Maheshwari-Aplin Roses for Hedone

On Queer Hedonism and World-Making Through Pleasure
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-916637-11-5
Verlag: 404 Ink
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, Band 28, 112 Seiten

Reihe: Inklings

What more can pleasure offer us, and how can we transform this pleasure into intentional practice in pursuit of a collective liberatory future? When a society marginalises a people, their humanity is revolutionary in all its hunger and joy. As the queer community worldwide faces rampant transphobia, rising hate crime, and unequal access to support services - all in the context of humanitarian crises, a climate crisis, and a destabilised political landscape - hedonism can play a central role in how we seek to organise as a symbiotic system. When viewed through a queer lens, hedonism undergoes a process of transformation, embodying the power for change and much more. Borrowing from the Ancient Greeks' understanding of love's multiplicity, Roses for Hedone explores queer hedonism not as a momentary phenomenon or indulgence, but rather a transformational route - whether via euphoric raves, inspired art, marching side by side in protest, or sharing simple delights - through which we can learn from our past, connect in the present, and look towards a more fair, hopeful future together.

Prishita (they/them) has been writing about the experiences of the queer community - historical, personal, and political - for the past five years, drawing on their knowledge and connections as an LGBTQ+ rights campaigner and community organiser. Previously Politics Editor at BRICKS Magazine, they have by-lines in Gay Times, gal-dem, Dazed, Metal, and Cosmopolitan, among others. Prishita has also written for a range of scientific publications, including Triple Helix Cambridge, and is a co-author on a paper on the second plague pandemic published in Nature Communications.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Maheshwari-Aplin, Prishita

Leseproben

Chapter 1: Èros//Exploration

eros. From Ancient Greek ???? (Éros). The Greek god of erotic love. Refers to a sexual love or desire; conceived by Plato as a fundamental creative impulse having a sensual element.

Each year, as London pops under the August sun – the scent of petrichor and the buzz of possibility heavy in the pollen-filled air – gaggles of queers trek to Hampstead Heath and become one with each other and the trees. Yeah, “This is My Culture” is a really good fucking party. Lesbians jelly wrestle topless while an enigmatic maître de soaks them in oil from an emptied bottle of washing up liquid, gays disappear into the trees and emerge tousled and smiling, and the bass thumps while bodies of all shapes and sizes writhe in coordinated ecstasy. But it’s also so much more than that.

This annual memorial-slash-protest-slash-party celebrates the life of iconic singer George Michael, and his talent, courage and sexual freedom. It was first hosted to mark the nineteenth anniversary of Michael’s arrest in 1998 at Will Rogers Memorial Park in Beverley Hills. His crime? Cruising for gay sex.

From the ancient Roman bath houses to the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris, gay men have rehearsed the art of looking. They’ve paused, touched and stolen kisses everywhere from the molly houses of eighteenth-and-nineteenth century London – brandy shops, taverns and theatres where “dozens of men would congregate to meet one another for sex or for love” – to rest stops and underpasses in the United States.16 In 2015, while taking a late-night stroll on Hampstead Heath, George Michael was ambushed by a photographer from News of the World. Unabashed and defiant, he simply snapped: “Are you gay? No? Then fuck off! This is my culture!”17 True, cruising – the art of searching for sexual partners in public places – is partly about erotic satisfaction. But as Alex Espinoza writes in Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime: “Cruising is not just about participation in a sexual experience; it is an act that promulgates a unique cultural practice necessary for the survival of the culture as a whole.”18 A cultural practice – an oral tradition, if you will – which creates space for homosexual intimacy within shame-filled and oppressive environments.

Espinoza opens his book by describing this practice as almost meditative. It “teaches you how to be still in the moment, how to feel the Earth spinning on its axis, how to sense the gravitational pull of the ground beneath your feet.” Here, there is a pleasure of existence, of mindfulness, that draws our attention from an aspirational erotic climax and into the present moment. It’s this indulgence in the process that taught Espinoza patience, perseverance and “how to cultivate a sense of confidence”. It’s also in these moments between – where the air is ripe with potential – that we learn not only about ourselves, but also how to relate to others with a forward-looking intentionality.

Participating in an act of sexual deviancy allows queer people to autonomously choose what has for so long been imposed upon us. Just as LGBTQIA+ people have reclaimed “queer” as a signifier of acceptance and strength, when we cruise, we shed the shame and revel in our perversions. Through engaging with this queer tradition of low culture – the “trashy” – we convert it into a “high form of disruptive behaviour.”19 We also circumvent capitalist pressures and expectations, for we accept the possibility of failure and “wasted time”. As academic Jack Halberstam argues in The Queer Art of Failure, a queer failure to live up to heteronormative societal standards of success can prompt us to fall short, get distracted, find a limit and to avoid mastery, among other things – all of which ultimately help us recognise that “empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers”.20 In rehearsing the queer art of failure, we losers stand on the shoulders of those who lost before us.

Recognisable through scattered clues, cruising sites offer an erotic paradox akin to Schrödinger’s Cat, wherein at any one time there could or could not be the possibility for connection. They blur the binary of knowing/not knowing, and imbue every unspoken glance with transformational potential. An almost imperceptible nod; a brief graze of the crotch; a lip bite and a tilt of the head.

This is especially true when coupled with other forms of code. Bob Damron’s Address Book, a gay yellow pages published in 1965 as a pocket book “so small that it could fit inside the back pocket of a pair of Levi’s or Wranglers” listed names of gay bars and “cruisy areas”, including a key featuring letters such as “D” for “Dancing” and “RT” for “Raunchy Types”.21 Alongside these listings, Damron also included a detailed explanation of handkerchief colours and their meanings as per the “Hankie Code”. According to Damron, a mustard hankie in the right pocket communicated that the wearer wanted 8”+, while a light blue in the left asked for a 69.22 With time, the more problematic codes have been dropped – some were racist or relayed inappropriate age preferences – and the range of colours and textures expanded.

This queer tradition of codified language and signage is one under which cruising as a practice slots gently. As artist and curator Mac Martin observed in a 2018 interview with International Business Times, “These seemingly squalid, gloomy and stinking places were incredible places of social mixing. Homos and straights of all social strata, men of all ages, cultural and religious backgrounds – they all came together there.”23 In 1791 Paris, aristocrats and workers looked to one another for a transient and radical exchange that defied the “normal” rules and expectations of society.24 Punters in 1934 London from disparate social strata sought membership at the city’s “greatest bohemian rendezvous”, the Caravan Club.25 Men of colour, so often fetishised as non-normative partners, speak of using the cruising ground to take control and undermine racialised politics of desire. And trans men experience glimmers of gender euphoria within the shared erotic gaze.26

The world-making potential of cruising has allowed this practice to flourish during times and in places of increased stigmatisation, policing and criminalisation. In 18th century London, cruising spots were established around alleyways, arcades and theatres “out of a collective desire to seek out that which was officially taboo.”27 Over 200 years later, photographer Sunil Gupta attempted to document the plethora of gay cruising in public places around New Delhi, at a time when homosexuality was still criminalised. Such was the danger that Gupta had to enlist volunteers to act in his photographs. Today, queer people in countries where even to be perceived as homosexual in public can be life-threatening use VPNs to seek anonymous connections and pre-arranged orgasms via cruising forums and dating apps.28 Although some purists consider these sites, such as Squirt.org, Grindr or Hornet, not to fall under the definition of “cruising”, let’s tear down those gates for the sake of our shared understanding and view such activity through the lens of circumstantial safety and aligned intent.

The access to community, intimacy and sex that cruising provides mostly for men who have sex with men can’t be ignored within the context of systemic discrimination and oppression. However, the belief that the only reason gays cruise is to access what cannot be accessed through any other route undermines the depth and breadth of this practice. It also ignores the reality of those whose pursuit of freedom is regularly exploited. In 2019, Human Rights Watch reported that gay men were being set up via dating apps in the Russian region of Chechnya during the anti-gay crackdown of 2019.29 And, in Uganda, a country with one of the world’s harshest anti-gay laws, police officers have been going undercover “pretending to solicit sex to lure gay men out and arrest them.”30 On an interpersonal level, the same liberatory touch can cross the line to predatory when driven by shame and entitlement. There also have been reports of higher rates of other offences, such as thefts, robberies and violent assaults going unreported at known cruising sites by victims who don’t want to be “outed”.

Cruising clearly doesn’t come without risks. Yet, countless men around the world continue to look, touch and embrace in and out of the shadows. For this cultural practice is driven not only by desperation but also by the magic that occurs between the lines. Yes, there may be urgency, but this is rooted in an innate human desire for the very belonging and understanding that has been, and continues to be, kept from the queer community by a heteronormative society. There is taking, but there’s also reciprocity. It’s a reclamation of sexual agency, an act of survival – a protest.

As he gazed at an exhibition about cruising...