Cruising Utopia, 10th Anniversary Edition. José Esteban Muñoz
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of the gay community or gay politics. Through an especially powerful reading of Jean Genet, Bersani formulates a theory of antirelationality. The most interesting contribution of this theory is the way in which it puts pressure on previous queer theories and exposes the ways in which they theorize gay identity in terms that are always relational, such as gender subversion. But this lesson ultimately leads to a critique of coalition politics. Bersani considers coalitions between gay men and people of color or women as “bad faith” on the part of gays. The race, gender, and sexuality troubles in such a theory—all people of color are straight, all gay men are white—are also evident in his famous essay. The limits of his project are most obvious when one tries to imagine actual political interventions into the social realm, especially interventions that challenge the tedious white normativity that characterizes most of North American gay male culture.
Bersani’s project does not need to see and believe in utopianism. Yet queer politics, in my understanding, needs a real dose of utopianism. Utopia lets us5 imagine a space outside of heteronormativity. It permits us to conceptualize new worlds and realities that are not irrevocably constrained by the HIV/AIDS pandemic and institutionalized state homophobia. More important, utopia offers us a critique of the present, of what is, by casting a picture of what can and perhaps will be. In this chapter I look at moments in a few gay male cultural works that imagine utopia through what I call queer utopian memory.
Memory is most certainly constructed and, more important, always political. The case I make in this chapter posits our remembrances and their ritualized tellings—through film, video, performance, writing, and visual culture—as having world-making potentialities. Furthermore, I suggest that these queer memories of utopia and the longing that structures them, especially as they are embodied in work that I identify as public-sexmimetic cultural production, help us carve out a space for actual, living sexual citizenship.6 I single out moments, such as the passage from Crimp quoted earlier, that tell, remember, and reflect on public sex. I do not read these texts as nostalgic discourse but instead present them as moments in which queer utopian remembrance reenacts what Crimp has called a culture of sexual possibility. John Giorno’s short autobiographical fiction and the visual work of conceptual artist Tony Just serve as the textual sites for this discussion of the workings of queer utopian memory and the structure of feeling that is adjacent to such a reconstructed notion of utopia and memory, a force field of affect and political desire that I call utopian longing.
Fucking Keith, Remembering Utopia
John Giorno’s You Got to Burn to Shine is a rich mosaic of poetry, performance text, activist mission statements, and autobiographical prose. The book reflects on Giorno’s life as a queer writer and performer over the past four decades in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Giorno’s text is the uncanny testimony of a man who has survived various risky lifestyles. It is studded with fabulous star-fucking stories that sparkle like tawdry gems. The reader is, for example, treated to a tell-all account of the author’s having sex with Andy Warhol, a tale that satisfactorily debunks popular myths that have circulated around Warhol to degay his sexuality.7
A section called “Great Anonymous Sex” recounts one of Giorno’s encounters with another Pop Art superstar in 1982 at the Prince Street subway toilets. In this story Giorno fucks and sucks a young man who is later revealed to be Keith Haring. Giorno’s sex narrative begins with his entrance to the Prince Street toilets, a space rife with anonymous public sex. Giorno writes about a plain-looking yet attractive boy with wire-rimmed glasses, a “kid” possessed of an “unusual passion”:
He was making love with great energy and focus, affection and delight, different than the routine going on around me. The guy’s heart was pouring love and I went with the flow. I sucked the kid’s cock (it was cut, not large but very hard). He sucked my cock, with his eyes looking up into mine. Two guys with poppers kept sticking them in our nostrils. We continued alternating sucking each other’s cocks. He managed a few times to get my cock all the way down his throat and I fucked his face, moments of surrender for both of us. The onlookers jerked off watching us.8
Giorno’s narrative rings of idealization and writerly hyperbole, which is not to doubt the “truth” of his account. In the passage, Giorno functions as a disseminator of public sex culture. The idealization that his prose enacts is, within the scope of my analysis, an example of the way in which a rich remembrance of sexual utopia feeds a transformative queer politics. The excess that Giorno’s text produces is indeed more than simple sexual bravado. The space of the Prince Street toilets and the practices of public sex that are rendered in his narrative engender a certain transformative possibility.
The politics I understand as being enacted in Giorno’s text are not immediately visible. In fact, the statement would seem to run counter to Giorno’s assertions that “the great thing about anonymous sex is you don’t bring your private life or personal world. No politics or inhibiting concepts, no closed rules or fixed responses. The great thing about anonymous sex is spontaneity.”9 Although Giorno understands this space as being one that is free of ideology, I think we can still read a powerful political impulse in Giorno’s text, an impulse that is detectable in the acts that are being transcribed, the spaces that are being conceptually rendered, and the performance of writing that expresses his public sex history. I am most interested here in the latter of these.
The cataloging of public sex culture that Crimp performs in “Mourning and Militancy” can be read alongside Giorno’s text as an act of queer world-making. More specifically, I see world-making here as functioning and coming into play through the performance of queer utopian memory, that is, a utopia that understands its time as reaching beyond some nostalgic past that perhaps never was or some future whose arrival is continuously belated—a utopia in the present.
I turn now to a 1964 printed dialogue between Frankfurt School social theorists Theodor W. Adorno and Ernst Bloch on “the utopian function of art.”10 At one point in the dialogue, Bloch turns to Adorno and confirms a basic truism about the politics of utopianism in spite of the climate of a mechanical age in which everything seems mechanically present and therefore cancels out the possibility of utopianism:
Bloch: Thus, the fact that there is also utopia in this area where it has the most difficulty … [thus] the essential function of utopia is a critique of what is present. If we had not already gone beyond the barriers, we could not even perceive them as barriers. (Emphasis mine)11
The saliency of Bloch’s point lies not merely in the fact that imagining any utopia offers us something that is more than another time but also, as in the case of Giorno and the gay male cultural workers I am considering here, in that what is made available first is a critique of the present and of its limits, its barriers. Adorno follows up his friend’s point by casting his statement within the frame of the dialectic:
Adorno: Yes, at any rate, utopia is essentially in the determined negation, in the determined negation of that which merely is, and by concretizing itself as something false, it always points, at the same time to what should be.
Yesterday you quoted Spinoza in our discussion with the passage “Verum index sui et falsi” [the true is the sign of itself and the false]. I have varied this a little in the sense of the dialectical principle of the determined negation and have said Falsum—the false thing—index sui et veri [the false is the sign of itself and the correct]. That means that the true thing determines itself via the false thing, or via that which makes itself falsely known. And insofar as we are not allowed to cast the picture of utopia, insofar as we do know what the correct thing will be, we know exactly, to be sure, what the false thing is.12
Dialectical thinking, especially what Adorno refers to as “the determined negation” enables us to read Giorno’s text as something other than a nostalgic foreclosure on future political possibility. Instead, via the lens provided by these materialist philosophers, we can understand Giorno’s text as pointing beyond the barriers of our current conditions of possibility, beyond the painful barriers of the AIDS pandemic; it lets us see, via a certain conjuring of “the past,” and for many of us we see this past for the very first time. These pictures of utopia (a term that is used in later comments Adorno makes in the dialogue) do the