (21:23):
I love that. I hope you've got great reviews for
the performance, truly.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
Yeah, the performers, you know what I mean?
Speaker 1 (21:29):
Yeah, exactly, Yeah, best courtyards for cruising, please take a tour. So, Joe,
I don't know if you have been seeing the same
and the places that you've lived, but I do feel
like in the US we're seeing younger generations voicing these
sort of anti sex impulses, usually criticizing cruising and people
(21:49):
who spend a lot of time hooking up and looking
for sex right, wasting time. As you sort of mentioned,
they've used sex as a sort of non productive, actively
harmful thing. I mean, obviously they're gradations and complications to this,
but it does seem like there's this sort of anti
sex swing happening right, particularly targeting sex media and public cruising.
So what is one thing that you wish younger people
(22:12):
would know about cruising before criticizing it.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
I love to talk about this, and they talk about
the zoomers or the dimmer careers, you know, with a
kind of approach to the fear of sex that is happening.
But it's also not just them. I mean, hello, Larry Kramer, y, Yeah,
I know if I can say this, but you know,
but Larry Kramer did very many good things, but also
you know Larry Kremer Andrew Sullivan, they are queers. They
(22:36):
have had positions on sex and promiscuity that are very
much along the lines of what these young kids are saying.
So I don't think it's necessarily generational. I think it
manifests generationally because there is such a general cultural panic
around sex because of the Internet. And this is something
that happens all the time. It happened when you know,
(22:57):
the printing press was invented, it happened when photography was invented,
when cinema was invented. Every time visual technologies are developed
that make access to images or to to kind of
content as we call it these days, more easily, and
what democratized then the fear of sex. Sex is going
to be seen by more people. What is it going
to do to them? With the Internet and digital culture alongside,
(23:20):
you know, very important conversations that we need to continue
to have around like consent. There's a kind of an
unfortunate flip sight to that, which is that younger people
are being told about sex as primarily a site of
harm and a side of risk. I encountered this a
lot like teaching undergraduates in the UK especially, no one
(23:41):
knows how to do sex. And in the UK, I
mean it's ridiculous how little young adults know when they
come to university, especially the straight kids. The fear they
had of sex and they're born was unbearable. They couldn't
even talk about it to each other because there was
scared of being like Judge. There's you know, slots. It's
(24:01):
not all gen Zers that think like this, and I've
spoken to many gen Zers who are completely different and
are a lot more open with their sexuality. But the
dominant discourse around sex is that you know that sex
is always primarily a site where we will be harmed,
rather than thinking about sex as a place where you
(24:22):
are allowed to feel pleasure, where you're allowed to experiment,
where you're allowed to learn about yourself and your body.
Learn about how to be with other people in very
vulnerable positions is something really important. That's how what it
means to be with people growing up. I learned a
lot from you know, my early twenties, late teens, early twenties,
from people who are in their thirties right. They were
(24:43):
the guys who taught me a lot about sex, what
sex can be of good things and difficult things about sex,
the messy stuff about sex. And I learned all of
that through them. And that's kind of something we've done
since we've existed as like a culture or a community,
if you want to call it that. It kind of
to each other things. And I don't want to be
(25:03):
like sounding like an old fag, but because of the
ways in which sex has been the platform so much,
you can't have sex talk, you can't have sex images
in social media. Content is so restricted to specific places.
If your main point of contact with the world is
a smartphone in our computer, there's a lot in not
getting between that and the fear mongering around sex, which
(25:25):
comes from very genuine places of concern. It just reduced
sex to this really bad thing.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Okay, So before we let you go, I do have
one last question, and I think we've kind of addressed it.
The US and several European countries are going through a
lavender scare style moral panic. We've seen it before, we
are unfortunately seeing it again. We're seeing laws targeting everything
from queer books to poppers in the US now. So
my final question for you is, how do you cruise
when the empires on the verge of collapse.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
RFK Junior really did come for poppers, and I mean,
and it's likely that he's coming for prep with the
defunding of HI programs. I have a hope for this moment, right,
this kind of right wing turn, this like radical right
wing turn, will help our gay brothers remember that they
are and have always been faggots, and that perhaps we
(26:13):
kind of can go back to the moment where we
were in solidarity and in the same places with other
people who are not, you know, just the gay men,
like the particular kind of you know, good gay man
when they came for the paupers. I posted something on
Blue Sky along their lives of that's it. Finally the
guys are going to become politicized now.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
You know.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Don't take the fucking poppers away from us. I can
only see one solution, which is that we kind of
realize that the people who left behind in order to
become middle class white gay men, that they remember that
we are now all in the same both or that
the things that they are coming for also affect those
of us with privileged lives. And so I hope that
(26:55):
this makes us think about the choice that we've made,
and that we really evered openness to the very spaces
of cruising that we go to and maybe, you know,
maybe this is the spaces of cruising, like once again
you can kind of build a movement.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
I love that you mentioned that, and I you know,
I think during the sixties and seventies, so many of
the galvanizing movements happened when, like you know, I think
of Canada a bathhouse was attacked.
Speaker 3 (27:18):
I think of the US.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
Everybody in that era described stonewall as like the messy,
grimy bar.
Speaker 3 (27:24):
Where you went to go do disgusting things.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
So it's like those places are always the site of
galvanizing movements. And you know, I kind of hate that
we're back in this moment in some cyclical way, but yeah,
it does give me hope. I think you're right.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
People don't know about this. I mean, the Catalans are
really proud of this because they say, we're really where
it started, not Stone. Like the first protest, the first
LGBT protests in Spain, it was in Barcelona in nineteen
thirty three, and it's a bunch of like transsex workers, yeah,
who are like walking the streets near a Urhino Public Urhino,
(28:00):
and and something happened there that the next day all
these these like trans hookahs uh went down marched down
to the public urinal in protest. This is the thing
we have always organized around around these places of sex
because they were so important to us in the case
of sex workers, for their own livelihoods too. And if
(28:20):
that's what it takes it, then that's what it takes.
Though it's sad that the gays, the gays, you know,
I'm not talking about the facts, im talking about the guy. Yeah,
that the gays are like, oh shit, fuck they came
for paupers, like, yeah, they came for everyone else before before,
you you know, but.
Speaker 3 (28:37):
Mind first they came for the poppers and I did not. Well,
thank you so much for joining us today, Joe. We
really really appreciate having so much like you. Thank you,
thank you. This has been such a treat.
Speaker 4 (28:50):
When we come back, we're gonna hear an actual cruising
compassion from one of our listeners.
Speaker 3 (28:54):
Stay tuned.
Speaker 5 (28:55):
Yeah, a few weeks ago, I visited a guy's place
and he said his boyfriend and all his friends are
out partying. So we hooked up and in the aftercare
his boyfriend and all their friends came over and I
(29:19):
was the after party until eight am. Oh I got
there at ten pm. Oh for ten hours I was
taking loads.
Speaker 2 (29:30):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (29:31):
And that's the story. Oh, that's that's I mean, what
a true.
Speaker 4 (29:36):
And what's interesting is that he said in the aftercare
I became the after party.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
And that doesn't feel like much of a soft landing.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
No, you know what, if you're doing something that requires
aftercare taking, like several loads for many hours afterwards, is
very bold.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
It's very daring.
Speaker 4 (29:54):
I love the eagerness though, right, like, yeah, you're not thirsty,
thirsty because she I mean, I'm I do love.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
How to sink to the story was They're like, I'm
just going to share with you in Olympian feat of
load taking and that we'll speak for itself.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
Correct.
Speaker 3 (30:08):
I don't need to add frills.
Speaker 1 (30:09):
You didn't need to know names, We didn't need to
know who was wearing, what, where it happened.
Speaker 3 (30:13):
Do you think the boyfriend pre planned this with his boyfriend? Honestly?
Speaker 1 (30:17):
Okay, I was hooking up a couple that I knew
once and one of them was like, hey, come over,
my boyfriend's out. You should come fuck and then the
boyfriend was like, Hey, so and so told me you're
coming over. How would you feel if I happened to
show up a half hour earlier? And I was like,
I don't mind that, but I do feel like i'd
be lying to your boy you know what I mean?
If I come over and I'm like, oh, it's just us, Oh,
(30:38):
oh my god, there's your boyfriend.
Speaker 3 (30:41):
I'm not trying to act, you know what I mean.
Like if we're role playing, that's one thing, but I'm sad,
you know what I mean, Like I need a rate
for that kind of performance, truly.
Speaker 1 (30:50):
So I do definitely think there could have been a
bit of a subterfuge or a bit of a mislead there.
But if you're open to it and you're down, then
you know what happy accident? Right, Well, thank you so
much for submitting that story.
Speaker 3 (31:03):
I wish I was you. I wish I had that stamina.
Speaker 4 (31:06):
If you want to hear your own cruising confessions on
an upcoming episode of this podcast, you can call our
Cruising Confessions hotline at three zero two two one nine
three eight nine eight. That's three zero two two one
nine three eight nine eights. Yes, please do Colin we
cannot wait to hear from you. All right, So this
was such a great episode.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
It was so good.
Speaker 3 (31:29):
Professor Pig.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
Professor Pig, he's such a smart person and the way
he manages to take these like really esoteric ideas about
like the politics of fucking and queerness and all these
historical stories and then just kind of smash it down
into like a little sloody.
Speaker 3 (31:45):
Into this little thing. Yeah, no, that's exactly I felt
the same point. Yeah, I was like, great, give me
that slutty little nugget.
Speaker 2 (31:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
And this is why we're friends.
Speaker 1 (31:55):
This is why we are friend's co hosts, wives, sisters.
Speaker 3 (32:01):
Yeah, we are our own polycule. We're a polycule of two.
I love it.
Speaker 1 (32:06):
All right, Well, we do want to thank our guests today,
Professor Joel Florencio. You can get his books, including his
new one Crossings Creative Ecologies of Cruising wherever books are sold,
and please do buy them at a bookstore. Sniffy's Cruisy
Confessions is directed by Adam Barron, produced by Amanda Kuper
and Cameron Femino, and executive produced by Eli Martin.
Speaker 4 (32:24):
Cruising Confessions is presented by Snippy's The Ultimate Map based
cruising platform for gay by curious people Ready to cruise,
check out the map at snippies dot com and fall
snitches at Snippy's app.
Speaker 3 (32:34):
Cruisers are a community. Do your part in keeping us safe.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
Learn more about protecting your sexual health at Healthy Sexuals
dot com.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
Put Jo put put Jo put, Joe put
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