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This chapter traces a material history of the waterfront area as a cruising ground, from historic bathhouses and empty trucks in the 1960s to warehouses and piers in the 1970s. It examines David Wojnarowicz’s art and writing alongside that of the photographers Leonard Fink and Alvin Baltrop, and writers such as Andrew Holleran, John Rechy, Edmund White, and Tim Dlugos. In much of this work, the ruined buildings on the waterfront appear as props in the sexual encounters that took place there, as cruising men fantasized about their former uses by sailors and longshoremen. The structural decay that made the warehouses so dangerous rendered them more appealing as cruising spaces. Drawing on journal entries, poetry, photographs, and archival ephemera, in this chapter I use Wojnarowicz’s experiences as a lens through which to view the waterfront cruising cultures before HIV/AIDS and the peculiar eroticism of ruins. I examine how and why the ruined buildings that dominated this landscape assumed such a powerful erotic role in the cruising that took place there in the late 1970s and, sifting through the traces that remain, offer an embodied archival history of the pier’s erotic uses in the pre–HIV/AIDS era.

This chapter explores how David Wojnarowicz and other New York artists, including Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, engaged with ruins visually in their artwork from the 1950s to the early 1980s. I am concerned with how and why a visual culture of ruins developed with such fervor in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and how artists manipulated the city’s dilapidation to their creative advantage. This chapter traces the development of a queer visual culture that focused on ruins as both subject matter and medium in American art in this period, and its relation to a critical aesthetic interest in contemporaneous urban processes of abandonment, ruination, and renewal. I consider this visual culture of ruins in relation to site-specific art practices and cultures of display, an interest in “crummy” spaces that had been gaining momentum in Manhattan from the time of the waterfront’s abandonment in the early 1960s. In this chapter, I am interested in how this work might appear, achronologically, different from the erotic vantage point of cruising, itself a queer way of looking in the city and a visual culture interested in ruins and in the places where the city’s heteronormative fabric falls apart.

As Wojnarowicz’s waterfront writing developed in the late 1970s, he looked for new ways to represent the strange temporality of the ruined waterfront. The figure of the ghost became the ideal symbol with which to articulate the experience of cruising there. He produced the photographic series Arthur Rimbaud in New York, placing the nineteenth-century French poet in sites that Wojnarowicz himself frequented, including the derelict piers and warehouses of the waterfront. In his writing, Wojnarowicz took up cross-temporal invitations of connection and erotic communion found in the work of writers such as Walt Whitman and William S. Burroughs. In this chapter, I explore the development of Wojnarowicz’s ghostly idiolect in the late 1970s and early 1980s through a hauntological investigation of my own, examining the erotic possibilities it offered him and the queer new personal temporalities he generated through it. Through close reading, I trace a cross-generational history of literature in ruins and by the sea that positions Wojnarowicz’s waterfront writing within a broader social and cultural context, effecting a rich, interdisciplinary interpretation of his creative practice, as well as exploring his own influence on contemporary artists like Emily Roysdon.

This chapter considers the question of how the radical use of the camera can translate into concrete political activism that effects social change. A way to do this is to stop confining the definition of political art to protest art and, conversely, to recognize the sublime in openly political artworks. It is also necessary to shift the concept of oblique to stealth. Oblique can be likened to passing, whereas stealth, if one is being conscious and strategic, can contribute to the dismantling of normative gender and sexuality in explosive ways. This is not just a rhetorical move. It is queering an approach to video making, queering how one looks through the camera, and queering how one sees what is captured. To be queer, one must become conscious of one’s location. Queering one’s approach to making video is not to become queer in one’s sexual practices but to become conscious of looking 45 degrees off center, askew and somewhat bent.

This chapter explores the representation of race and sexuality in experimental documentaries produced by gay Asian men in the United States, Canada, and Australia in the mid- to late 1990s. These include Slanted Vision by Ming-Yuen S. Ma (USA, 1995), 7 Steps to Sticky Heaven (USA, 1995) by Nguyen Tan Hoang, Tony Ayres’s China Dolls (Australia, 1997), and Wayne Yung’s The Queen’s Cantonese (Canada,1998). These films seek to contest the feminization and desexualization of Asian men in gay visual culture by presenting self-consciously performative, sexually explicit material, which acts as an urgent counterpornography. A central component of the reeducation of desire for these films’ intended gay Asian male audience is the goal of replacing the so-called wrong, misguided desire for white men with a supposedly more empowering desire for other Asian men, such a shift ostensibly signals a concomitant shift in masculine agency from passive sexual object (the Asian boy toy) to active sexual subject (the politicized agent). The chapter argues that this politically correct lesson fails to account for desires and identifications that cannot be so easily disciplined, especially those desires that embrace bottomhood and femininity. In other words, such a reeducation ends up arresting the play of desire and marginalizing a gay Asian male subject’s desire for submission and domination—in effect, a move that curtails a gay Asian subject’s choice and sexual possibilities.

RFD quarterly (once referred to as “Rural Fairy Digest”) was one of the first queer journals to extend the non-normative intersectional politics of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) to nonmetropolitan U.S. audiences. This chapter extends recent historical scholarship on 1970s lesbian and gay US print cultures to analyze the anti-urban politics of RFD’s early stylistics. It offers an aesthetic archaeology of what one initial contributor, Donald Engstrom, later termed RFD’s “separatist fag community,” and what one historian of regional US cultures, James T. Sears, sees as the quarterly’s “anarcho-effeminism.” Extending their findings, the chapter explores how a particular version of gay male urbanity began to reprint itself as a normalizing print style in 1970s glossy magazines, and how RFD, alongside rural feminist journal Country Women, responded to this historical packaging with oppositional stylistics of its own.

This chapter focuses on the furniture and jewellery designs created by the Hironen Studio from 1987 to 1995. The symbolic objects produced in this studio belong to the design-art genre and present the discourse concerning difference and otherness through a decadent visual style focused on extreme individualism, narcissism, and personal identity. This discourse is engaged by means of a transgressive visual strategy based on two aesthetic sources: the camp aesthetic stemming from Queer theory and its formulation of postmodern otherness and the Japanese ero-guro-nansensu (erotic-grotesque-nonsense) genre, which emerged in bourgeois popular culture during different periods in Japanese history, and similarly combined unconventional forms of behaviour. The visual combination of these aesthetic genres in contemporary design amounted to a visual protest against hegemonic taste as a representative of class, gender, and power.