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