Like the perpetual threat of violence inherent in the decaying piers and warehouses on the waterfront, cruising in the late 1960s was marked, according to Rechy, by a dialectical energy of despair and “frantic” pleasure. This dialectic is what Rechy later termed, in reference to the cruising culture of the piers, “the pornography of implied violence,” a complex and violent eroticism that resonates in the multiplicitous uses made of the abandoned piers and warehouses of the waterfront in the following decade.39
