Remembering ‘Risky’ Sex: Viral Hauntology and Post-crisis Cruising Discourses

The hauntological dimensions of the AIDS pandemic—the losses and affective echoes of trauma—actively shape cultural understandings of gay sexual subcultures today. By focusing on three post-crisis cultural artefacts that delve into the subcultural practice of cruising, this chapter explores how recollections of the sexual past influence discourses on promiscuous public sex in the present. The chapter begins with a close reading of several paintings from John Walter’s 2015 exhibition Alien Sex Club. It explores how Walter constructs the cruiser as an abject spectacle of risky sex that warns gay men against recidivism into dangerous past sexual behaviours. Responding to this sex-negative view of cruising culture and the sexual past, the chapter turns to Patrick Moore’s book (2004) Beyond Shame. Although Moore’s reparative text has anti-homonormative intentions, his attempt to redeem the memory of New York’s cruising spaces reactively valorises them as sites of radical social transformation. By looking at the collaborative artist book project Petite Mort, the chapter explores a deidealising approach to public sex; one that does not try to reduce the turbulent past into a cautionary tale or a halcyon image, but offers a way to live with, and accept, its ghostly echoes and troubling contradictions.