Timing’s a funny thing. A few weeks ago, just as dating-cum-hookup app Lex announced that it would be refocusing on “friends and community”—to great gay consternation—I received my advance copy of Make the Golf Course a Public Sex Forest! in the mail. If the former development is an example of the ongoing privatization and gentrification of digital spaces, then the latter is a demand for its opposite, what you might call a fuck commons. As the editors of Sex Forest! write in their introduction, “Public space is what we need, not in the narrow sense of government-funded projects but rather in the sense of open, non-hierarchical containers for a range of different uses and possibilities.” Possibilities which include public sex without the risk of violence, from police and other sources.
I thumbed through my copy of Sex Forest! with interest, scanning a genre-diverse selection of poetry, S/M erotica, and horny hybrid fiction. This balance of what the editors call “hot porn” and “headier theoretical and historical explorations into the relationship between sex and notions of the public” aspires toward upending the same social, economic, and legal forces that have transformed Lex from a would-be descendent of the lesbian personal ads of On Our Backs to the kind of place where, to revisit a personal anecdote, one might be accused of human trafficking while seeking a co-top for their femme bottom girlfriend.
Disappointing though some find Lex’s new chapter to be, it was inevitable. There’s just no way that a free, American, venture-backed sex app purportedly for “lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, [and] queer” people could continue to exist, not in the same hellscape where sex workers are purged not just from their own websites, but from all social media platforms, particularly those designed for recreational sexual and romantic connection1. So long as public sex is a crime, public women (to use an antiquated term), and all who are identified as such, will remain criminals—whether or not they’re fucking, whether or not their fucking is sanctioned by law. As the primary targets of legislation designed to discipline and punish public women, sex workers and trans women are already too proximate to gender obscenity; the women proximate to them are put at risk, too, albeit at a lower intensity, depending on other identity intersections2.
From the death of the search engine to the rise of FOSTA-SESTA-type assaults on those in the sex trade (as well as those who are trafficked, which this legislation is ostensibly meant to protect), the online privatization I mentioned was of course underway when Lex was still just an Instagram account, but things were admittedly more loose back then. Four or five years ago, Lex was where I met the most chaotic lovers of my fucked up Saturn return (not to mention my friend and one-time collaborator, photographer Elle Pérez). Though it hewed more toward the weekly newspaper model than eyeballing a hot bitch in the street, Lex was, or aspired to be, an online dyke cruising apparatus. Now it’s become/ing something else, as anything does when its goal is to be above-board, legal, and, most importantly of all, profitable.
As the punchline it’s come to be, Lex encapsulates the limitations imposed on those of us who can’t access the freedom of public sex in the same way that (some) cis men can3. I’m like super open to pushback on this, but I suspect that this is why you can have a Grindr and not a Grinda; that is, a lesbian sex app that is explicitly about fucking, rather than about dating, relationships, networking, and, implicitly, monogamy in which any capital exchange happens behind the plausible deniability of a marriage contract. It’s one thing to pony up the overhead for such an apparatus. It’s another to execute the kind of backend enforcement required to manage any risk of solicitation to an extent that satisfies stockholders, VC funds, credit card companies, and the feds that it could be a safe bet.
Because how many workers do you know who can’t be on Tinder in their private lives? How many tgirls do you know who get magically deleted from Hinge? If you’re not one, or both, of these populations, are you and the dykes that make up your community sure that you’re far enough away from them that you could get away with a real-life cruising app? Because I’m not.
But why do we, as dykes, need an app in the first place? Fags, for all their Scruffs and their Sniffies, still have anonymous public hookups without the benefit of wifi. Why can’t—or don’t—dykes do the same?
This is a question posed in an essay found in Sex Forest! Authored by Kathy, it takes a stab at answering why, when it comes to cruising, dykes are “out of luck.” “Public environments where women can easily, within 10 or 20 minutes, meet and fuck other women do not and have never existed,” writes Kathy. I don’t agree with the answers provided to the question Kathy poses, but then, I don’t agree with the question itself. Regardless of how you define cruising, there is ample evidence to the contrary of Kathy’s claim, some of it supplied in this very essay. Daemonumx, a human library of dyke and gay history, came up with a litany of counter-examples off the top of her head (she also sent me this PDF)4. She’s also written about it here and here (and elsewhere, I’m sure). Long story short, dykes do cruise, and have since the criminalization of public sex.
I won’t argue that dykes can or do cruise in precisely the same way that fags do, because we as dykes are not (exclusively) fags. But we can safely put “dykes don’t cruise!” aside while taking the opportunity to explore the resonances this claim activates: anxieties about dyke and lesbian sexual desire; the differences between dyke and fag cruising, as well as the limitations of both and the interplay between the two (some of us are fagdykes!); the crucial role that straight people play in the act and culture of cruising, for both dykes and fags, which Kathy gestures toward, pointing out that dykes don’t have a corollary for fags’ trade, with which I can only sort of tenuously agree. To be provocative for a moment, if we’re to understand the act of cruising as inextricable from straight people, or even as a primarily transactional exchange between queer men and straight men, why isn’t the dyke equivalent turning a trick (i.e., why does the dyke equivalent of trade have to be a straight woman)?
I suppose my beef with this question, as it appears in Sex Forest!, is that I suspect it reaffirms dykes as a subsidiary of fags, obfuscates the challenges and dangers of cruising to fags of all genders, and forecloses on solutions to the problems that many dykes seem to struggle with vis a vis their sex lives in general (ones that Lex, even now, purports to answer): how do I find other dykes? How do I talk to them? How do I fuck them?
What I’m saying is, if we insist on differentiating between dykes and fags when it comes to public sex, we could choose to see it as an aperture rather than a slipknot. Cruising, for fags, is the criminalized reclamation of pleasure and power. Dykes, too, do this through cruising—so where else do we encounter these reclamations?
So. Lots to chew on here. I don’t mean for this newsletter to be understood as a takedown, or even a rejoinder, of either Kathy’s essay or of Sex Forest! All of us are writing about, around, and toward freedoms that we, in many different ways, are denied. The thing to remember about cruising is that it exists because public and transactional sex are illegal, and queer people can access neither the public nor sex with the same degree of safety that straight people can (your mileage may vary, etc., etc.).
If you are cruising, good for you! If you want to but aren’t sure if and how you can, I hope a few of the resources I’ve shared here can help you get started on your ~journey~. Stay safe out there, babes.
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As well as those conflated with them, particularly trans women and transfeminine people.
Public womanhood can constitute not just sex workers and trans women but all feminized genders further marginalized by houselessness, race, class, ability, HIV status, citizenship, indigeneity, and more.
Ed.: This line formerly read: “As the punchline it’s come to be, Lex encapsulates the limitations imposed on those of us who can’t access the freedom of public sex in the same way that cis men who identify themselves (or more crucially, are identified) as queer.” And I don’t know how that got past the editor (yours truly) because that’s not what I meant. Written like this, it makes it seem like I’m saying that men who are read as queer have the easiest time cruising, when I don’t think that’s true at all. The people who are safest seeking or having gay sex are straight—obviously. See my update above.
So it turns out idk how things work and this PDF is paywalled. While I figure that out, someone sent me an abstract to an article about non-binary cruising that is, regrettably, paywalled.
David Davis