Portals

Furtive Modes of Research

“Thinking of cruising in this methodological way suggests a furtive mode of undertaking artistic research and practice”.

GSM      I thought we could begin by touching upon the furtive nature of cruising and how this can be employed as methodology. In the past, much of my research has drawn from explorations of abandoned sites where access is restricted. When entering and cruising these spaces unnoticed, gathering objects and ephemera, and consciously or unconsciously leaving traces of those visits, there’s a sense of risk (whether actual or perceived) to personal safety and of incrimination. Searching for clues pointing to queer pasts in these spaces, or ‘queering’ to some extent the environment through installation or performance, that risk, or at least the perception of it, intensifies. The furtive nature of this way of working seems to arise because there’s something at stake.

FA      Historically, cruising has often been a hidden or furtive practice because of the very real risk of entrapment, arrest, police harassment, and queer bashing. There are other practical motivations for this furtiveness too: cruising somewhere fairly off grid like the West Side piers in the 1970s means that people are likely there for the same reason as you. This furtiveness also has an erotic charge or can acquire one. This is something I explored in my book Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York’s Ruined Waterfront (2019): cruising in ruins was risky in terms of personal safety for various reasons, but that was also a turn on. 

Something that drew me to the idea of a ‘furtive mode of research’ was the fact that, like cruising, it is a phrase that has different connotations, depending on who is reading. It can refer to feelings of isolation or alienation, or to the necessity of reading between the lines in a culture that doesn’t value or represent you or keep you safe, but it can also speak to that thrilling experience of queer recognition, a glance across a room or with a comrade in a poem, a painting, or a photograph. 

GSM      That idea of queer recognition is really interesting. Those charged and often fleeting exchanges are inherent in cruising and part of that thrill is its coded nature. I’m conscious that exhibition making or publishing ultimately makes public, to some extent, work and research that responds to cruising generally. The studio feels like a place to explore these ideas freely and openly, as well as a space where decisions are made around what is shared in terms of context and what is reserved. Exhibition making, which places some of these ideas in the public sphere feels problematic in a way. 

As queer people, we’re able to and are indeed nourished by speaking openly on these subjects, yet perhaps also mindful of protecting ourselves and those within a community who engage with a culture furtively, either by choice or lack of it. In what ways are notions of care that we discussed also wrapped up in that? 

FA     In terms of cruising in an exhibition context or exhibiting art that explores cruising publicly, I share your concerns. For me, the issue isn’t so much about making something private public, since cruising is a public sex practice, but rather that it might lose its queer erotic charge altogether or become an easily packaged example of ‘queer art’, a saleable category that can be really limiting. Ariel Goldberg explores this in their book The Estrangement Principle (2016), how to make queerness visible without reducing its complexity to a recognisable image or a style. 

GSM      I think part of my hesitation in releasing work from the studio or making it more public is also tied up in shame. Making work that engages with this subject partly comes from a place of countering that, of revisiting personal experiences and deconstructing oppressive narratives we have grown up with and internalised. In that respect, exhibiting the work becomes something empowering. 

I’m interested in how shame correlates with the Scottish experience – perhaps one that is more generally influenced by the Kirk [the Church of Scotland]. Shame continues to be felt more widely amongst the queer community, particularly by gay men of our generation and the generation that preceded ours, but I wonder to what extent it was felt more intensely or just differently in Scotland? 

FA      I thought about this a lot in 2017, when cultural institutions and organisations in England and Wales were marking the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act and the partial decriminalisation of sex between men in private. (And, of course, it didn’t apply to sex in public spaces! Arrests for that in England and Wales actually increased after 1967.)

Partial decriminalisation didn’t happen in Scotland until 1980, just 7 years before the introduction of Section 28. I think that had a lot to do with the Scottish Presbyterian tradition and the dominant role that the Kirk played in public and private life in Scotland in this period. Of course, there are also large and historic Catholic communities in Scotland. For so many Scots, if you weren’t growing up with Calvinism or related forms of Presbyterianism, you were growing up with Catholicism. A lot of that shame is inherited. 

GSM      It’s crazy to think how recent that was. Prior to Section 28, I think the influence of the Kirk also filtered down through state education in Scotland, and certainly remained embedded in the education system in the 80s, 90s, and 00s, even in non- denominational schools.

I wonder to what extent residual shame exists across generations within the queer community and how it is experienced and countered. In Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality (2004), Patrick Moore suggests that at the turn of the century the 70s were viewed as a period of shameful sexual excess that segued into HIV/AIDS, resulting in an intergenerational divide within the gay community, as that generation were prevented from passing on a sense of pride and identity. He writes specifically about the American experience but I think that rings true in the UK. 

FA      I think friendship, conversation, and intergenerational connection is another way to counter that shame. It’s not without its challenges, of course! All friendships are complicated and intergenerational ones can bring up issues around hierarchies, respect, and different experiences of state discrimination. I think it’s also important to think about all those queer ‘elders’ who didn’t make it, who died from AIDS-related conditions, suicide, or other forms of violence that come with living in a queerphobic society. And to borrow from Fierce Pussy, for those with HIV and AIDS, if they were alive today they would still be living with it.

Extract from a conversation between Fiona Anderson and Graham Silveria Martin published on the occasion of Portals (2022)

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