Thus, it can no longer make sense, if it ever did, simply to assume that a male-centered analysis of homo/heterosexual definition will have no lesbian relevance or interest. At the same time, there are no algorithms for assuming a priori what its lesbian relevance could be or how far its lesbian interest might extend.
—Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet
everyone on the app says they hate the app but no one stops
—Danez Smith, “a note on the phone app that tells me how far i am from other men’s mouths”
During the Fourth of July weekend in the summer of 1987, poet Eileen Myles left their apartment in the East Village to write a poem among the ruins. This poem came to be called “Hot Night,” and was later published in their 1991 collection Not Me. Unlike the exterior of the piers, this sense of ruination was not necessary literal—although Myles does write in an essay on the poem’s composition that in the “summer the city seems like a big rotten museum, or an empty abandoned culture”—as much it was metaphorical.1 At the end of this essay, they continue:
I was in the wreck of one culture the night I was writing this poem. All the monuments lay scattered around: the person I loved, the poet I was ten years ago, the kinds of things that were central then to my life. It’s impossible to say anything new about the East Village changing, that wreck, though my most startling experience recently was when I turned a corner on my bike early one evening and didn’t recognize any of the stores and didn’t know where I was. Even Little Ricky’s now asks to check your bag. I walked out angry but I’m sure I’ll be back because I’ve never been able to buy trendy postcards right downstairs before. (NM, 202)
Myles’s recollection of heartbreak is accompanied by a description of the neighborhood that suggests a queasy double take, where commerce uncannily reinvents the city before the eyes of its inhabitants. Even Little Ricky’s, the kitsch and paraphernalia store on the same street as the poet’s apartment, has now adopted a sense of corporate mistrust toward loyal or local customers. Such changes are all the harder to swallow for an old hand, but the poem’s speaker is emphatic about their experience in the very first lines: “Hot night, wet night / you’ve seen me before” (51). In a commentary on the poem Davy Knittle suggests that Myles subverts the course laid out by traditional city planning on their walk, in order to pursue a queer line of movement, one that follows the undulations of their own desires, and “resists the public-private development that has dominated the shifts in Manhattan’s built environment over the arc of their writing life.”2 They observe gentrification with a cynical awareness that even complaints and critiques can eventually ossify into received or recycled narratives about the city—“it’s impossible to say anything new about the East Village changing.”
Instead, Myles views summer in the city in more primordial terms, finding in its trash and refuse that “big rotten museum.” In recoiling from the commercialized and ever-changing face of the East Village, the poet also begins to appear distant from community itself. They dwell among the everyday ruins, which, Knittle writes, “offer Myles social experience without human interaction” and “the sense of using a shared resource,” a resource that nonetheless, paradoxically, becomes their instrument of solitude.3 “The city’s outsides look like your insides if you’re feeling that way,” they write in the essay (NM, 199). The substitution of the poet’s internal unrest for the exterior of the city itself, an ugly symbiosis of feeling and place, appears to depend upon a certain imaginative capacity; it will only work if “you’re feeling that way.” Indeed, the immanent erotic potential felt by the poet is directed not toward a possible lover but to the streets, which are described, postcoitally, as “drenched and shimmering / with themself,” and Myles makes this relation clear through apostrophe: “Impersonal street / is a lover / to me” (“Hot Night,” NM, 51). In openly engaging and communing with the environmental and erotic muck of the urban landscape, this moment of the poem speaks to Sarah Ensor’s call that we explore “how cruising might inspire an ecological ethic more deeply attuned to our impersonal intimacies with the human, nonhuman, and elemental strangers that constitute both our environment and ourselves.”4
This last element is crucial, for the urban night of Myles’s poem feels curiously unpopulated and “without human interaction,” as Knittle puts it, and reads rather as an erotically charged delve into the self which in turn instantiates a form of pathetic relation to the surrounding environment. Myles characterizes the “process” in similar terms by stating their belief that “life is a rehearsal for the poem,” and continues:
I literally stepped out of my house that night, feeling a poem coming on. Incidentally, it hadn’t started raining yet, so I wasn’t alone in being ready to burst. I was universally pent up [ . . . ] then the explosion of rain and light made it absolutely necessary to go in the deli on 6th street and buy a notebook and pen. I went over to Yaffa and wrote it looking out the window. I haven’t changed a thing. (201)
Inasmuch as “Hot Night” occupies the temporality of an aftermath, composed just beyond the brink of an “explosion” and populated with refuse, it also marks a moment of becoming—a neighborhood changing, a storm breaking, a poem arriving. The storm itself renders the street as an ambient space—the “growling / thunder lightning / to flash and light / up 7th” (NM, 51)—that offers new subjective possibilities. This “flash,” which illuminates the scene and shapes its emerging visual landscape, resembles the photographic flash commonly associated, via Benjamin and Baudelaire, with urban experience itself. But it also bears a resemblance to what Eliza Steinbock has recently termed the “shimmer,” after Barthes. The concept of the shimmer has a rich history in theoretical writing, where it is often employed as a “noun akin to sparkle or flash” or else, in terms of “shimmering,” as “a modifier to describe change in its alluring, twinkling, flickering form” in a manner that is “politically urgent” and “breaks with binary and dialectical thinking.”5 For Steinbock, the “shimmer” makes itself available to a trans or nonbinary ontology precisely because it depends, as Barthes argues, on vantage, so if “trans is not identified as either/or, but depends on the ‘angle’ of the subject’s gaze emerging in different contexts, then the slight modifications of gender could be likened to the space of the shimmer” (10). What the lighting-up of the shimmer makes possible is a body’s capacity “to be one with its transitions,” which bring with them “a potential change through self-multiplication across the shimmering passage of unresolvable disjunction in which we all live and breathe” (12), just as Myles’s poem remains viscerally cognizant of “growling,” “lightning,” and the subject’s own sense of becoming, of being “about to burst.” The traces of this bursting are there to see on the New York streets, which are aptly “shimmering / with themself,” such that we might read this phrase less as an exterior description of the sidewalk than as an investment in the “incipient subjectivity” (13) of the shimmer—a “them” self—that would appear to anticipate Myles’s own coming out as nonbinary years later.
That the subjective mode of shimmering is linked, for Steinbock, to the cinematic image speaks to the photographic dimension of Myles’s poem. Myles describes the poem’s moment of becoming as a process wherein the aesthetic and erotic are intimately linked. “I’ve had this feeling before—of going out to get a poem, like hunting,” Myles writes, as they describe another time they “felt ‘erotic, oddly / magnetic’ like photographic paper. As I walked I was recording the details. I was the poem” (NM, 202). Myles frames the poet as both agent and medium, the active participant in an erotic search and the surface upon which the consummatory act is developed and made legible, while photography is intimately linked to the poet’s own process of self-discovery. Their full description in the poem of this photographic-erotic capacity is framed around the following scene (NM, 53):
Sunday
I photographed mounds
of trash, finally
turned the focus on
me, a portrait I
could accept. I
feel erotic, oddly
magnetic to the
death of things
This moment collapses together a number of entities in a queer assemblage: trash, death, sex, the self. It reaches for a certain comic flourish, perhaps, in the succession of “trash” and “me” as chosen photographic subjects, as if there might be some self-conscious or self-flagellating relationship between the two. Trash is me and I am trash—the outsides look like your insides, if you’re feeling that way. Maggie Nelson argues that Myles displays an interest in “meshing filmic devices with poetic tropes” in a manner akin to the “kinship that the first-generation New York School poets felt with Abstract Expressionist Art” and quotes their statement that “I experience writing poems as the chance to make a little movie.”6 Myles regularly posits their “speaker as a camera and the poem itself as a snapshot or collection of snapshots, complete with recurring ‘clicks,’”7 a sound that is particularly focal toward the end of “Hot Night”: “used / magazines, / poetry books on a blanket, click” (NM, 57). The “movie” being made in “Hot Night,” however, is not only about the urban environment, for the speaker’s transition from forager to self-portraitist serves to reframe the poem and lends its central walk an explicit purpose, that desire to find “a portrait I / could accept.”
The confluence of an erotically charged “hunting” with the photographic “click” of portraiture, as well as the “shimmering” possibilities of such a confluence, would seem to place Myles comfortably in the tradition I have identified in this book; a (mostly) poetic tradition of texts in which cruising, looking, and photographic or cinematic representations are seen to be imbricated. And yet to consider “Hot Night” a cruising poem in the way I have done other texts is to observe the ways in which it relates uncomfortably to such a categorization. As Nelson writes, “the speaker is out hunting for sex as well as a poem, and the poem concludes accordingly: “I need / whiskey sex / and I get / it,” and in doing so they create “a great deal of slippage” between distinctions between male and female.8 But “Hot Night” is also a poem vexed by questions of gender and representation. Unlike the crowded spaces of Whitman’s “Among the Multitude” or the busy platform of Hughes’s “Subway Face,” for example, the street of “Hot Night” is, as mentioned above, curiously unpeopled, its poet-photographer dwelling in relative solitude among the garbage. “Strolling the gutters, alert to men’s ever-threatening violence,” writes Dianne Chisholm, Myles feels “most connected to big-city trash,” a figuration for the way they have been “repeatedly ‘trashed’ by guardians of the all-American ideal.”9 And unlike O’Hara’s “Song” or Wojnarowicz’s prose dispatches from the piers, Myles’s poem is not erotically oriented toward any one object or person. Cruising is instead present more diffusely, as an atmosphere. Prospective partners do not themselves emerge from the street’s landscape.
As I will argue in the next section of this chapter, the photographic and curiously sepulchral qualities of Myles’s poem reflect not only the particular epoch of New York in the late 1980s, in the midst of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, but also their own ambivalent position vis-à-vis a number of unfolding histories to which they might be said to belong, as both a poet and a queer person. As Davy Knittle writes, the poem’s figuration of “the street as an impersonal lover echoes the practice of gay (male) public sex, a practice without a particular parallel at scale for non-male-bodied people.”10 This imbalance is no doubt exacerbated by the fact, as sociologist Denise Bullock claims, that “previous definitions of cruising have privileged the behavior of males and has been limited to an overt style of cruising for the intent of short-term sexual encounters,” which has led to the perception that lesbians do not cruise, or do not engage in cruising to the same degree.11 Rita Mae Brown, author of the runaway 1973 bestseller Rubyfruit Jungle, a classic of lesbian fiction, undertook practical research into gay male cruising cultures in March 1975. Venturing fully clothed into the East Village bathhouse The Club, with a mustache, squared-off nails, and a butch walk, Brown hoped that by placing herself “in an all-male situation where there is no intrusion of female sensibility” she would “learn something about that sacred cow, sexual difference.”12 Brown identifies the bathhouse as an ambivalent space, a Xanadu, or refuge, in which encounters are transactional and hierarchical, and from it draws conclusions about differences between gay and lesbian sexual cultures; the way that women “build no Xanadus because we are oppressed in a different way to the homosexual male.”13 The “anonymity” of cruising can be “undesirable and frightening” for non-male-bodied people, who are at greater risk of sexual violence and cannot “trust men sexually in an anonymous situation the way men can trust each other.” The “men in the baths can walk out on the streets and reclaim all the privileges of maleness,” whereas Brown “walked out of the baths as I walk out anywhere, a woman,” with no such “fantasy farm” to retreat to. While the public space of the street is hardly without its dangers for gay men, the right street, in the right neighborhood, can also recreate the site of the gay bathhouse in plain sight, another “fantasy farm” of possible encounters. Myles’s navigation of the street in “Hot Night” can thus be read, in this vein, as a riposte to the erasure and relative exclusion of women and nonbinary people not only from the prevailing gay male culture, but from the very cruising practices that it has traditionally monopolized.
If the “click” toward the end of Myles’s “Hot Night” registers not only the sound of the camera but also a larger sense of something climactic clicking into the place, when the speaker finally “get[s] it”—it being, variously, “whiskey,” “sex,” or a sense of completion—the poem makes it evident that such completion is hard won. The contingency of the “click” in Myles’s poem can in fact be illuminated by an earlier “click” in the work of another downtown artist. Laurie Anderson’s 1973 photo-narrative project Fully Automated Nikon (Object/Objection/Objectivity) was first conceived after she was approached by a woman in a seafood restaurant in Virginia who insisted that she, Anderson, was an actress from a TV soap opera. “I guess I just look like her,” Anderson replied, and yet “the more I denied it, the more convinced she was of my identity,” and “partly to assert myself, I asked if I could take her picture. As I shot the photograph, I realized that photography is a kind of mugging, a kind of assault. I was shooting her, then stealing something.”14 Anderson’s realization of the invasive dimension of “tak[ing]” the woman’s “picture” occurs here through the act of retaliation; she herself has her “identity” taken from her as a result of the woman’s insistent misapprehension, and then responds in kind using her camera.
Subsequently, however, Anderson carries her aesthetic interrogation of the act of taking beyond this more or less innocuous, if frustrating, exchange and brings it to bear upon a more sinister daily reality for women in cities:
When I got back to my neighborhood, the Lower East Side in New York, I decided to shoot pictures of men who made comments to me on the street. I had always hated this invasion of my privacy and now I had the means of my revenge. As I walked along Houston Street with my fully automated Nikon, I felt armed, ready. I passed a man who muttered “Wanna fuck?” This was standard technique: the female passes and the male strikes at the last possible moment forcing the women to backtrack if she should dare to object. I wheeled around, furious. “Did you say that?” He looked around surprised, then defiant. “Yeah, so what the fuck if I did?” I raised my Nikon, took aim, began to focus. His eyes darted back and forth, an undercover cop? CLICK.15
Anderson’s exchange with the stranger-subject she shoots here differs wildly from those of Sunil Gupta and Hal Fischer’s work, produced later in the 1970s. But then, this exchange is not a cruise but a catcall, its participants not two men but a woman and a man. This antagonistic mode of soliciting women—which seems as invested in the assertion of power, by making someone feel unsafe, as it does in actually hooking up—has its own codes, its “standard technique.” Anderson’s taking “aim” with her “fully automated Nikon” disrupts the quotidian chain of events. The association of the “CLICK” with surveillance is telling, but in fact Anderson’s photographic intervention in this exchange is even more discomfiting than that of the law’s, because it gives visual form, and with it the implication of posterity and accountability, to the thoughtless misogyny of the passing comment.
She notes that subsequent reactions by other men, however, were the “opposite”; they acted “innocent, then offended,” and by “the time I took their pictures they were posing, like taking their picture was the least I could do.” The camera’s exposure has a double meaning here, as it prompts these men to suddenly switch their behavior and pose as innocent in the face of potential revelation. In the exhibition photographs she displayed, Anderson placed a white strip across the eyes of the men, primarily to protect their identity, perhaps, but also to remind viewers of other contexts in which such steps are taken, as they often are with criminals or those involved with criminal activity. The mechanism of Anderson’s “CLICK” is here seen to be efficacious, for the camera allows her to “object to objectification” and “glares back at the male gazing, reversing the power dynamic in which the men’s behavior has placed her” and in turn “developing an aesthetics of empowerment.”16 Myles is comparably defiant in their rejection of the scopophilia of public urban spaces. In the poem “Basic August,” written a year after “Hot Night,” in the summer of 1988, the poet wishes they could “pull a devil mask over / my face. To be in- / visible and assertive” (NM, 73), and this desire soon precipitates an act of assertion on the subway:
Or I have learned from
novels that you can
stare right through a
person. All the midriffs
of men I have bored
through this summer
in the sweaty subway
which is like
an intestine. make
the beady eyes vanish
by boring through
like a train (74)
In this moment, the erotic look or leading glance is reversed, turned back upon the male gazers of the subway, running in to them like the train they cohabit for a transient moment, a hot minute. In refusing the cruising glances of men on the intestinal subway, the poet plays them at their own game, with the same affective charge of “Hot Night,” where the “outsides look like your insides, if you’re feeling that way.” In their 2018 collection Evolution, Myles’s poem “The City of New York” ends with a similarly sweaty vignette, half-erotic, half-comic glance shared between the poet and a woman riding the subway:
In the evening the voice
on the train was warning
us about thieves &
sexual perverts
this woman & I
started snuffling
the voice began again.
What’s next we laughed.
He said thanks. The younger
woman was decidedly
cruising. The subway is hot.
I’m thinking this.17
Like many moments in Myles’s writing, the wider implications of this scene gravitate around the pinpoint, deictic observations of present—the here and nowness of “I’m thinking this.” This recollection proceeds in a logical sequence: a train announcement, a snuffle, a laugh, a thanks, but the observation that the “younger / woman was decidedly / cruising. The subway is hot” somehow scrambles the order of the unfolding information. Privy on the page to the end of the succeeding line we might mis-hear or mis-read it at first glance as “The younger / woman was decidedly / hot.” With this wrong turn the poet would tip over from mere observation into “decidedly / cruising” themself, eyeing up the hotness of a prospective partner. The frisson shared between the poet and this younger woman serves to undermine the subway announcement about the implied threats to women’s safety, which are here laughed away not through a “click” or a reciprocally antagonistic glare, but through this furtive moment of queer solidarity.
These examples from Anderson and Myles’s work illustrate how the unwelcome specular economy of the city, characterized by the predominance of the male gaze and unsolicited verbal threats, vexes the practice of cruising for women, nonbinary, and transmasculine people. Indeed, compared to the quasi-canon of gay male cruising texts, the tradition of writing about lesbian cruising is smaller and less visible, such that we gather that although Myles has “learned from / novels that you can / stare right through a person,” these are not directly instrumental texts in the same manner as those in the gay male tradition. Even Audre Lorde’s well-known recollection, in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, of 1950s New York, passing “Black women on Eighth Street—the invisible but visible sisters—or in the Bag or at Laurel’s,” two of Manhattan’s lesbian bars, is primarily about “passing in silence” and “looking the other way,” hoping but also perhaps retreating from “that telltale flick of the eye, that certain otherwise prohibited openness of expression.”18 In their short story “Chelsea Girls,” published in 1994 and set in the summer of 1979, Myles’s auto-fictional narrator asks: “Could we possibly be two boys out cruising women together?”19 Here Myles is referring to themself and their then-girlfriend Chris. After having dinner together, they have gone on to the Duchess, a lesbian bar in the West Village, where Myles is hoping to cruise an attractive waitress who had served them earlier at the restaurant. Although on the surface the incredulity of the question relates to the implications of sleeping with other partners for the couple’s relationship, the gendering of its terms points to a larger question about whether they really could engage in the “boys” game of cruising. Although this introspective moment occurs within the (relatively) safe environs of the Duchess, its almost-ontological anxiety about the nature of lesbian cruising is anticipated by the description of the walk to the bar:
Let’s go to the Duchess I said lighting another [cigarette]. I slid my yellow bic into the small pocket of my orange painter pants. I had such faith in things. I had a little notebook in my back pocket where men carried their wallets. Firstly I was a woman, then I rolled my cash and I put it in my pocket. It was impossible to carry two square things. If you wanted anyone to see your ass. And I did but I didn’t.20
Here Myles locates an expressive simplicity in small details, demonstrates a certain “faith in things.” The presence of the notebook replaces the object of the wallet, casually gendered as male, and Myles’s explanation—“firstly I was a woman”—cuts several ways. It suggests that a wallet in the back pocket is not only unfashionable for women, but unsafe. Or less safe than Myles’s solution of rolling up cash and stuffing it into their pocket, which makes them less conspicuous to pickpockets and other possible menaces. Plus, it’s “impossible to carry two square things”; to return to O’Hara’s maxim, it’s “just common sense: if you’re going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you” (“Personism,” CP, 498). Except that Myles is ambivalent about soliciting an audience for this particular feature—“I did but I didn’t”—and the use of “anyone” (akin to O’Hara’s campy “everyone”), with its implication that one might be visible to just anyone, introduces a note of threat.
This account of the street suggests that lesbian cruising is implicated in the optical bind of male desire, and it inflects the subsequent reference to “two boys cruising.” Just as Myles seeks to view themself from behind in describing the different ways that men and women wear or fill their pants, their description of “two boys cruising women” recalls, at first glance, what Laura Mulvey describes as “trans-sex identification,” the process through which the “woman spectator in the cinema can make use of an age-old cultural tradition” which allows “a transition out of her own sex into another,” thus coming to inhabit the “male gaze” that Mulvey theorized in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”21 Myles’s example, however, lends this motif of spectatorship a queer resonance, where the assumption of boyhood is linked closely with lesbian desire. It is thus more in line with Steinbock’s contribution to theories of looking via “the field of transgender studies,” an aspect shift that involves moving away from what they describe as Mulvey’s “spurious” and heavily psychoanalytical concept toward an acknowledgment that such cross-identification is neither “uncommon” nor binary, and encompasses a whole range of “threshold embodiments groping toward social identities.”22 One such identity might be that of the butch, although Myles is clear in distinguishing between butch-ness and boyishness in their recollection that “Christine was the boy in our relationship. Not the butch. No Chris was the pain in the neck little teasing boy.”23 This distinction further complicates the tone of Myles’s phrase “two boys cruising” because it suggests an elision of gay cruising with a boyish petulance, giving way to a pejorative summoning of the male gender, like the inverse of what George Chauncey identifies as the gay male adoption of “women’s names and pronouns,”24 which is often to campy, collusive, or antagonistic ends.
Myles’s offhand invocation of cruising’s gender thus lights upon a mode of identification that exceeds singular categories and speaks to what Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain identifies as their multitudinous “category habitation,” their “self-describing” variously “as a dyke, a butch, as a man or a guy (in some of their work)” and their “ultimately coming to apply a gender-neutral pronoun to themself outside the page.”25 Inasmuch as their work displays an awareness of the dangers of the street for non-male-bodied people, their own mythos as a lesbian poet is largely structured around a punk defiance against gendered limitations. That their notebook in “Chelsea Girls” is presented as an object, if not of rebellion, then of distinction from men, speaks to one such defiant moment in “Hot Night,” a poem in which the process of writing on the hoof is central. Indeed, “Hot Night” gives a different meaning to the notion of the cruising poem insofar as its author is cruising it. It is, after all, the poem itself that the poet is on the hunt for when they write that they
pick up “you” like
my midnight
rattle I shake
at the devil
of the night
that does not
scare me.
(NM, 56–57)
Yoking together the language of the sexual pickup or the midnight encounter with the “rattle,” Myles constructs an intricate triangulation. As they write in the accompanying essay, “there’s a welter of ‘you’s in the work”—of which this instance is the “most poetic”—where “I’m addressing my romantic obsession and the gesture or the whole performance of writing a poem” (200). This eroticized apostrophe to the creative act is harnessed against the night’s diabolical landscape in the figure of the rattle, which could either be a physical, talismanic object or a quick-fire succession of sound, like Myles’s own “poetic” take, perhaps, on Whitman’s famous “barbaric yawps” (LG, 77). In an earlier part of the poem, Myles makes use of other kinds of weaponry against the night’s malevolence: “I think I / need a bowie / knife, a / pistol, a squealing / horn” (51). Consistent with the sense of emotional nihilism they felt on the night of the poem’s composition, Myles’s enumeration of defense mechanisms manifests as murderous and substitutes defiance for fear—they have been “hardly ever as / charged up as / now” (52).
The sense of the deathliness that runs throughout the poem, the speaker’s feeling of being “filled / with the death / of the streets,” the streets that are themselves “wit- / ness to the death of my innocence” (52), is thus illuminated by their speaker’s destructive bent. But this invocation of the “death / of the streets” in New York City in the year 1987 surely also points to a larger cultural referent. “Hot Night” figures a landscape that is more diffusely morbid than it is elegiac, and although Myles frames their account of the poem around the cultural and personal wreckage they found themself in that night, the metaphorical porosity between the wasteland of the streets and the ongoing deathliness of the city, which is weathering one of the largest public health crises in its history, remains unspoken. Among the kinds of culture Myles discusses in the essay, from their private museumlike “culture of one” to “some new, larger one out there which I suspect exists” (202), there is one community in particular that remains unacknowledged, at least explicitly, though it is there in the poem “At Last,” when the speaker stands outside the Gay Community Center and muses: “We live / in a culture of / vanishing men” (46).
Myles has written and spoken extensively about HIV/AIDS and many of their poems, like “At Last” and “Hot Night,” either directly or indirectly address the atmosphere of this period, when “people [ . . . ] began dying too of AIDS” and there was “this new kind of wealth and a baroque puffy quality” sitting “right next to the poverty and the stink of shit in the subway and in the streets.”26 But HIV/AIDS also appears to be a contested site for Myles, one that makes legible their sense, as they write in “Hot Night,” that “I / do & do not / belong” (NM, 53). In “At Last,” this ambivalence is given expression in the poem’s opening reflection on time and the blood drive. “I always fall in love with tired / women,” the poem begins, “It seems I have the / time” (46), and continues:
On the blackboard
at the Gay Community
Center it said:
Ladies, we need your
blood. Afterwards
come to the Women’s
Coffee House and
have a cup of
coffee. Donation
$1.00
The political riskiness of the poet’s statement that “I have the / time,” surrounded as they are by “vanishing / men” living on borrowed time, is offset by the reference to the paltry thanks women receive for giving blood and, symbolically, this moment suggests, for remaining present and able to contribute, nurture, and sustain the imagined queer blood line of the dying.
In “The Lesbian Poet,” a talk given at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project in 1994, Myles theorizes the unique position and plight of the queer woman poet, and in so doing makes clear that it is not only straight men that stand in their way. When it comes to “poetic models,” Myles writes, “I’ve actually got many more fathers” than women forebears, and this rumination on the gender of their ancestry is earlier anticipated by the following reflection:
As a literary lesbian vis à vis gay men I’m more alone than ever before. The awesome mortality AIDS conjured up leaves fags ever more protective of their lineage. Melvin Dixon pleading at the 1992 Outwrite conference in Boston, “Who will call my name when I’m gone.” We will, I whisper but I’ve never been so aware of the conversation between lesbians and gay men, not going on. Men want to be remembered by men. When a man dies, it’s the need to be valued by men, not women, that counts. History, and we still know who keeps that.27
In this critique of the maleness of queer lineage, Myles is paraphrasing from a talk given by the Black poet and professor Melvin Dixon, who died from AIDS-related complications just a few months after he delivered it at the Outwrite conference in Boston in 1992. Where Myles sees Dixon as a spokesperson for masculinist coterie, a man writ large, Dixon begins his written talk, titled “I’ll Be Somewhere Listening for My Name,” with a more intersectional awareness, writing that as “gay men and lesbians, we are the sexual niggers of our society. Some of you may have never before been treated like a second class, disposable citizen. Some of you have felt a certain privilege and protection in being white.”28 Dixon’s reflections upon the racial inequities of the queer community lead to an elegiac acknowledgment of his own fate, and the talk ends with a self-elegizing call:
I may not be well enough or alive next year to attend the lesbian and gay writers conference, but I’ll be somewhere listening for my name.
I may not be around to celebrate with you the publication of gay literary history. But I’ll be somewhere listening for my name.
[ . . . ] You, then, are charged by the possibility of your good health, by the broadness of your vision, to remember us.29
It appears to be Dixon’s potent, mournful apostrophe here that occasions Myles’s sense of being “more alone than ever.” “Hot Night,” I have been arguing, comprises a radical response to this estrangement; it is a poem that sees Myles writing themself into a landscape they appear to be excluded from. In this poem, it is creation itself that offsets loneliness, as when they sardonically write that their
poetry is here
for the haul
the lonely woman’s
tool—we have
tools now, we
have words &
lists, we have
real tears now,
absence, rage
(NM, 55–56)
This is a poem that harnesses rage and loneliness to forge an unsentimental path through a cultural wasteland of broken hearts, dead gay forebears—Hart Crane is namechecked—and the seething wreckage of the city. But the crucial distinction between the way the poem’s speaker is “charged / up” here, on the one hand, and Dixon’s charging of his audience to “remember us,” on the other, reveals a palpable fissure in the queer community even at a time of crisis. Myles’s “charged / up” poem is particular to a time and place and presents, I have been suggesting, a radical variant of the cruising poem that thinks through various forms of gendered exclusion, not least the exclusion of non-male people from the preempted legacies arising from the HIV/AIDS crisis. The insistence with which Myles seems to position Dixon as the mouthpiece of such exclusion, however, neglects to address the matter of race and thus the particular vantage of their own whiteness in relation to such questions. All of which is to say, it seems curious to choose a Black gay poet, giving a speech just months before he died, as the symbolic agent of institutional male power. Myles has revived this critique in recent years, recalling in a 2015 interview:
He was incanting the names of all these male poets, and there wasn’t one woman in there. I was sitting there thinking, “We’re going to be your legacy.” Here I am right now talking about Melvin Dixon. Why won’t you let us call your name? That’s the fucked position of women-in-poetry lineage.30
“Hot Night” is a “charged / up” poem, uttered by a speaker who finally “get[s]” what it is they desire, but the refusal to hear Dixon’s elegy on its own terms also leaves us wondering, from today’s vantage, who else is excluded from the picture.
If it is fair to argue, as Sedgwick does in this chapter’s epigraph, that “there are no algorithms” for determining a priori the commonalities between gay and lesbian worlds, it seems a continuous fact that the algorithmic iteration of gay male cruising, as exemplified by an app like Grindr, bears no direct or automatic comparison with lesbian sexual cultures. After all, no such mediating app for lesbians has presumed as much intracultural visibility or predominance. (And it is worth noting that the term algorithm, in Sedgwick’s foundational study from thirty years ago, possesses none of its ambivalent, contemporary tint as a descriptor of social media’s apparatus.) This is not to say, however, that there can’t be a generative dialogue between erotic scenarios and snapshots that feature differently gendered agents. In the final section of this coda to the book, I will explore how some of the questions Myles’s work raises regarding exclusion and representation can illuminate the poetics and politics of cruising “right now,” in a politically ambivalent age of gay app culture, same-sex marriage, and the advent of preventive HIV medication like PrEP.
A version of the affective and atmospheric scenario of “Hot Night” reemerges in Myles’s 2018 collection Evolution and illustrates this sense of historical distinction. Indeed, scenes, figures, names, and titles constellate throughout their work, like the subway exchanges found in both “Basic August” and “The City of New York,” and suggest a kind of tense continuity, a picture of the city that is multiple and viewed from the vantage of historical moments. In the 2018 poem “The City” (and there are at least three poems with this title throughout Myles’s oeuvre), the poet observes an urban landscape that sounds familiar: “juicy and bloody at night / stabbing my eyes,” a “city / at night / all its empty wares / are everywhere.”31 This hot night is witnessed in the wake of the Occupy Wall Street protests (the poem is dedicated to poet and activist Stephen Boyer) as its speaker muses once again on solitude and the erotic and gendered aspects of their body in space:
my loneliness an illustrious
path a screen
I shoot these themes
themes
I mean my
jism
that look on your face
is covered
with my thought32
Here Myles imagines the poem as a site of interpersonal relation; the poet, engaged in their signature act of compositional spontaneity, “shoot[s]” from the hip and riffs on themes in an almost pornographic exchange where the matter of erotic consummation (transfigured as male) and the “look on your face” are brought graphically together. But the word “shoot” might equally be read as photographic, the poet as a fully automated camera “shoot[ing]” their themes, at least before it is linked with ejaculation, and the presence of “a screen” as a form of “path” inserts into the poem an intervening visual surface.
In a collection frequently concerned with digital culture and published in tandem with an exhibition of Myles’s Instagram photographs at Bridget Donahue Gallery in New York in 2018–19, the word “screen” here cannot help but emanate a particular meaning, suggesting the familiar glow of an iPhone, the go-to and charged-up mechanization of the temporary gaze. In the artist statement for the exhibition, which was simply titled poems, Myles speaks to the sense of poetry and photography as a shared impulse in describing walks with their dog Honey where “together we explored what lower Manhattan had become. This bliss of geometry, trash: instantaneous configurations [ . . . ]. I write poems, I write about art & these photos I take I think are a similar kind of gathering—truncated places with words & writing that just trace a buzzing passage on Earth.”33 Here Myles posits their phone “screen” as an ecological tool, an appendage to their “passage” through the world, or “a path,” as they put it in “The City.” Screens can both compound and suppress our collective “loneliness”; they place us before the agency of a virtual world, at one further remove from the ambient one around us, and yet their mechanisms can equally revive or repurpose our relations to that world, for the poetic-photographic capacity Myles so often proffers is after all the “lonely woman’s / tool.” Screens also navigate as well as capture our experience, leading us via GPS to our chosen destinations.
Or, indeed, to our nearest available hookup. Although Myles doesn’t explicitly invoke dating app culture, the intersection of erotic, interpersonal, and mediatized surfaces staged in this poem calls to mind cruising’s contemporary iterations via the visual technologies of geosocial media, where the “click” becomes the tap. In the words of Shaka McGlotten, these “now not so new virtual intimacies encounter and rework historical antecedents particularly to queer, especially gay male, sociality: chiefly cruising and hooking up,” though they are constitutively distinct.34 Take Grindr, for example, whose “virtual” grid of user profiles bears a referential relation to the structure of lived urban (and suburban) space, of which Manhattan’s grid system would seem the iconic exemplar. Moving through or within the actual space of the latter also conjures up a phantom image of the structural whole, such that orientation becomes a suspension between the lived and the virtual. As Rem Koolhaas writes, in a formulation that might equally describe acts of looking, browsing, or cruising, the “city becomes a mosaic of episodes, each with its own particular life span, that contest each other through the medium of the grid.”35 The “life span” of Grindr’s “episodes” similarly involves a reification of cruising’s temporality, where the phrase “Right Now,” with its false promise of instant immediacy, describes both the projected teleological end of the hookup as well as the suspended tense of the search itself.
While cruising may be historically associated with a radical and democratic mode of sexual freedom—even if, as the examples of this book have shown, this is often not true in practice—cruising’s translation into new media limits it, McGlotten continues, “to the context of personal choices and consumerist self-styling,” and “cruising apps reduce social worlds to public sex to bad faith erotic free markets; they are in bad faith because like the neoliberal markets in which they are situated, the benefits of the market tend to accrete to the very few—namely, well to do, young, and very often white, men.”36 Tom Roach similarly begins his interrogation of digital queer intimacies by stating: “Everything you may have heard about online dating is true: It is steeped in a consumerist logic. It substitutes algorithms for pheromones. It instrumentalizes intimacy and mechanizes the wily ways of desire.”37 The novelist Garth Greenwell writes at length about this substitution in aesthetic and ethical terms:
Physical cruising, as I experience it, is more valuable, richer both sensually and ethically than online cruising. If the kind of cruising I grew up with is poetry, then Grindr isn’t just prose, but Strunk and White, prose stripped to function. The circulation of bodies in physical space allows for a greater possibility of being surprised by desire, of having an unexpected response to the presence of another. In online cruising, as in pornography, the reality of another’s body is to a very great extent erased in its reduction to an image. When I cruise in real life, a man whose framed torso might have seemed unremarkable catches me by the way he moves, or the way he smells, or by the tone of his voice or heat of his glance or by any other of the million other traits we lose when we reduce ourselves to a short list of stats, a little boxed image on a screen.38
Greenwell captures the peculiar glassiness of the grid, an assemblage of curated images that can seem by turn unreal and unremarkable and, in Roach’s words, “are ultimately flattened into a sea of similitude.”39 Greenwell’s description of the “framed torso” recalls Myles’s lines from “At Last” that describe “the midriffs / of men I have bored / through this summer” but gives them a different intent and emphasis, in that Grindr often feels like a sea of men’s “midriffs,” and the “boredom” of browsing is one of its primary effects. Greenwell’s argument that the focality of images in online cruising, its visual culture, ultimately yields a loss, a reduction of subjective and interpersonal exchanges that is performed through virtualization. And there are probably very few users—or cruisers?—of an app such as Grindr, whether infrequent, casual, or regular, who would not recognize some part of Greenwell’s critique, who would not see it in some essential truth about the mechanization of desire.
And yet. In a recent study composed primarily of interviews with Grindr users, researchers reflected upon the fact that “online space has historically been thought of as virtual or less real than actual encounters,” but this “appears to be contradicted in the way participants talked about their experiences.”40 Greenwell’s distinction between analog and online cruising as poetic and prosaic, respectively, is an appealing one, but might the use of such loaded aesthetic terms risk, even from the candid vantage of his admittedly first-person reflection, performing a form of gatekeeping that misses something about user experiences? Indeed, both Roach and McGlotten’s work on virtual intimacies take surprising turns toward hope and possibility. Roach announces his novel intent from the beginning of his article when he argues “in contrast to the chorus of techno-pessimistic voices that holds the Internet responsible for the death of a public queer sex culture” and suggests that the ends of both analog and online cruising “are generally the same, that is, connection, hooking up.”41 He goes on to locate “an ethical commonality spanning public cruising and private browsing,” the Foucauldian and “queer practice of shared estrangement,” the sense in which Grindr’s “senseless blather and crass self-interest might also be an active creation of an antirelational discourse.”42 Similarly, McGlotten states from the outset of his critique that “there’s room yet for optimism” insofar as “virtuality” is not necessarily “opposed to the real; virtuality refers to immanence, capacity, and potentiality,” but also because “intimacy is already virtual in the ways it is made manifest through affective experience.”43 As I have hoped to show in this book, the predominance of images on Grindr, and its proffering of a kind of visual cruising, is not exceptional or unprecedented. Cruising has long been a visually mediated phenomenon, an erotic exchange whose immediate optical iteration—the look between two strangers—implicates the visual and even the “virtual,” the realm of cultural and archetypal matter that shapes our individual and collective desires.44
This is not to say that the flattening out of cruising’s contingency and sensory immediacy online, and the reduction of a living, breathing person to “a little boxed image on a screen” is not a legitimate cause for lamentation, but rather that it is infelicitous to claim that cruising hasn’t always, in some sense, involved the mediation of “a screen.” In other words, we must interrogate where a critique of the present ends and a nostalgia for an imagined past begins, a “longing for a past when people supposedly had more authentic connections with one another,” when in fact in the “1970s, anonymous sex was often experienced and described as dehumanizing, in much the same way that cybersex is denounced now.”45 Roach writes, in 2015, that “the virtual grid of the MSM [men-seeking-men] hookup app is hardly the picture of Whitmanesque camaraderie.”46 Bersani writes, in 1987, that “I do not, for example, find it helpful to suggest, as Dennis Altman has suggested, that gay baths created ‘a sort of Whitmanesque democracy, a desire to know and trust other men.’”47 Whitman’s work is a telling intertext for the utopic bluster of this imaginative projection of an egalitarian cruising community, but it too registers the darker aspects of such desires.
That the qualities of Grindr’s “Right Now” bear at least some continuity with the mediated and visualized world of historical cruising does not mean that its de facto privileging of whiteness is any less troubling, but rather that it presents the issue of racial inequities in the queer community via a new interface, one that presents its own set of complications. For the final part of this coda, I want to ask, after Greenwell’s framing of Grindr as “prose stripped to function”: what might a poetics of Grindr look like? And how might poetry carve out a space of gathering and critique, to offer forms that register the losses, the gains, the nuances, to give voice to affects like the “anxiety” and “paranoia” which, McGlotten argues, “organize many of the processes and relations in these online queer spaces in ways that resemble prior and contemporaneous forms of racial injury?”48 Indeed, one of the blind spots of Myles’s continued critique of Melvin Dixon is their inability to imagine the ways in which new generations of queer Black poets will remember Dixon’s name. And if the burgeoning category of the “Grindr poem” can be said to exist, the most compelling examples of it are by queer poets of color reckoning with the peculiarities of online cruising and lighting through lyric form upon questions of liveness, intimacy, and visuality.
Danez Smith, for example, a Black, queer, poz writer and performer from Saint Paul, Minnesota, rethinks their own relation to the queer bloodline in the poem “gay cancer,” which appears in their 2020 collection Homie. In this poem Smith enumerates their ancestors, Melvin Dixon, Essex Hemphill, and Assotto Saint, draws a lineage between them through the virus that “grew / in me too,” and establishes a sense of transtemporal presence: “my wrist to my ear / you’re here.”49 Here, Smith makes various work of the bloodline metaphor in suggesting that these poets constitute a lineage in multiple ways, both as literary forebears but also as preceding carriers of the blood-borne virus. They are there, painfully, hopefully, audibly, in Smith’s veins. This poem also has a particular contemporary resonance in pointing to the fact that HIV continues to disproportionately affect the Black community, and in this regard the poem recalls Smith’s moving, imaginary letter to Essex Hemphill, written around the time of the Stonewall 50 festivities in 2019:
It worries me, Essex. How many people consider the epidemic over now that PrEP is here, even though more and more black people find themselves stunned in the midst of their own bodies? How many people fell off the queer liberation train when they got the right to marry and divorce?50
Both the sexual freedoms offered by PrEP and the so-called homonormative forms of assimilation offered by same-sex marriage risk precluding, Smith suggests, a continued solidarity with those not served by the advent of these things, which is to say, broadly speaking, those who are not middle class, cisgendered, or white. There is a not “uncommon (albeit ill-informed) opinion,” C. Riley-Snorton writes, that “if the crisis is not over, it is nearing its conclusion,” yet such an “apocryphal ending can only be narrated in terms of containment—an investment in pharmaceutical management (and even prevention),” and thus belies the fact that the end of “HIV/AIDS has only meant the redistribution of crises.”51
Questions of race, healthcare, and the discriminate implications of the ongoing crisis haunt one of Smith’s cruising poems from the same collection. This poem’s title, “all the good dick lives in Brooklyn Park,” refers to a suburb of Minneapolis and immediately calls to mind the location function of hookup apps in its geographical delineation. What constitutes good dick in this poem is mediated, once again, by the screen, and the poem’s first few stanzas illustrate how desire for a certain race, in this case a particular form of Black masculinity, is enfolded with aspects of place. In the part of Brooklyn Park the speaker arrives at, the lack of a grocery store and the presence of successive liquor stores signifies to them the sexual prowess of their prospective partner.52 This section of Smith’s poem is self-aware and critical about the elision of good dick with a certain kind of neighborhood. It exposes through repetition the stereotype of the “mandingo myth” that circulates around “project dick. section 8 inches,” and this last detail puns on the government-funded housing program for low-income citizens and the detail about dick size you might expect to find on a Grindr profile.53
The poem makes clear that it is an ode to the “hood” guys the speaker sleeps with, but it takes an unexpected turn in the final stanzas, when the speaker reveals that their lover is HIV-positive and unable to afford the appropriate medication. Suddenly and soberingly, the specter of inequality and of this man’s inability to afford HIV medication enters the picture. This moment illustrates the heady affective mix, where humor quickly gives way to solemnity, that so often characterizes Smith’s work, and their earlier play with stereotypes soon gives way to a tender act of solidarity where “i kiss him with the pill coming apart on my tongue,” hoping it can “fill both of us out.” In two poems from their previous collection Don’t Call Us Dead, the hookup similarly becomes an occasion for reflecting upon queer Black intimacy in the face of inequality, the “ordinary microaggressions as well as overt or structural forms of racism” that McGlotten supposes “online spaces reproduce and perhaps even heighten.”54 The poems, which are printed on facing pages, come as a pair, their titles running in to one another: “a note on the phone app that tells me how far i am from other men’s mouths” and “& even the black guys’s profile reads sorry, no black guys.” In the first poem, the speaker sees:
headless horsehung horsemen gallop to my gate
dressed in pictures stolen off Google
men of every tribe mark their doors in blood
No Fats, No Fems, No Blacks, Sorry, Just a Preference :)55
The app’s visual landscape seems variously apocalyptic and tribal, marked by the insidious banalities of “preference” that in fact bespeak deep-set gendered and racial prejudices, and the poem’s speaker offers their “body” anonymously, even ominously, “to pictures with eyes.”56 Different body types suggest entirely different discourses and visual vocabularies; the men who “say they weigh more than 250 pounds / fill their profiles with pictures of landscapes, sunsets / write lovely sonnets about their lonely & good tongues” while “men with abs between their abs write ask or probably not interested in you.”
As well as representing this ruthless image economy, Smith also interpolates what Roach describes as the “blather” of app culture, the “introductory interpellations, ‘hey,’ ‘’sup,’ ‘woof’” and the “inevitable request for pics” which “reduce dialogue to a series of churlish grunts and crass propositions—a nightmare (or perhaps a respite) for those who pride themselves on eloquence, wit, or emotional expressivity.”57 A nightmare and a respite: “everyone on the app says they hate the app but no one stops,” the poet writes, “i sit on the train, eyeing men, begging myself / to talk to them.” Smith’s poem gives voice, ultimately, to this sense of an expressive lack, a breakdown in language and in the ability to “talk,” and in so doing it draws attention to its own vocal aspects. Although the imitation of “ThIs OnE gUy WhO sPeLlS EvErYtHiNg LiKe ThIs” is a textual joke about so-called text language, the sporadic capitalization calls to mind the shouting associated with capital letters, and Smith’s own live delivery of this line—yelling out the inexplicable anger suggested by this typography—enriches its humor.
The performative resonance of the poem’s final line—“i sing a song about being alone”—maps the poem’s ambivalent account of life on the “phone app” onto the larger aesthetic matters of liveness and performance, and suggests that the interplay between the textual reproduction, on the one hand, and the live or oral instant of iteration, on the other, might bear an analogous relation to online cruising’s reification of queer intimacy’s liveness. In this regard, the poem also resembles Jericho Brown’s poem “Host,” which too interpolates Grindr-speak through the mouthpiece of a demanding collective “we”: “We want pictures of everything / Below your waist, and we want / Pictures of your waist.”58 The question of the voice is revived in the poem’s final lines, where the collective speaker, seemingly a couple on an app, state: “We can host, but we won’t meet / Without a recent pic and a real name / And the sound of your deepest voice.”59 Brown’s satirical edge is hard to read singularly here, for these lines present but also mock this dogmatic desire for the “real,” the evidentiary, and the live “voice” amid the app’s economy of artifice. The phrase “deepest voice” also gestures to the prejudicial nature of preference in its summoning of a stereotypical and audible form of masculinity, one that is often enfolded with race, as McGlotten shows in the case study of one of his interviewees, a Black man who recalls once affecting a “higher-pitched, ‘white’ voice” in order to reveal and challenge the assumptions made by his white hookup partner.60
What these contemporary Grindr poems thus make clear is the continued predominance of the screen, both the physical surface upon which we access apps and the visual mediation through which archetypal desires are made legible. Inasmuch as cruising has largely moved online, its fundamental questions remain the same; namely, what does it mean to truly look at another person, to wrest from that look—in the “right now” of an encounter—a form of intimacy that may be contingent, transient, or even estranging? Apps open up a new space for enquiry into the optical and visual dimensions of desire. Critics and poets alike, as I have shown in short here, have already marked it as a space of intense ambivalence, but one we nonetheless must look to in the name of futurity, in order to consider the possibilities of other erotic or affective worlds that lie not only beyond the stratified and oppressive instruments of heteronormative capitalism, but the gendered and racialized forms of exclusion that are evidently reproduced in and by queer communities as well.61 The matter of what you see when you look, either at another (an other) or at yourself (your self), is vital to this imaginary. It is apt, then, that Smith’s second app poem apostrophizes queer Black readers and advocates self-love with recourse to a dreamlike ekphrasis: “imagine a tulip, upon seeing a garden full of tulips, sheds its petals in disgust.”62 The poem’s visual minimalism, gravitating as it does around a “look in the mirror,” gives way to an unambiguous moment of lyric intimacy between poet and reader: “you are beautiful & lovable & black & enough & so—you pretty you—am i.”63 Cruising, after all, should feel good for both parties.