artist statement

Anyone familiar with the cliches of American high school would be familiar with the car-hook-up. Your parents won’t let you have your date over so you find a secluded place to experiment out in the world. However, for queer people, hooking up in nontraditional settings plays a less nostalgic role. Whether it’s a park in town, the city’s gay-friendly bathhouse, or the darkest corner available in the New York City nightclub, before the internet, before Grindr, known cruisy spots around town were a primary vehicle for single or closeted gay men to find sex. It was arguably even a political act - a kind of fuck you to mainstream society's villainizing of queer love; an act of necessity as much as daring.

“cruising” concentrates on these sites of passion. Photographed on medium format film, in the tradition of landscape photography, these seemingly banal locations are identified for the sexual significance they hold for the minority who experienced release at them.

While people have always cruised for all sorts of reasons,, as a member of a generation who has only known the internet and the aspects of fledgling queer life it facilitates, this work is my way of making a document of this history; an homage to these places and sites, which asks the viewer to do reflect. Who were we as a society that relegated our sexual liberation to parking lots, bathhouses and motel rooms, and who are we now that it’s relegated to an app or the incognito browser we double-check we closed.