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Among the writings on cruising from the late twentieth century, the physical choreography is particularly notable. David Wojnarowicz, in his 1991 memoir, “Close to the Knives,” recounts his experiences walking through deserted warehouses along Manhattan’s west-side waterfront, where he describes “passing through shadowed walls and along hallways, momentarily glimpsing a series of men in varying degrees of leaning” within the recesses of a room. Andrew Holleran, in his 1978 novel, “Dancer from the Dance,” evokes “dark clots of individuals coalescing in vacant lots, parked trucks, and alleyways, venerating Priapus beneath the summer moon.” In his memoir, “Times Square Red, Times Square Blue,” Samuel Delany brings a female companion to observe the sexual activity at a late-night cinema in Manhattan, where she notes, “There are a lot of people in here walking around . . .”
Delany’s memoir, published in 1999, expresses sorrow over the closure of urban spaces where individuals, predominantly men seeking men, once gathered for anonymous sexual encounters. Broadly, cruising refers to the quest for impersonal sex in public locations—bathrooms, parks, saunas, and movie theatres. This practice has existed as long as cities have and often arises as a response to prohibitions on certain types of sexual relationships. “Exchanging fleeting glances or knowing nods at the urinal wall, tapping a foot, or dropping bits of crumpled toilet paper,” Alex Espinoza mentions in “Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime,” from 2019. “We created ways to communicate using a secret, coded language because it was a necessity.” During the sixties and seventies, cruising locations were documented in printed directories, like Bob Damron’s “Address Book,” a self-published catalog of gay bars and “cruisy areas” across the nation and eventually internationally. However, following the AIDS epidemic and the loss of many urban cruising spots due to health regulations and gentrification, this in-person activity transitioned to online platforms.
“Petite Mort: Recollections of a Queer Public,” a 2011 anthology of essays by various writers and artists regarding public sex in New York City, edited by Carlos Motta and Joshua Lubin-Levy, conveys a distinctly nostalgic tone. “There was every type of guy present: workmen, delivery boys, shop employees, executives, tourists, random fathers, and well . . . you name it,” Aiken Forrett recalls about a bathroom located on a lower level of the World Trade Center. In this collection, legal scholar Katherine Franke discusses “the afterlife of homophobia,” noting that queer sex—after the 2003 Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which decriminalized “sodomy”—was legitimized, yet also privatized. Franke advocates for a re-examination: “It’s time for sex to resist and push back against a sanitized sexual politics that seeks to cleanse homosexuality of its more explicit manifestations.”
The introduction of Grindr, the first major dating app utilizing geolocation technology, in 2009, heralded a new chapter in dating culture. Its liberating potential—sexual encounters readily accessible via one’s phone—captivated both heterosexual and queer audiences alike, prompting OkCupid, Tinder, Scruff, and Growlr to replicate Grindr’s feed, which displayed users’ proximity to each other. However, what initially seemed like newfound freedom gradually morphed into another form of labor: the task of curating an alluring profile with chosen photographs and a brief bio, coupled with hours spent scrolling. Today, Grindr stands as perhaps the most widely used L.G.B.T.Q. social network, boasting over fourteen million average monthly users, yet it has also been criticized for pushing gay life further into private realms—one study indicated a thirty-six percent decline in the number of L.G.B.T.Q. bars in America from 2007 to 2019.
As the quest for sexual connections became more digitized, a noticeable yearning emerged—not for the moral repression that birthed cruising, but for its attributes of anonymity and spontaneity. Novelist Garth Greenwell, in a 2016 essay praising cruising, wrote about areas “where the radical potential of queerness still resides, a potential that has been nearly eradicated from a mainstream, homonormative version of gay life.” It was within this context of nostalgia for something less predetermined that, in 2018, the website Sniffies.com began to gain traction.
Sniffies markets itself as “a map-based app for gay, bi, trans, and curious cruisers.” Accessible through a web browser, it requires no profile creation, no photographs, and even no email address. Just open the site, log in anonymously, and a real-time sexual map of your vicinity is at your disposal. Sniffies enables users to inform others of their presence at public venues like parks, bars, and gyms, as well as to invite individuals to gatherings in private locations. “Is anyone else here?” one might post upon arriving at a well-known cruising site, many of which existed prior to the internet. Upon my first login in Los Angeles, I encountered a group congregating near what appeared to be a highway overpass.
Users engage with Sniffies not to socialize, make friends, or enjoy coffee, but with the expectation of immediate sexual satisfaction. A few users share pictures of their faces, yet the majority opt for images of other body parts first, accompanied by their physical details, fetishes, H.I.V. status, and comfort level with drug use. One Sniffies fan described it as “Grindr without the wink,” explaining, “On Grindr, the third thing you send is a picture of your genitalia; on Sniffies, it’s your profile picture.”
“The name originated from the notion of sniffing people out, discovering who’s nearby,” the founder of Sniffies, Blake Gallagher, based in Seattle, shared with me. In 2018, Gallagher, then an architect with an interest in computer programming, created a model of the site and posted about it in the Personals section of Craigslist. He pretended to be a user, then observed as others logged on. The initial two users on the map quickly multiplied to four, then eight, then sixteen. “It just kept doubling,” he noted. “I recall looking and realizing that, wow, there are only a few dozen people on this map, separated by miles but still within the urban landscape of Seattle, and they returned daily
Sourse: newyorker.com