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  • 7 / Sincere Fun, 2024
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    Queer Stories, Off-Grid

    Hamish Lonergan

    I went to Venice over Summer to escape the grids of Zurich and Zoom, which seemed to close-in as I retraced the same tidy streets, week after week. I was there through the confluence of another two, equally-claustrophobic grids. A perpetually tanned, muscled boy from Grindr, who I never met but still followed on Instagram, […]

    I went to Venice over Summer to escape the grids of Zurich and Zoom, which seemed to close-in as I retraced the same tidy streets, week after week. I was there through the confluence of another two, equally-claustrophobic grids. A perpetually tanned, muscled boy from Grindr, who I never met but still followed on Instagram, had visited a few weeks earlier, posting videos from a water taxi to the Hotel Cipriani. Even his less glamorous photos showed a city emptier than before cruise ships started docking in earnest in the 1980s. It seemed the perfect time to go. I deleted Grindr on the train there. 

    Day 1 

    By the time I disembarked, I saw thousands of others had the same idea. I arrived on the Festa del Redentore when, once a year, a string of pontoons joins Guidecca to the main island. Passing the crowds queued in front of Palladio’s church, I turned into Fondamenta Rio Croce instead, on a different pilgrimage. 

    About half-way down—up a flight of stairs flanked by squat columns, across a timber bridge— is a portal to the Garden of Eden, Venice’s most storied cruising ground.1 The garden was unlocked for the unofficial and self-funded ‘Cruising Pavilion’, the only queer ‘freespace’ at the 2018 Architecture Biennale.2 Hardly the first time that architectural discourse has neglected these stories. 

    A flurry of writing on COVID-19 reveled in comparisons to Spanish flu and tuberculosis, overlooking the urban effects of AIDS: the other global pandemic of our lifetime.3 In the name of public sanitation, health authorities cleansed cities of the bars and bathhouses— with their darkroom mazes—that helped men connect, not just hook-up.4 Take Samuel Delany’s autobiographical Times Square Blue, Times Square Red, evoking the queer ecosystem that flourished where Broadway slices open the Manhattan grid.5 By the time it was published in 1999, the institutions that anchored Delany’s intoxicating world had already succumbed to deliberate gentrification in the wake of AIDS. Families of tourists replacing queers ducking into porn theatres, or cruising for blowjobs in bookstores. 

    I thought cruising—this literacy of nods and looks, walks and slight gestures—was lost to me. I knew the theory, from the novels of Alan Hollinghurst or Aaron Betsky’s pioneering Queer Space (1997), but nothing in practice. I am, after all, part of a generation who never had to risk public indecency to get off. Already weakened by HIV transmission, physical cruising was crushed by apps that took sex off-street and out of the club, and turned it into a campy anachronism. 

    Peering along the canal, I looked for other men loitering in doorways in the dark. There is no sign today of what literary scholar Janet Todd called, primly, ‘a none-too-discreet extension of gay Venice, where aesthetes came to mingle and pick each other up.’6 If I did see someone in the shadows, I am not even sure what I would have done. With the garden closed, where would we go? 

    Indiscreet ‘aesthetes’ regularly feature in accounts of a decadent, decaying and diseased Venice. Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel-winning poet, described a party, a flaking Palazzo, and ‘a bunch of giggling, agile, homosexual youths…presided over by a rather distraught and spiteful middle-aged queen.’7 Sociologist Richard Sennet implied that flagrant 15th Century gays contributed to a syphilis epidemic and spurred the moral panic that created the Jewish Ghetto, with their ‘flourishing homosexual culture devoted to cross-dressing, young men lounging in gondolas on the canals wearing nothing but women’s jewels.’8 It is a seductive vision of a permissive city, yet records at the time show men burned alive in Piazza San Marco for same-sex relations.9 

    With outsider voices banished from traditional archives, queer histories have often relied on such fragments. Ephemeral practices and secret identities left little mark on the city, except when they erupted into public scandal and punishment. Their stories need assembly, piece by piece, from traces in criminal and medical records, the implicit in fiction and autobiographies, even accounts as self-indulgent as my summer holiday. 

    The poet Raymond Laurent supposedly declared his love for Langhorn Whistler in the Garden of Eden before, unrequited, he shot himself.10 But the story is altogether more subdued in Jean Cocteau’s autobiographic poem Souvenir d’un soir d’automne au jardin Eaden (1909).11 Cocteau, Laurent and their friends languish in the garden; melancholy without knowing why, they misunderstand Laurent’s hints at premeditated suicide. A euphemistic obituary reads: ‘His life…was destroyed by a very lofty, a very rare ideal, that of the Other Love’.12 In these snippets there seems something closer to reality, less impetuous melodrama, just a young man tormented by love in a time when that love appeared impossible. 

    I imagine the ritual. 21-year-old Laurent unbolts the garden’s gate from inside. Is he beautiful? Our eyes meet in the gloom, I follow him into the densest part of the garden, before I realise: I would never be there. I would never have taken the risk. The freedom of cruising was— still is—shadowed by police patrols.13 

    All this time, cruising was never the only way for queer bodies to touch. In the film Keep the Lights On (2012), Erik and Paul first speak in 1998 on a hotline—’No, I’m more of a top. What about you?’—sex first, relationship later, not so different from the apps today. In Maupin’s More Tales of the City (1980), Michael Tolliver vows to meet someone nice away from San Francisco’s bars. Reading it now, I thought: meeting anywhere in person sounds so romantic. Nostalgia like this is an infinite regression. Does every queer generation think it was more real for the last? 

    Day 2 

    The next day, I picked my way from a modest hotel near Campo San Tomà to the Collezione Peggy Guggenheim. More than once, I pushed past an ambling couple only to rush back the same way, an alley that seemed right running into a canal instead. There is a certain logic to most cities, of streets forming crossroads, meaning one wrong turn can be fixed at the next. Everyone gets lost here, even Brodsky. Knowing the cliché is not enough to avoid it. 

    For critic Rosalind Krauss, the grid’s rejection of nature was the principle, repeated motif of Modernism. ‘Flattened, geometricized, ordered, it is antinatural, antimimetic, antireal. It is what art looks like when it turns its back on nature.’14 This is why Venice, a city of islands in a lagoon, so firmly rejects the street grid. Its writhing tartan of alleys and waterways could never turn its back on the water, even if it tried. 

    At the end of Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance (1978), queers burst onto Manhattan’s grid in protest. For most of the novel, they have gossiped or danced in dresses and jockstraps on the fringes of the city, where the avenues disintegrate into parks and piers. If you have ever been called a faggot for dressing loudly, you will know that eyes on wide streets can make an everyday panopticon. Here, for the first time, they want to be seen. For the glares from apartment windows and passers-by—‘Fucking queers, they should be arrested!’ shouts one woman—to bear witness to their liberation. 

    We queue to get inside the Guggenheim, queuing again at each room, its capacity marked on the threshold. Signs tell us to keep a metre and a half distance, and I can hear, almost feel, when someone breaches it. To get out of the way, I push up to Mondrian’s Composition No. 1 with Grey and Red (1938/39). This close, I worry my breath will fog the glass. The black grid recedes, and all I can see are cracks across its grey planes of paint. 

    The cracks form circles and curves, mountains and valleys, with no respect for abstraction and Neo-Plastic theory. In another of his paintings, ‘yellow paint has cracked over time…red paint oozing through the cracks.’15 Conservationist Ana Martins wrote that the explanation is rational—his technique of overlaying and retouching coats is especially susceptible to cracking—but in the room, in those cracks, I thought of nature clawing its way out of the grid, seeping up like acqua alta. 

    When my eyes refocus, I see a man standing next to me. His glasses flash in the corner of my vision, a waft of shaving cream. His hand brushes mine. ‘Sorry’, I mumble, not for the touch but for standing there, engrossed, too long, I retreat to the next room, the line dissipated. 

    Nothing strikes me the same way. I move from one work to another, a glance long enough to see it does little for me, until I smell the man again. This time I turn. I take in linen pants, a singlet, black hair falling on bare shoulders, a moustache, before I realise, he is looking at me too. 

    ‘This is good, don’t you think?’ 

    No, I think, but say ‘Yeah, really interesting.’ 

    He touches my back, turns me gently, his hand hot through my shirt. ‘But not as good as that one.’ 

    We talk a little more about the art, we hold each other’s gaze, until he says ‘I’m going to the bathroom,’ and I follow him in. Cruising is a kind of spatial practice. Without the hyperawareness of COVID-19, I wonder how often I have been cruised and just never noticed. 

    After, we drifted back to his apartment, the route twisting like the chase in Death in Venice. Aschenbach trails Tadzio and his family, lurking behind porticos and on the other side of bridges, the family mostly oblivious, until ‘through the haze…the beautiful boy would turn his head, seek him out, and sight him.’16 His feverish infatuation is not the effect of the Sirocco winds or Cholera. It is a symptom of Venice itself. This game of meaningful looks, the half-hidden hunt—cruising—was enabled by the very qualities that make it so easy to get lost here. The city’s fitful paths and sightlines are not so different from a bathhouse darkroom. 

    Over canals and under buildings, no one noticed we were holding hands. This minor gesture between men that can still draw glances in much bigger cities. It was surprising, our off-grid anonymity.

     

     1 Named after English couple Caroline and Frederick Eden, who created the garden in 1884.
     2 Pierre-Alexandre Mateos, Charles Teyssou, Rasmus Myrup and Octave Perrault, Cruising Pavilion, 24 May 2018,
    3 For an especially callous example of this omission, see Eleanor Jolliffe, ‘A short history of epidemics and their impact on the built environment,’ Building Design, 15 April, 2020, https://www. bdonline.co.uk/opinion/a-short-history-of-epidemics-and-their-impact-on-the-built-environment/5105528. article.
    4 For one instance of these closures, see Joyce Purnick, “City Closes Bar Frequented By Homosexuals, Citing Sexual Activity Linked To Aids,” The New York Times, Nov. 8, 1985.
    5 Delany depicts a broad cross-section of society, including straight-identifying men who had sex with other men. Samuel R Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York: New York University Press, 1999). Barett also writes of the symbolic ‘queerness’ of Broadway’s subversive interruption of the grid: Annie Barrett, “Noncon Form,” Log, no. 41 (2017): 141-44.
    6 Janet Todd, ‘Requiem for a Garden of Eden,’ Twenty Minutes, BBC Radio 3 (27 November 2009), https:// www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/ b00nyw61
    7 Joseph Brodsky, Watermark: An essay on Venice (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1992), 50.
    8 Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone : The Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York (N.Y.): Norton, 1996), 223.
    9 Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 109-145.
    10 For versions of the incident see Nikolai Endres, “Emily Eells (ed. and tr.), Two Tombeaux to Oscar Wilde: Jean Cocteau’s Le Portrait surnaturel de Dorian Gray and Raymond Laurent’s Essay on Wildean Aesthetics,” Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, no. 121 (2012): 265- 268; Todd, ‘Requiem for a Garden of Eden.’
    11 Cocteau returned repeatedly to Laurent’s suicide in his work, see Claude Arnaud et al., Jean Cocteau : A Life (New Heven; London: Yale University Press, 2016).
    12 Translation in Horst Schroeder, “‘Suicide of Vivian Wilde,’” The Wildean, no. 30 (December 5, 2007): 45–51.
    13 Reflecting on his own cruising adventures on the Venetian Lido, queer theorist Shaka McGlotten writes that ‘gay identity was shaped by urban spaces and by persecution, by Parisian vice squads cracking down on the sodomites sodomizing in the public toilets.’ Shaka McGlotten, ‘Lessons in Cruising,’ The Avery Review 29 (February 2018), https://averyreview. com/issues/29/lessons-in-cruising.
    14 Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” October 9 (1979): 51–64.
    15 Ana Martins et al., “Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie: Non Invasive Analysis Using Macro X-Ray Fluorescence Mapping (MA-XRF) and Multivariate Curve Resolution-Alternating Least Square (MCR-ALS),” Heritage Science 4, no. 22 (2016).
    16 Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, trans. David Luke (London: Vintage, 2002), 82.

     

    Hamish Lonergan is an architect, writer and doctoral student at the gta Institute at ETH Zurich. His research explores the role of tacit knowledge in architectural education. Previous writing—on issues of criticism, taste, and authority in architectural culture—has appeared in journals including Footprint, Inflection and OASE. Before joining the gta, he co-curated the exhibition Bathroom Gossip (Brisbane, 2019) and worked worked at COX Architecture on projects including significant Indigenous cultural facilities on Minjerribah (Stradbroke Island).

     

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