Cruising Time Sam Ashby

Cruising Time

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Foreword

by Sam Ashby What does it mean to take pleasure in research? To seek identification across time and search for the self in the shelves and stacks of libraries and archives? How do I seek desire in the institution? Can I cruise the past?

Cruising—the act of looking for anonymous sex in public spaces— is a practice which feels like tradition, a queer inheritance passed down from generations of elders and forefathers. I was never taught to ‘cruise’, but somehow it became a practice that I understood. Somehow I knew where to go. Somehow I knew how to read the clues, the gestures, the glances.

I was never interested in History at school because I didn’t find myself in it. Instead I sought out other histories, in the lives of those whose experience on the margins reflected my own. But I had to learn to read the clues, to recognise the furtive gestures of the past in the present.

Cruising is a largely solitary act dependent on the potential of an encounter with a subject. It is an act of patience; pleasure or disappointment are its inevitable outcomes.

For me, artistic research is a loosely defined and open-ended practice akin to cruising. My subjects are often shifting territories, underrepresented lives. My encounters with them are reduced to the ephemeral and yet are filled with potential new narratives and forms.

When I cruise, it is a longing for an inaccessible past, but also a passionate engagement with the present. I look at the archive, and the archive looks back.

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Introduction

by Jon Davies The traditional narrative of queer progress recounts how determined kids in the countryside and the suburbs leave their stifling biological families behind. Instead they migrate to join their spiritual brothers and sisters in big cities, which provide a degree of anonymity that nurtures sexual experimentation and the space to fashion one’s identity anew. But surely the innovative modes of psychic and cultural survival we honed for ourselves as youth in varying degrees of homophobic isolation deserve to be kept close to our hearts? These abject experiences form queer ways of being that hold onto feelings of shame and difference, allowing one to read between the lines and look askance at the dominant culture’s falsehoods.

Sam Ashby grew up in rural Hampshire, England in the 1980s and 90s. By contrast, I was swishing around a homogenously white middle-class suburb of Montreal, Canada. These cultural wastelands provided appropriately bleak backdrops for our coming of age alongside the evolving AIDS pandemic: we developed our nascent queer identities under its life-threatening shadow, never far from the reminder that if you are gay every sexual encounter could mean death.

A personal computer with a dial-up modem arrived at my home when I was fifteen so I was privy to the stirrings of an online queer youth community centred around message boards, though email was not yet widespread: my far-flung gay teen pen-pals and I wrote and mailed actual letters. While a porn magazine had once been a Holy Grail perhaps glimpsed thanks to a friend’s older brother or hidden deep in the woods, the Internet offered a bounty of gay porn images—primarily of oiled-up white (or orange) muscle clones—that tantalisingly loaded one line of pixels at a time before being saved to floppy disk.

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Sam and I share a fascination with the idiosyncratic, difficult and circuitous routes that young people of our generation and older had to journey in order to find traces of queer culture that spoke to us seemingly against all odds, allowing us to imagine futures for ourselves beyond our drab straight surroundings. In my case it was through glimpsing the subcultural world recreated in Mary Harron’s feature film I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) and miraculously discovering some of Kenneth Anger’s and John Greyson’s experimental works on video at the local library. I think of myself as part of the last queer generation in the West to have been forced to seek out these life-giving discoveries before the Internet made even the most underground queer cultural object accessible to all. I can’t help but feel that something is lost—a sensitising experience of marginality, perhaps—when the queer cultural archive is easily accessible and no longer needs to be gleaned through whispers and fragments. Sam’s film The Colour of His Hair (2017) is so moving because it juxtaposes the tactile glory of physical LGBT archives—where snapshots, T-shirts and love letters form a community-in-absentia—with dramatic narrative vignettes of two gay men trapped by a blackmailer with seemingly no where to turn. The Internet not only (falsely) promises that everything that one could ever possibly want to know about of the past is available to you, but that the images of LGBT life that are most widely disseminated are still those that are the most affirmative.

Affirmative in the sense of telling you that being LGBT is ok and “it gets better,” but also affirmative of neoliberal capitalism, which now has a place set for you—and your monogamous, gainfully employed life partner—at the IKEA dinner table.

Thinking of the “hatred of capitalism”—the alternative title that the divine Jack Smith proposed to Sylvère Lotringer for the pioneering magazine Semiotext(e)—I am reminded that finding the Librairie Alternative in downtown Montreal as a 16-year-old was as foundational to my attraction to a radicalised queer identity as any underground film was. The shelves of this collectively run anarchist bookshop were heavy with books and pamphlets about 4

anti-racist struggles, class war, feminism, animal rights, even early photocopied trans community newsletters. Not to mention all the activist buttons and patches that all the cute French punks sported. I soon joined the collective and worked a regular Saturday shift until I left Montreal at 22.

I would like to think that I could have encountered Sam’s Little Joe magazine (2010–) on those shelves if his first issue had come out just ten years earlier. Decidedly analog in spirit, the magazine—“about queers and cinema, mostly”—seeks precisely to restage the ways that queer cultural objects find new audiences across time and space through the narrowcasting of a shared secret rather than the broadcasting of mass media. I also think of the now-closed London public restrooms that Sam lyrically memorialises in Et in Arcadia Ego, a “companion” film to William E. Jones’s Tearoom (2007), which appropriates the police surveillance camera footage shot of men having sex in a restroom in Mansfield, Ohio, in 1962. These pleasures too were a secret (albeit a violently exposed one), one that could only be passed via rumour and its validity “proved” by first-hand witnessing. I recall the gay porn video store I worked at in Montreal so I could afford to live downtown instead of at “home” with Mom, and how I kept its identity secret from her. It boasted a small cinema in the back where three porn tapes—this was before DVD had decimated VHS, so c. 1998—looped each day, as well as booths where men could bring the tapes they rented for half-an-hour or an hour or a whole afternoon (wheee!), as well as a rental section. One of my tasks was to mop every morning, the sticky evidence of the customers’ pleasures coating the floors. I learned: some men just enjoy each other in places like this, where the questions of whether Will & Grace was radical or regressive, or whether one preferred VHSes or DVDs didn’t necessarily come up.

Cruising Sam’s work as well as his notes and proposals for future projects, I am struck by the fervour of his desire to forge a connection to a buried queer past through spaces like this. Turning away 5

from contemporary models of identity that frame LGBT citizenship through state approval, he instead looks backwards to how people found each other in love and lust before “queer.” In the process, these spaces like washrooms, parks, video and book stores, or message boards become suffused with affect. Ecstatically “out of time,” Sam almost seems to be seeking belated communion with the ephemeral couplings and fragile collectivities he finds.

Jon Davies is a writer, curator and PhD student in Art History at Stanford University.

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Cruising Methods A conversation with Fiona Anderson Fiona Anderson’s 2017 article for LUX titled ‘Cruising as method and its limits’ was instrumental in the formation of my understanding of cruising as a process and strategy for research and artmaking, so it was an honour that she agreed to speak with me on the subject of cruising as a method for my own practice.

I first met Fiona at the Retro Bar, a gay pub down a narrow alley that runs off the Strand in Central London, probably in 2012. I think it was after a Queer@King’s event, a regular public lecture series of queer subjects held at King’s College (the clue’s in the title, folks!), where Fiona was then a student of my dear friend Mark Turner, who inevitably introduced us. Mark had previously told me about Fiona’s interest in subjects that made my ears prick up: the artist David Wojnarowicz, and New York’s notorious gay cruising sites, so we had plenty to discuss over our pints.

We were to cross paths on occasion after that, notably on London’s Southbank in April 2014 after I had hosted a screening of Derek Jarman’s Blue at the IMAX, which is probably where we hatched the plan to meet up in New York that summer. I was going to the Fire Island Artist Residency for a month, and had arranged a week in the city before to do some research. Fiona was going to do her own research on Leonard Fink, a photographer who documented the city’s derelict waterfront, a popular gay cruising site in the years before the AIDS crisis. And so it was that we found ourselves in the Lesbian and Gay Center archive, looking through the personal photographs of Patrik Moreton, a man who until that point neither of us had heard of. Looking back, it was an encounter that would solidify a shared passion for archives.

Not long after, Fiona moved to Newcastle to become Lecturer in Art History in the university’s Fine Art department, and our opportunities to cross paths diminished. This was until January, when 7

we were both invited to the ICA to take part in a panel discussion after a screening of William E Jones’ 2007 film Tearoom and the short film which I had made as its companion, Et in Arcadia Ego. With us on the panel were the artist Prem Sahib, a friend whose beautiful work deals more abstractly with gay sexual cultures, and the video game designer Robert Yang, whose Tearoom-inspired game replicated the experience of cruising in public toilets.

Sitting with Fiona again, this time in my friend Will’s living room, and with the purpose of speaking about our work, I am struck by the ways in which we have been cruising each other all this time.

When I’m writing an article or a chapter, I always like to start by talking about a particular work or having a compelling point of entry to bring the reader in. I started thinking about how we might do that with this conversation. You previously talked about enjoying that time we spent in the archive at the Lesbian and Gay Center in New York in 2014. I wondered about that as a starting point, because in that experience there are so many of the things we could talk about in relation to your work your interest in cruising as method and practice.

Fiona Anderson

Sam Ashby

Great. Sounds good to me!

So what was that day? We were looking through some beautiful photographs.

Fiona

It feels quite magical for me, that memory. Actually, I’m getting a bit emotional. I’d been looking for archives in New York, and I knew about The Center, and I was like, if anyone in New York is going to have material relating to Fire Island, it’s probably going to be them. And then, of course, they did have material. Whenever you go to these places you never really know what you’re going to find which is also part of that kind of experience that maybe you can relate to, which is so magical. I Sam

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think because I was looking for film as well—my project at that time was really about film that had been shot on the island—so not finding any film was a moment of disappointment. But then finding all of these incredible photographs was just a whole other experience that was really amazing to share with you.

What we found in the archive was not artists’ photographs or artists’ films; it was really personal documentation of parties and friendships.

Fiona

It was essentially the photographs of a gay couple that had a house in the Pines. Their photographs documented each summer of parties, their friends and their performances. Every year they would pin them up on a cork board and hang it up in the house. And we found each one of these photographs had been sun damaged and torn because they’d all been pinned together on these cork boards for years, and then they’d been lovingly separated. They all had the remaining holes.

Sam

I think about those pinpricks a lot. I really do! That was such a moving experience.

Fiona

Sam

Yeah.

I think one of the reasons it was so moving—and not wanting to imbue it with too much foreboding at all—is we know that many of the people in those photographs didn’t live into the ‘90s. But one of the most powerful things of looking through that archive was doing it in that particular space and knowing that it was there as part of this queer archive and this queer library and that it was being lovingly collected and cared for by people who were super invested in telling that history. That is something that really comes up in The Colour of His Hair as well—that it matters who’s telling these stories.

So I wonder how your experience in The Center in New York compares to or relates to other archival experiences that you’ve Fiona

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had and particularly the relationship between the institutional archives and queerer archives that may be in people’s homes or are cared for by people really invested in the histories and the future of this material.

With The Colour of His Hair there were archives I was working in that were very institutional—like where the script comes from—which doesn’t come with quite the same experience for me. There is so much control around material; you really have to know what you’re looking for in those spaces. It’s difficult to cruise in those spaces or to have a looser approach, and it’s more difficult to jump between objects.

Sam

Well often you need to know the catalogue terms, and you need to know the particular way that this institution might refer to this material. So you have to go into it often knowing what to look for, knowing how certain histories might be coded.

That’s partly how queer histories can get obscured within big institutional collections. And that could be literature, like published texts, or it can happen with archival material as well I think. That’s why it is so important for artists and filmmakers to take on the role of archivist and to perform it every time they go into a collection.

Fiona

I think I was trying to push people to think more about themselves and how they might leave their own traces. Many people feel like they don’t have a voice or are underrepresented today, queer people especially. And I think, for me, it became really apparent during those interviews with Matt Cook and during the process of being in the LAGNA archive, and pulling out all of this incredible material, that there’s so much that we’re not seeing.

Sam

All histories are partial, so to get rid of this imperative for totality and total comprehension and chronology is really liberating and important—to say that, from the traces that we Fiona

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have, I’m going to construct something; it’s not going to be a total narrative, but it’s important that this is presented in this way and that this is shared, even if it is partial. I think sometimes in academic research there’s a fear of filling in the gaps incorrectly or imaginatively because it would be inaccurate. But it’s only inaccurate if you are trying to produce a total narrative.

I think in the film—certainly, the way that you move between different narratives—is recalling your experience in the archive and is presenting this as an appropriate method to tell that history moving forward as well.

I think that has become a methodology for me—this idea of filling in these gaps, and what can I do to enliven this material from my perspective and being clear about that. And I think that it’s nice that I can use the space of that film to say, “this is a history that’s partial,” and to wear that on its sleeve.

Sam

I think you are doing a lot more than filling in gaps; you’re pointing to the fact that there are gaps, and in some ways, that’s more powerful—the knowledge that there are these multiple histories that are lost or, like love letters, destroyed. You’re sharing information about the ways that these histories, these personal narratives, were lost. So I don’t think of it so much as filling in the gaps because that can be a futile exercise, but it’s more about pointing to the fact that there are these gaps.

Fiona

Sam

Right. That’s interesting. I really like that.

What are the ethics of uncovering these kinds of histories?

That is something that I certainly thought about when we were in New York. You know, these are not photographs taken by an artist; they weren’t intended for sale or public consumption.

And I did get a sense of peering into something that, because it felt so painful sometimes thinking about the onset of HIV and AIDS, did raise questions about the ethics of being in an archive like that and, subsequently, what you do with what you Fiona

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find there. How do you feel about that? Or how do you deal with that as an artist?

I think it’s something that’s becoming more and more apparent as I’m making work. When I do find material I want to use—like the Super 8’s that I show in The Colour of His Hair for example—it necessarily throws up these ethical questions.

The owner of those films was quite cautious about letting me use them because he felt that these were representations of people that he knew a long time ago, that they had no say in where those images were going to end up. There is an ethical dilemma in representing lives that have passed. How do we show them in a way that is respectful?

Sam

We don’t want to reproduce feelings of shame. You have a pride in sharing this material and telling these histories.

Fiona

And I think those images were very happy, and that’s why I chose them—these men seeming really content and free at a time when they weren’t really, they were on the cusp of freedom. There’s also a lot of material I’ve found in archives that is anonymously donated or comes from an anonymous creator. Obviously, when things are deposited in archives in that way, you understand there’s a level of shame attached to it.

This material is sexually explicit, and often it’s showing people that you can’t trace. Some of the polaroids that you see in The Colour of His Hair and the scrapbooks at the end, they’re from anonymous donors. The archivists have stories about those people, but they can’t officially tell you who made or deposited them. So for me, there’s a whole level of mystery that is quite enticing around that material; there’s an added aura because it’s anonymous. It’s not that shame necessarily brings feelings of excitement, but there is a sense of the illicitness of queerness in the past, that so much was done under darkness, which is maybe something that we are losing sight of now. But as someone who is working in these spaces, I find it very exciting.

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It sounds like you are starting to talk about cruising as a method of research there—not least because you are talking about anonymity within the archive, as well as sparking thoughts about shame and intentional anonymity and obscuring. These lend themselves really generously, or generatively, to thinking about cruising as a method for moving through these spaces and for how to make use of this material creatively.

What is the appeal of cruising as a method for you?

Fiona

Recently I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what my method is, or how to define it. For a while I was thinking, am I queering the archive? That didn’t really fit for me. So much of the material I’m looking at is highly sexual or queer already.

There’s a looseness and freedom to the way I work, an acceptance of dead ends and equally an acceptance of paths that diverge. Cruising just fits that so well, it was kind of revelatory when I read your text.

Sam

One of the reasons I really started thinking about cruising as method really connects with what you say about feeling like “queering” as a term wasn’t sufficient. I felt that it had just been used so much in artist’s press releases and by galleries and in academic writing, where really all it meant was “blurring” or “trying to do things a little bit differently”. It was losing any root or relationship to queer lived experience and becoming something that was just an artspeak catchphrase. I found “cruising” to be much more effective for talking about a similar kind of practice—not a synonymous one but a similar one—because it required situatedness and was also talking about not just people but places and times of day and movement. But also it was erotic. And so the reason I call that piece Cruising as method and it’s limits is because I was asking, what does it mean to use cruising as a metaphor for something that’s not sexual, and thinking, how do you not lose its links to sex? Is that something that you’re thinking about in your own embrace of this idea of cruising as method and cruising as a practice for archival Fiona

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research? That it also should be linked to sex? And how do we keep its erotic charge?

It’s funny because we’ve described the emotion that can come from being in an archive, as we found together, but also I think the erotic comes from a similar place—being situated in a space; it’s also relating to your own body and how your body interacts with that space and other people within it.

There’s the potential within that for real-world erotic, which is nice. I always find institutions very erotic—libraries, cinemas, art galleries. I think there is something about those kinds of spaces. Publics are moving through these very controlled environments but there is always this potential to somehow create another world within that. There’s a ... I hate the word, but ... frisson ... that can happen at any time. There is also something about the boredom that can come with being in an institutional setting that is also quite sexy. Your mind can wander… Often when you’re looking at queer material from the past; it’s also very sexual, so you’re potentially being turned on by the material within an institutional setting. So for me, there are these multiple layers of sexual potentiality. It’s incredibly sexy as an encounter, but oftentimes its also disappointing in the same way that you have to accept the disappointment when you’re cruising—that another potential outcome is no outcome at all.

Sam

I think also that idea is really important to me in thinking of cruising as a method—that we embrace being turned on by the material, that we look at so often this idea that we should have objectivity and distance from what we research and what we explore is a tactic of exclusion. And it’s a way of saying that certain stories and certain narratives and certain lives aren’t worth scholarly or artistic investigation, that they’re not serious or interesting or worthy of that. So to resist that we can say, “well actually I’m turned on by this,” and rather than that preventing me from engaging properly with this material, it’s Fiona

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the thing that actually allows me to engage with it really deeply.

Yeah, and I also like that we don’t have to be literal about this either. We’re not literally talking about jerking off in the seats!

Sam

Well, the British library toilets as cruising ground might suggest otherwise… But I think we can be turned on. We should be open to it.

Fiona

I think you’re right. We’re acknowledging the history of this material. Look at the popularity of pre-AIDS porn—the kind of pioneering ‘70’s porn—at some point fairly recently it started getting shown in art galleries completely out of the context for which it was intended.

Sam

I saw Arch Brown’s Pier Groups— a porn film of guys cruising the piers—shown with a film of Gordon Matta-Clark’s Day’s End—an artwork of the piers—at Light Industry. So I think that’s exactly that bringing together that you are talking about there.

Fiona

Yeah, so how do we remain turned on? Or how do we keep that spirit of those films alive? It’s a conundrum.

Sam

Seems to me that’s one of the things you’re trying to do with the Fire Island films. Do you want to say a bit about that and the methods and strategies that you used in making that project—keeping it sexy?

Fiona

That project really came out of cruising Fire Island. I was obsessed with this place that I’d never been to as a container of Western gay history, a microcosm. I could see everything—from the development of an identity through to liberation and then AIDS, death, and finally a return post-AIDS—in the films I was watching that were made on Fire Island. So I made it my mission to collect every film that was made on the island. Most Sam

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of that ended up being pornographic, but a lot of it wasn’t, and I decided that I was somehow going to tell this narrative through this material. While I was on the Fire Island Artist Residency in 2014 I met Ginger Brooks Takahashi who, as a queer woman, felt excluded from the Island as a site of desire and actually excluded in a more general sense too. A number of the residents felt similarly—that they didn’t have access to that space. Even I felt like I didn’t fit into the Fire Island that I had fantasised about. That was a really bizarre experience for all of us. In order to connect, though, Ginger and I cruised the Meat Rack—the cruising area—together. We ended up picking berries together in this very domestic way, while these men were fucking all around us in the bushes. Neither of us felt that we could really interact with that space somehow, but we both felt like we could do that through the films. So I showed Ginger clips from my film collection and she responded to them with her analogue synthesiser. We activated this material in a very intimate setting on the island—the local community house—and it was an amazing experience. I guess it was the material we were choosing and the way that Ginger was activating it with her music; it didn’t feel like it was this kind of weird reverential art gallery space, even when we did it in an art gallery in New York the following year. It felt like something else. It felt like we were being true to the intention of that material somehow.

It got me thinking about the idea of aural histories and the aural history of cruising, and actually the place of sound in your films more broadly. It seems that you’re using sound as an opportunity to collaborate. Because in both those films—the Fire Island project and then in Et In Arcadia Ego—it’s very clear that someone else is responsible for the sound.

Fiona

Fire Island Film + Sound was a totally collaborative project.

I came with the visuals and Ginger came with the sound. That was amazing to be able to do, to relinquish that control. Those were live experiences, whereas when you’re making a film you Sam

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have to solidify that. It is collaboration, but it’s quite an anxious one for me.

I think collaboration is often anxious. But it’s really interesting what you’re saying about relinquishing control over the material, and it also strikes me that it’s not dissimilar to how you’re using archival material where, as it becomes part of this archive and it becomes available for you to make use of it in creative ways, you’re repurposing and reworking that material in ways that the initial producer might not have anticipated or would find anxiety-inducing themselves.

Fiona

Sam

Right, definitely.

I would like to use collaboration then to think about the queer communities that you built up around film and fandom through Little Joe. It’s such a wonderful object and archive in itself.

Fiona

Thank you. I’m a total fanboy, and the first issue of Little Joe was really a fanzine.

Sam

What does it mean to you to be a queer fanboy? Or a fan of queers in cinema? What is it about fandom that’s so generative?

Fiona

Maybe it’s growing up when I did, when there was a total lack of any kind of representation, but I was always obsessed with sexuality in film.

Sam

Fiona

What films were you a fan of?

It was always the films I shouldn’t have been seeing. I remember watching Rocky Horror Picture Show through the crack of a door at my uncle and auntie’s house when my older cousins were up late night one night. Seeing those giant red Sam

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lips at the beginning of the film, I was just like ... what the fuck?

I have three older sisters so I was, introduced to material that was probably not suitable for a young boy. I remember seeing Dirty Dancing very young. I saw Pretty Woman in a video bar in Greece at age eleven. So for me it was about the encounter with adulthood in childhood; that was very formative and quite erotic.

It seems like the circumstances of the viewing were really erotic as well. So it’s interesting then to think about the screenings that have come out of Little Joe and this idea that the community that it generates could be live as well and would be around going to screenings and talks about films and other events too.

Fiona

I think there was a sense that I was showing material that was sexy and it could be kind of exciting to go to one of these events. We also created the Clubhouse which was a little cabin in an art gallery, and that was placing people in much closer confines, and the erotic potential of that was quite great. So I think it was really important that these were spaces where people could meet and interact and be social. It wasn’t like the way films are typically shown now—where there’s a film and then there’s a Q&A and it’s a bit ... you know? There’s no space for people to really interact with each other.

Sam

There’s also something about the tactility of your work—you’re very sensitive to the material qualities of film and archival material and things you might uncover in an archive. I was thinking about that through the risograph printing method and the necessary layering of that, and how well that seems to lend itself to fanzines—so that you’re a queer fan not just through the content but also the way that the magazine is produced and shared. So I guess it’s both about cruising as method, and queer friendship as method, and I don’t want to lose distinctions between them.

Fiona

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I think friendship is something that’s so important about Little Joe and it’s been so generative in that sense. Mark Turner and I would never have met if I hadn’t been doing Little Joe because Pablo León de la Barra recommended him as someone I should meet when I started the project, and through Mark, I met you. And so many of the contributors of Little Joe I consider great friends now. This idea that Little Joe is somehow helping to connect people is really wonderful.

Sam

One thing I think is compelling about queer friendship—as a method for art making or a strategy for it and for acquiring archival material and moving through it—is its sort of quasi-public nature as well. And what I mean by that, what I find appealing about both cruising and queer friendships or thinking about friendships queerly is that they resist the privatisation of intimacy that often happens in heteronormative life: that you are in your family and that’s your main focus and you don’t really look outside for anything. So I see Little Joe then as like a queer friendship group rather than family; it’s open to new members and wants to have long conversations into the wee small hours of the morning literally and figuratively about queer art and film and life. And sometimes that’s sexual and sometimes it’s not.

Fiona

And I think it’s interesting to compare then Little Joe and filmmaking, or the idea of director creating a film which inevitably is the creation of many hands and many people, but it’s hierarchical. Obviously Little Joe is hierarchical too because I was the editor and designer and publisher, so in a sense I was at the top of that, but I was always very cautious about being the public face of the magazine even though I had to be there at the events and introduce the films. It was something I was always very uncomfortable about because Little Joe felt like a creation of many people. And it’s something I’m finding now, for example, with making The Colour of His Hair—that I want to acknowledge the importance of the collaboration or of the Sam

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groups that arise—but somehow it seems harder to do that with making film.

I think with Little Joe the identity of the position of the fan and this idea of a fandom is maybe how you got away from that. You didn’t seem like you were controlling this narrative but rather using the resources you had to bring this stuff together, so there was a coherent vision to the project. I don’t think you were visibly controlling it; it was much more generous than that. I think with The Colour of His Hair, you’re really clear right from the beginning about the archival nature of this material; you’re saying it comes from this particular place and this is where I found it. That makes it really obvious from the outset that it’s almost a collaboration with these other people and with these archival collections.

Fiona

So maybe it’s an anxiety that I don’t need to worry about, or perhaps just being aware of it is important.

Sam

Being aware of it, yeah. I think there’s a lot that’s positive about not wanting to be the story and not wanting to dominate.

It’s also really important that you’re clear about where you found this material and that your method is clear actually: so this is where I found this material and this is what I’m doing with it, not necessarily in a way that’s really didactic, but being clear that you’re doing something—you’re cruising it—and being kind of selective and experimental with it.

Fiona

Maybe it’s interesting then to think about the limits. Of course, there are always limits to any method as such, but do you feel like there are areas where cruising as a method is jarring?

Sam

My fear about cruising as method is that it goes the way of “queering” and becomes really non-sexual and a way of absolving ourselves of responsibility and saying “oh no, Fiona

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of course there’s no coherent narrative; I was just cruising this material”, and that it becomes de-sexualized and perhaps de-politicized through that.

To which I would say, those are concerns that I share with my work. I always want to maintain erotics and politics in my work.

Sam

Fiona

Do you see your work as political?

Absolutely. Because it’s talking about why it’s important to look at this material today and what it can tell us about the moment we’re in now. I think there’s an easy slippage with history and an easy amnesia that I think I’m trying to fight against with my work. For me that’s a political act.

Sam

Fiona

And is cruising a political act as well?

Yes. To use the other term, I think cruising queers the institutional. And I think it’s important to create narratives within these master narratives that don’t necessarily allow many different readings. So I think cruising is generative in so many ways and more than subversive. Do you see it as political?

Sam

Yeah I do, yeah, for the reasons you said. I also think in an age of gentrification, to look back at and to think in the present about ways of using public space for purposes for which they were not intended is political. And to resist particular paths through sex, life, and public space that seem projected by those institutions is really important. But I also think to embrace pleasure in an open-ended way is political in itself.

Fiona

And the position of pleasure in the past and how that shifts is fascinating to see, I think.

Sam

Fiona

It’s so important that when we look at pre-AIDS sexual 21

cultures that we remember pleasure and that we don’t evacuate all the pleasure out of that moment—that we don’t constantly read foreboding and pain into that pleasure. And that’s actually really hard to do, and I wonder whether you’ve experienced something similar to me, which is, often when I publicly show photographs of the cruising ground of the piers, people will come up to me afterwards and say, “it’s so sad all these men were about to die”. And so what I’ve tried to do in a lot of my work is not just resist that strange compulsion, which I totally understand, but to think: what do we do with that emotion? What do we do with that compulsion to read tragedy into these images? And quite often what that does is consign cruising to the past as a blissful cultural sexual practice, and I think we have to resist that as well.

Absolutely. I think that’s obviously an anxiety that came up when making Et in Arcadia Ego, and it’s an anxiety that I really identify with. Obviously, there’s a fetishization of this pre-AIDS material as well, which is also interesting to consider because we’re now in an age of PrEP when men can have this type of sex again, which obviously comes with its own risks.

Sam

Fiona

And with a requirement to be medicated.

Yeah, but there are a lot of gay men that are achieving a kind of pre-AIDS sexual life. I mean obviously it’s not really a return to that time, and the material that’s coming out of that, from now—the sexual material, pornography—is totally different to that pre-AIDS material. Maybe I’m going way off track here, but for me there’s an embodiment when I’m reading material from the past. I feel the presentness of it. So for me, I’ve never really suffered so much from that anxiety of the foreboding.

Sam

Fiona

Sam

Because the pleasure resonates.

Yeah. It resonates. When I look at Leonard Fink’s 22

photographs of the piers, I never think “oh how sad”. I just think, “how amazing that would have been!” You know? And I think you and I, in The Centre archive, we felt that sadness and it felt very real and very present, but that’s because it was very present in that material.

When I look at that material, be it the piers or the photographs of Fire Island, and think about the imminence—if you could call it that—of AIDS, it makes me feel sad up to a point, but it also makes me feel angry. It makes me feel rage. And that is also a really embodied experience.

Fiona

Yeah, and vital, and I think one that’s important now and that’s why I think a lot of the work, a lot of the subjects we’re looking at are important now.

Sam

Dr Fiona Anderson is Lecturer in Art History in the Fine Art department at Newcastle University.

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Cruising Time

by Sam Ashby Stills taken from The Colour of His Hair (Sam Ashby, 2017) Transcription and proofing by Alex Reece Special thanks to Fiona Anderson, Jon Davies, David Edgar, Evan Garza, Kevin Killian, Alex Reece

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