Young gay cruising houston

Rather, contemporary popular culture, high art, literature, pornography, and vernacular speech continue to reproduce face-to-face cruising in public as part of a globally available gay sexual vocabulary and social practice. Juxtaposing digital maps of queer businesses with an archive of cruising narratives, Riedel shows that while mapping business data offers one visualization of queer territory in Houston, archival narratives of cruising suggest that cruising areas have more complex relationships to commercialized spaces—sometimes directly connected, at other times peripheral and symbiotic, and at others seemingly divorced.

All these models of queer territory posit collective understandings of place that transcend the social boundaries of queer identity groups. Importantly, that fractured and contested structure is due in part to the converging efforts of a wide array of disparate agents: queer sex-seekers, Houston residents, local politicians, civic groups, queer organizations, national anti-pornography groups, and conservative political movements.

Espinoza's Cruising movingly shows the practice is not of a bygone era or one in which only certain morally questionable people engage. It can also happen inside commercial establishments that charge a fee to access other clientele in a semi-private space, like bathhouses, video arcades, and adult book stores.

Cruising is also associated strongly but not exclusively with gay men. Men seeking men for sex has never been the sole determinant of queer territory. Using the city of Houston as an example, this essay attends to cruising as an underdeveloped aspect of those models.

A listing of gay cruising (cruise) bars and gay nightclubs located in Houston (H-Town), Texas. The word can summon all these thoughts and more, regardless of authorial intention; indeed, it can carry whatever freight we readers bring to it. This marking is how cruising functions not only as a social practice but also as a concept.

In general, I argue our politics and communities benefit most when we embrace the untidy polysemy of "queer" and explore the openings it provides. All three authors also reference cruising, but offer little detail about how cruising works in their models.

As Houston's Montrose neighborhood came to be identified as a "gayborhood" between and , archival evidence shows that cruising narratives played a powerful role in that identification. Rather, dissent and conflict over the practice of cruising in Houston shows queer place claiming to be fractured, contested, and structured in part through a politics of respectability inflected explicitly by class but curiously silent on race.

Top 10 Best Gay Men's Cruising Spots in Houston, TX - July - Yelp - RIPCORD, South Beach Houston, JR's Bar & Grill - Houston, Tony's Corner Pocket, Eagle Houston, The Room Bar, Blur, Pearl Houston, Papi’s Houston, Michael's Outpost. These narratives, in parallel with the maps, point to multiple, contested queer territories spread across Houston in memory and practice.

Out of doors, cruising can happen both on foot and, after the popularization of the automobile, by car as well. Brian Riedel explores the role of cruising in queer territorialization and place claiming in Houston, Texas, in the twentieth century. While this essay centers upon the importance of cruising in a particular place and a past era—Houston between and —the rich scenes it describes should not be misconstrued to suggest that cruising is a thing of the past.

What role does cruising play in marking specific areas of the urban landscape as "queer territory"? To be sure, other speakers and thinkers deploy "queer" with additional senses—an historical term of derision, a specific identity, a verb. Location, comments and surrounding areas.

When I intend these specific meanings in this text, I will do my best to flag them. Many men seeking men for sex today came of sexual age through these digital tools, leading writers like John Fielding to ask whether the prominence and distribution of cruising as a queer social practice has waned as a result.

Martin Levine used spot maps of bars and cruising grounds to substantiate a "gay ghetto"; Jen Jack Gieseking analyzed individuals' "mental maps" of queer space; Amin Ghaziani critiqued the enclave theory of "gayborhoods" in favor of what he terms "cultural archipelagos. That assertion echoes Samuel R.

In short, cruising persists as a culturally relevant practice in the United States and elsewhere, one that often moves across social boundaries and identity categories. Information of the cruising area Raveneaux Golf, Houston. Sniffies is the first of its kind -app, bringing the full cruising experience to any device and any browser.

These narratives also point to complicated relationships between cruising and other markers frequently used to define queer territory, specifically businesses serving a queer clientele. For those who know how to read it however, both then and now, cruising marks public and semi-public spaces as at least temporarily queer ed territory.

Since the s, social scientists have proposed and critiqued various models of queer territorialization. The Sniffies map updates in realtime, showing nearby Cruisers, active cruising groups, and popular cruising spots nearby. His book has received critical acclaim in part for its temporal and global scope—ancient Greece, England, Russia and Uganda receive specific attention—but also for his sensitivity both to disability and Latinx experience, as well as his assertion that cruising can offer contact across class and racial lines.

As Alex Espinoza has evocatively described, cruising can lead to sex in situ , whether in public locations like parks or semi-public locations like restrooms, but often leads to sex elsewhere in more private spaces. At the same time, these narratives also show that queer territorialization in Houston was not a smooth process of collective place claiming and recognition.

In our information age, dating websites and hookup apps on mobile phones—Grindr, Scruff, Growlr, Boyahoy, Jack'd, and others—seem to remove much of the guesswork but definitely not all the danger from divining who might be nearby and looking for the same thing.