While Cruising the Dead River is, at times, a nostalgic book, as it wanders through now-demolished piers and warehouses and recalls abandoned bars and absent city spaces, it is not a book that longs for a return to a supposed golden age of pier cruising. I am not looking back wistfully to a bareback utopia, though I recognize that there is pleasure and power in doing so. Instead, I am interested in how New York’s gay cruising cultures in the late 1970s are remembered and how they have been historicized. I ask whether cruising in ruins itself might be figured as a model for tracing the
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