Cruising as another way of looking?
Brokeback Mountain (2005) Ang Lee
May the gay cultural and sexual practice of cruising be thought through as a textual structure and representational mode?
Can we think of cruising as a concept that opens up new possibilities and questions in relation to the pleasure and politics of looking? – I will proceed with the idea of cruising as ‘another way of looking’ – another way because it has been a look, a pleasure, a strategy cultivated from within gay culture that, I would argue, has been crucial in shaping a number of looking practices in film, art, and popular culture. And another way, also, of making sense of aesthetic strategies that deal with exchange, desire, reciprocity, and relationality that, while modelled on a gay cultural specificity, are potentially available to all. It is a case of knowing what to look for.
The art of cruising
As a starting point for opening up these ideas I want to consider not a film, rather a 2010 installation by Wolfgang Tillmans staged at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. Tillmans placed one of his enlarged photographs depicting a punk, Empire (After Punk) (2005), originally from a fax, on the wall facing a 19th century sculpture of a labourer by William H. Thornycroft. The sculpture was titled The Mower (c1882-94). Tillmans writes in the catalogue for the exhibition: “I positioned The Mower to face in the direction of the punk … The Mower in return becomes detached from his role as a farm worker and is reconsidered as the subject of admiration for his perfect beauty and body.” This particular homoerotic staging, an idea presented as mutual looking, an exchange, a return of the look, which is also across time (1980s/1880s) and across media (an enlarged fax/a bronze sculpture) articulates a cruising structure; one that engages desire, admiration, and looking. This installation is thus smart in its reflexivity of homoerotic looking relations in the sense that you have to know what to look for in order to get the reciprocal desires established by the staging of two seemingly disparate works of art. Empire (After Punk) points to the place that we would normally occupy in our movement through the gallery: it looks at us, or, rather it looks at The Mower as the stand in for us. Is Tillmans attempting to get the punk to cruise us? Are we, in our engagement with the other homoerotic works by Tillmans, also invited to returning a look? In short, it opens up the possibility that with some artists we may be cruised by the work on the wall. We are being solicited for a position that brings to the fore a desire in looking rooted in the particularities of cruising.
Some of Andy Warhol’s mid 1950s drawings, especially those known as the James Dean Look-a-Likes, depict outlaw rebels looking back at us to see if we are looking at them. Does the look back at us respond to an idea that perhaps we looked first – to see if there is a mutual desire – again are we being cruised by these works? The logic of how these works are asking us to engage often constructs for us a place in which to return the look. It is a fact that cruising only comes into being when the look is returned, when the cruiser looks back (and neither is positioned as subject or object as both are caught up in the desire for mutual contact). There is an idea here that a place or position, if we are willing to take such a position, is possible. In all the works described so far there is a desire to return the look, to acknowledge the possibility of some kind of contact, to be caught up in the act of cruising itself.
Cruising in practice
Accounts of gay male cruising often stress the reciprocity of the glance and the often-playful exchange of looks. In When Men Meet: Homosexuality and Modernity (1997) the sociologist Henning Bech proposed that the homosexual gaze is a look that often lingers, it has that extra beat of time. Bech is thus suggesting, in addition to the playful glances and looks, that there is also a temporal dimension to cruising going on to say “here it is a matter of seduction. So the gaze must be audacious, it must linger – not too long, but longer than otherwise, then be taken away again slightly slower than otherwise, as if sticking voluptuously to the other’s and only reluctantly tearing itself away from the toffee.” Bech spend a good number of pages trying to make sense of the playfulness of what he calls ‘the homosexual gaze’ – it becomes a game of looking in that such looks pretends also not to look – a to-ing and fro-ing to work out where such looking might ultimately lead. The recent French film Stranger By The Lake (L’inconnu du lac, 2013), most definitely a film about cruising, uses both a repetitive and durational structure in its narrative in order to capture the sense of waiting inherent in cruising. Specific shots are repeated to underscore the sameness of days and encounters, but for gay men this is not boring – it is utopian since homosexuality’s relationship to temporality and desire is not that of straight linear time. The yoking together of waiting and looking is an experience of cruising more generally. In Stranger by the Lake spectators are made to wait and repeat scenes and scenarios, having their desires delayed. Much like the characters endless waiting, looking, and watching we are asked to collude in their looking and temporality as something that we, as spectators, participate in.
The artist David Wojnarowicz described cruising as ‘extended seconds’ emphasizing the temporality of the cruiser’s glance. In one of his live performances In the Shadow of Forward Notion Wojnarowicz recounted ‘back when I was seventeen years old hanging out in central park and this cute guy was standing around the park entrance and we kept locking eyes and I felt this sexual flush because the eye signals we exchanged had the extended seconds of a cruising nature.” Similarly, Ben Gove in Cruising Culture (2000), a book about cruising in literature rather than visual culture, also describes cruising as “a sense of time expanding during the exchange of erotic eye signals, as the two gazing men create a circuit of desire that arouses the circular, self regarding timelessness of the unconscious.” From a less lofty perspective but no less interesting, the 1978 gay liberation era publication The Joy of Gay Sex included cruising in its alphabetical listing of sexual practices, described in the following way: ‘There is an art to cruising, and its most important tools are timing and the eyes. The eyes first: You’re walking down the street and you pass a man going in the opposite direction. Your eyes lock but you keep on moving. After a few paces you glance back and see that he has stopped in front of a store window, but is looking directly at you. […] After a bit, the frequency and intensity of exchanged glances will increase, and one of you will stroll over to the other.” In gay terms then, there is a consensus about what cruising is and what it involves; the glancing, the timing, the mutual interest. Establishing this I want to now shift towards some of the ways we might think about these relationships in more concretely cinematic terms.
Cruising and cinema
Difference in the cinema as we know from Laura Mulvey is more often than not defined through gender conceived of as a unilateral structure (men look, women are to be looked at) but this is a heterosexual assumption that is vexed from a gay and lesbian perspective through the ways in which it fixes an idea around the looking pleasures of cinema. I would even argue that cruising as a particular structure of gay male looking relations actually resembles more closely some of the formal structures of cinema that have usually assumed this complementary gendered logic rather than one that accounts for homosexuality.
This work on cruising and cinema began with my book analyzing the phenomenon Brokeback Mountain, specifically the chapter on spectatorship, where I presented an argument around the construction of homosexual desire in relation to shot/reverse shot structures both in that film and throughout cinema more generally. That was about making available a reading of film form based on a same-sex logic rather than the gendered difference that otherwise characterises ‘straight’ readings and framings of cinema derived from a very basic understanding of Laura Mulvey’s thesis.
Cruising and cinema are closely related in ways that are rather interesting but largely undocumented. Since the early days of cinema at the turn of the century film theatres were often meeting places for clandestine affairs and public sex between men. In his history of queer London, Matt Houlbrook indexes no fewer than twenty West End London venues by name in which men used to meet other men for sex in the dark and in front of the screen. Since its inception the cinema has been central to the cultural and sexual life of gay men. In an unintentional humorous nod to early cinema, Houlbrook recounts how the Biograph cinema near London’s Victoria Station was nicknamed the Biogrope due to the amount of cruising activity taking place there. While this kind of activity petered out in most cinemas due to increased public knowledge concerning the sexual activities of men of questionable reputation, cruising found its niche in adult cinemas actually showing heterosexual porn.
I am not the first to broach this topic of cinema and cruising – that claim belongs to R. Bruce Brasell who in the journal Wide Angle in 1992 examined Andy Warhol’s My Hustler (1965) in order to suggest more generally how cruising, as a glancing look rather than a gazing look, might be a more productive theorisation of how gay men are positioned to see and be seen in cinema. For Brasell, the gay spectator’s position relates to cruising because his look at the screen and his look in the film are often characterised as glances. He also considers the look of the gay spectator in the cinema’s auditorium whose “glance implies that the screen may not always be a safe place for the spectator, that the spectator may be forced emotionally to look away, an experience common to gay men.”
My Hustler is an unusual choice from which to explore this proposition since Warhol’s film only contains two 33-minute reels with a predominately static camera set-up in the second reel. It is too avant-garde to rest any general claims on gay men’s spectatorship and a film like Stranger by the Lake already contradicts such notions by editing us into some very long and close hard looks at male bodies, penises, and sexual encounters. My Hustler doesn’t contain any obvious cruising per se between the characters if we think back to some of the definitions at the start of this article. There is a lot of flirting and seduction but the spectator never participates in the looking in My Hustler because, and this is the important point, unlike Stranger by The Lake, there is no editing. That is not to say that Warhol doesn’t allow for other types of looking to emerge, as the lack of editing allows us no choice but to fix on the hustler’s body for the duration of the film. The look in My Hustler is neither direct nor fixed, it materialises from somewhere else, and in the second reel it is a reflection in the bathroom mirror. This ‘other’ place is the social margin that gay men, including Warhol, often occupy and is translated through the screen’s organisation of looking relations. The important points that Brasell’s theory of gay spectatorship does propose is the notion of the cruiser’s glance is an alternative to the gaze.
I want to make a note here though that the representation of cruising in the cinema is not the exclusive domain of gay men, although the subcultural knowledge of cruising does have a gay specificity. There are other examples of cruising looks and glances that are not gay in origin but nonetheless strike me as being queer. I am thinking here of that brief queer moment in Calamity Jane (1963) when the eponymous heroine played by Doris Day first arrives in Chicago and bumps into a woman on the street who turns, winks, and smiles. Does the woman mistake Calamity for a cowboy or does she see a butch woman? Either way, the winking, the looking, and the editing open up a range of possibilities.
Now, there are countless representations of gay male cruising in the cinema that we can readily identify – Cruising (1980), Paul Morrisey’s Flesh (1968), Death in Venice (1971), but an early sequence in the American indie film Brokeback Mountain (2005) has been the lynchpin in how my understanding of cruising as another way of looking was developed. In that film we are not only witnessing the cruise between the characters of Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis (Heath Ledger), we are also stitched in as spectators, through the shot/reverse shot structure of the editing. Cruising in this instance is about editing as much as it is about looking and the particularities of shot/reverse shot work to place us into the exchange in the closest way possible to how an actual cruise is often described or experienced. This early sequence in the film may have passed unnoticed to many spectators, but for gay spectators its obviousness was quite a delight – these two men are really into each other!
In my book on the film I obsessed over this early scene when Jack and Ennis first meet, silently only exchanging furtive and stolen looks, and is what I considered to be the film’s special relationship to gay spectatorship. I set out to make a case for the interrelationships between gay male cruising, spectatorship, and editing that overlapped much more than one would expect. When they first meet it is a single shot/reverse shot sequence comprising of only six shots, lasting forty-three seconds in total, but for me this was exciting and created a sense of anticipation, quite simply I was cruising with them and it was a thrill. I put forward my case that this sequence or structure would seem to invite an interpretation of film form that conflates cruising and editing as one mode of gay spectatorship. The staging of a cruising scene in Brokeback Mountain helped me at least to establish a gay specific reading of some of the film’s editing, in particular the shot/reverse shot patterns in which two men’s looks collude; it was for me also informed through the lens of gay cultural knowledge. My interpretation of the scene when Jack and Ennis first meet also dealt with a more general concern related to shot/reverse shot editing and how gay spectatorship might challenge those neat alignment of shots whose logic is understood as unilateral or to use the correct term, heteronormative. What I mean by this is that there is an obvious male-female complementary logic that is often privileged in the interpretation of spectatorship through a persistent attachment to gender difference.
While offering a valuable and much needed criticism of Hollywood cinema as a patriarchal institution, Mulvey would now herself acknowledge this: that the argument is heteronormative because it is unilateral and monolithic in its structuring of desire, looking, and power through the concept of the male gaze and its complement in female to-be-looked-at-ness. However, it is not useful to wholly dispense with Mulvey or say that she is wrong, since we wouldn’t have arrived at all the other ways of thinking about spectatorship, gay, straight, or otherwise, if she hadn’t written her initial polemic.
The argument about cruising and cinema does not mean that gay spectatorship is an exclusively constructed position for the gay male moviegoer, nor specific or intrinsic to all gay men. It doesn’t necessarily replace the male gaze although if one is gay then one is clearly not caught or solicited by the desire to see any more of Megan Fox in Transformers. Rather, what I am trying to describe is the close alignment between the situation presented in the film Brokeback Mountain and the cultural identity most close to decoding it. Surely, one could argue, a film that is about male homosexuality, same-sex desire and the closet should be addressing the gay spectator, whom ever I imagine him to be, who should be in a privileged position to most readily recognize a film about him. However, I wouldn’t argue that my experience of Brokeback Mountain and how I made sense of it was a correlative of other gay men’s receptions and experiences of the film vis a vis cruising. While cinema can produce the same position for us all, gay or straight, since film form is limited to how the text has been constructed from a series of shots, it does not necessarily mean that my identity or anyone else’s relates to these structures in the same way and that all spectators can see specific moments in Brokeback Mountain as being akin to cruising.
The shot/reverse shot pattern in the Brokeback Mountain sequence might appear conventional at first; the film is deeply connected to classicism in its use of form. The most basic function of this editing pattern is narrative realism through spatial continuity that establishes both the relative position of two bodies in space and fixes the spectator in relation to their fictive looks. It can, therefore, as a matter of fact be treated as a simple continuity structure. In shot one we see Jack looking and in the second shot (the counter-shot) what he is looking at, in this case Ennis. Similarly the fourth shot repeats this by establishing that Ennis is returning the look. Shot/reverse shot often establishes the look of the character by having the first shot of the character looking followed by the second shot of what he or she is looking at; this is commonly supported through an eye-line match. The function of shot/reverse shot is primarily to construct coherent spatial relations between shots so that we know how one shot, as a representation of narrative space, corresponds to a preceding or subsequent shot. What I am proposing here is that some instances of shot/reverse shot are not just simply continuity patterns or for that matter reducible to those determining Mulvey-gaze relations. The shot/reverse shot pattern in Brokeback Mountain bears some kind of relation, however arbitrary, to the cultural practice of gay male cruising I and others describe. Certain shot/reverse shot sequences between two men appeal to the gay spectator by being recognizable as such. A further quote by Henning Bech, and by way of conclusion, it is remarkably like a description of the scene in Brokeback Mountain: “You look away almost as soon as his eyes hit yours; and after a moment, you look back to see if he’s looking at you. Now it’s his turn to shift his eyes; this must happen quickly, in any case, and the very speed of it – i.e. whether the pace is a little slower or a little faster – will map out the likelihood of further developments.” And as we know, there are a lot of further developments in Brokeback Mountain.
First on print in Wuxia 1-2, 2015