Cruising Utopia, 10th Anniversary Edition. José Esteban Muñoz
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of “what might be.”
Here is another instance of Giorno doing what Adorno calls the casting of a picture:
I unbuckled the kid’s belt and he pulled down his pants. I turned him gently around, slowly eased in the wet head and slipped my cock into his ass, and he pushed to me and took it all. His ass was slightly lubricated with Vaseline, I wondered if it was from this morning or from last night, and if he had someone’s cum in his ass. That thought made me hotter and the grease made my dick feel even better. Someone started rimming me, had his face buried in my ass, his tongue in my asshole, and was nibbling and sucking. This is also a great pleasure for me. I fucked the kid, gently at first, then gradually as hard as I could. Sweat poured off us in sheets. From the depth of the inebriating darkness of that underground cave, stretching my cock to the sky, I shot a big load of cum, straight and glorious. Perfectly arisen and accomplished, and perfectly dissolved back into primordially pure empty space.13
This, I want to suggest, is certainly a casting of a picture of sex, but, in the same instance, it is also a picture of utopian transport and a reconfiguration of the social, a reimaging of our actual conditions of possibility, all of this in the face of a global epidemic. The picture rendered through Giorno’s performative writing is one of a good life that both was and never was, that has been lost and is still to come. It performs a desire for a perfect dissolution into a “primordially pure empty space.”
After this scene in the Prince Street toilet, Giorno runs out and catches a train in the nick of time: “I said goodbye and I was out the door in a flash, onto the train going uptown.” Once on the train he feels himself once again overwhelmed by the crushing presence and always expanding force field that is heteronormativity: “It always was a shock entering the straight world of a car full of grim people sitting dumbly with suffering on their faces and in their bodies, and their minds in their prisons.”14 This experience of being “shocked” by the prison that is heteronormativity, the straight world, is one that a reader, especially a queer reader, encounters after putting down a queer utopian memory text such as Giorno’s. I think of my own experience of reading You Got to Burn to Shine at some predominantly straight coffee shop near where I live, looking up after the experience, and feeling a similar shock effect. I once again pick up the thread of Adorno’s thinking from the same dialogue with Bloch:
[Negation] is actually the only form in which utopia is given to us at all. But what I mean to say here … this matter has a very confounding aspect, for something terrible happens due to the fact that we are forbidden to cast a picture. To be precise, among that which should be definite, one imagines for it to begin with as less definite the more it is stated as something negative. But then—the commandment against a concrete example of Utopia tends to defame the Utopian consciousness and to engulf it. What is really important here is the will that it is different.15
In Giorno’s work we can see the “will that is different.” There are many reasons why these fantasies of rapturous unsafe sex might have a damaging effect on gay men living in the AIDS pandemic. But having said that, there is something noble and enabling about Giorno’s storytelling. Adorno, in the passage just quoted, speaks out against a trend in socialism (and in humanism in general) in which utopianism becomes the bad object. Utopianism can only exist via a critique of the dominant order; it has no space to exist outside of the most theoretically safeguarded abstractions. In a roughly analogous way the pictures drawn by Giorno are also bad objects insofar as they expose gay men to acts, poses, and structures of desire that may be potentially disastrous. But, as Adorno teaches us, the importance of casting a picture is central to a critique of hegemony. Adorno explains, “If this is not said, if this picture cannot—I almost would like to say—appear within one’s grasp, then one basically does not know at all what the actual reason for the totality is, why the entire apparatus has been set in motion.”16
It might seem as though my oscillations between the worlds and sexual utopias produced in Giorno and the more theoretical utopian musing of Bloch and Adorno are something of a stretch. To that charge I answer, “of course.” But, beyond that, I would point to the words with which Bloch ends the dialogue: “In conclusion, I would like to quote a phrase, a very simple one, strangely enough from Oscar Wilde: ‘A map of the world that does not include utopia is not even worth glancing at.”17 Although it might be strange, from most vistas, that Bloch would be quoting Western culture’s most famous convicted sodomite, it is certainly not so odd from the perspective of this queer inquiry. Wilde’s sentence, when properly broken down and appreciated for its stylized precision, makes explicit the connection between queerness, utopia, and world-making. Queer world-making, then, hinges on the possibility to map a world where one is allowed to cast pictures of utopia and to include such pictures in any map of the social. For certainly, without this critical spot on the map we ourselves become the pained and imprisoned subjects on the fast-moving train Giorno describes.
Ghosts and Utopia
I turn now from the ghost of Oscar Wilde that haunts Bloch’s thinking on utopia to the ghosts that circulate in the photography of Tony Just. In 1994 Just completed a project that attempted to capture precisely what I am calling the ghosts of public sex. The project began with just selecting run-down public men’s rooms in New York City, the kind that were most certainly tea rooms before they, like the Prince Street toilets that Giorno describes, were shut down because of the AIDS/HIV public health crisis. Just then proceeded to do the labor of scrubbing and sanitizing sections of the public men’s rooms. The preparation of the spaces is as central to the series as the photos I choose to focus on; the only evidence of this behind-the-scenes aspect of the larger project is the clean spaces themselves—Just’s labor exists only as a ghostly trace in a sparkling men’s room. He documented this project through color slides and photographs that focused on the bathrooms’ immaculate state and the details of such spaces. The urinals, tiles, toilets, and fixtures that are the objects of these photo images take on what can only be described as a ghostly aura, an otherworldly glow. This aura, this circuit of luminous halos that surround the work, is one aspect of the ghosts of public sex that this chapter is interested in describing.
These ghosts of public sex are the queer specters whose substance Just’s project and my own critical endeavor attempt to capture and render visible. In pan, I see the ghosted materiality of the work as having a primary relation to emotions, queer memories, and structures of feeling that haunt gay men on both sides of a generational divide that is formed by and through the catastrophe of AIDS. One of the things one risks when one talks of ghosts is the charge of ignoring the living, the real, and the material. I bolster my formulations against such potential reservations with the work of Raymond Williams. Williams’s notion of a structure of feeling was a process of relating the continuity of social formations within a work of art. Williams explained structure of feeling as a hypothesis that
has a special relevance to art and literature, where true social content is in a significant number of cases of this present and affective kind, that which cannot be reduced to belief systems, institutions, or explicit general relationships, though it may include all these as lived and experienced, with or without tension, as it also evidently includes elements of social and material (physical or natural) experience which may lie beyond or be uncovered or imperfectly covered by, the elsewhere recognizable systematic elements.
For Williams, the concept of structures of feeling accounts for
the unmistakable presence of certain elements in art which are not covered by (though in one mode, might be reduced to) other formal systems. [This] is the true source of the specializing category of “the aesthetic”, “the arts”, and “imaginative literature”. We need, on the one hand, to acknowledge (and welcome) the specificity of these elements—specific dealings, specific rhythms—and yet to find their specific kinds of sociality, thus preventing the extraction from social experience which is conceivable only when social experience itself has been categorically (and at root historically) reduced.18
The ghosts I detect in Just’s project possess a materiality, a kind of substance, that does not easily appear within regimes of the visible and the tactile. These elements have their own specificity but are also relevant on a vaster map of social and political experience. To see these ghosts