Cruising the Dead River

David Wojnarowicz and New York's Ruined Waterfront

Fiona Anderson

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780226603896
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

In the 1970s, Manhattan's west side waterfront was a forgotten zone of abandoned warehouses and piers. Though many saw only blight, the derelict neighborhood was alive with queer people forging new intimacies through cruising. Alongside the piers' sexual and social worlds, artists produced work attesting to the radical transformations taking place in New York. Artist and writer David Wojnarowicz was right in the heart of it, documenting his experiences in journal entries, poems, photographs, films, and large-scale, site-specific projects. In Cruising the Dead River, Fiona Anderson draws on Wojnarowicz's work to explore the key role the abandoned landscape played in this explosion of queer culture. Anderson examines how the riverfront's ruined buildings assumed a powerful erotic role and gave the area a distinct identity. By telling the story of the piers as gentrification swept New York and before the AIDS crisis, Anderson unearths the buried histories of violence, regeneration, and LGBTQ activism that developed in and around the cruising scene.

1

Nostalgia for the Mud: Cruising in Ruins

Detailed descriptions of sex at the West Side piers appear in David Wojnarowicz’s personal journals from the summer of 1977. Walking “through Soho and over to Christopher Street” that September, he found himself in the dilapidated districts he had spent time in as a hustling teenager, by “the big pier past the old truck lines and the Silver Dollar Café/Restaurant.”1 There, he wrote, “away from the blatant exhibitionist energies of the NYC music scenes gay scenes,” he felt “uncontrollably sane.”2 In journal entries, poetry, memoir essays, photographs, short films, and drawings, he depicted the derelict piers of the pre–HIV/AIDS era as busy “sexual hunting grounds,” and the ruined waterfront as a liminal space “as far away from civilization as I could walk.”3 In an interview with the curator Barry Blinderman in 1990, years after many of the dilapidated structures had been torn down, Wojnarowicz recalled the pull of these “extraordinary warehouses where a lot of sexual activity occurred, where a lot of homosexual men would roam the hundreds of rooms of those abandoned shipping structures and engage in open sex.”4 The gargantuan buildings were, he wrote,

like some kind of museum with vast numbers of tourists rolling in off the streets in crowds—gliding through the hallways and rooms, picking their way over trash and fire charred heaps. Upstairs they filled every room, half the ceiling fallen in and they stopped carefully around charred beams and rusted metal and glass—a guy here or there with shorts down around ankles playing with his hard cock or getting fucked by someone else.5

In Wojnarowicz’s writing from the late 1970s, as in that of Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, and John Rechy, the decaying form and dangerous character of the warehouses and piers assume an erotic role in the cruising that takes place there. The ruined piers are rendered in fleshy, bodily terms. John Rechy, in the opening chapter of his novel Rushes (1979), wrote of “haunted male figures lurk[ing] for nightsex in the burnt-out rooms, among the rubble of cinder, wood, clawing cans, broken metal pipes, tangled wire like dry veins.”6 Decay was both mourned and celebrated, in what Holleran characterized as a “nostalgia for the mud.”7 There were “slight traces” in the warehouses, Wojnarowicz observed, of “déja-vu, filled with old senses of desire,” with erotic remnants of the harbor’s maritime history.8 In a journal entry from June 1979 he wrote of “the semblance of memory and the associations” invoked as he cruised the West Side piers, reminded “of oceans, of sailors, of distant ports and the discreet sense of self among them, unknown and coasting.”9

In The Power of Place, Dolores Hayden argues for a history of place focused on the “traces of time embedded in the urban landscape in every city,” for they “offer opportunities for reconnecting fragments of the American urban story.” The recording of history in the urban context, she asserts, should be a collaborative, multitemporal process that “engages social, historical, and aesthetic imagination to locate where narratives of cultural history” are “embedded in the historic urban landscape.”10

In a similar way, “restless walks” through Manhattan to the West Side piers left Wojnarowicz “filled with coasting images of sights and sounds . . . like some secret earphone connecting [him] to the creakings of the living city” and the erotic traces “embedded” therein.11 The waterfront was filled with traces of his own youthful experiences as a street hustler, as well as, in more general terms, its earlier sexual appropriations by sailors and stevedores when New York’s harbor was still an active port. In a later essay, “Losing the Form in Darkness,” he wrote of the industrial paraphernalia that littered the warehouses: “paper from old shipping lines scattered all around like bomb blasts among wrecked piece of furniture; three-legged desks, a naugahyde couch of mint-green turned upside down.” In the same essay, he reflected on “the sense of age” in this “familiar place”:

The streets were familiar more because of the faraway past than the recent past—streets that I walked in those odd times when in the company of deaf mutes and times square pederasts. These streets are seen through the same eyes but each time with periods of time separating it: each time belonging to yet an older boy until the body smooths out and lines are etched until it is a young man recalling the movements of a complicated past.12

Wojnarowicz’s nostalgic cruising sensibility, his sense of these “traces” of cruising pasts rooted in the derelict warehouses of the waterfront, of a “secret earphone,” offers a point of entry into an alternate history of Manhattan’s queer fringes and its erotic former uses that, through his conflation of the waterfront’s erotic pasts and present, reflects the complex, multilayered relations between the cruising cultures of the trucks, the bathhouses, the piers, and the men who cruised there.

In Backward Glances, Mark Turner traces a history of urban cruising that begins with the Industrial Revolution and the development of the modern metropolis in the mid- to late nineteenth century. Cruising in both New York and London was and is, he writes, “an act of mutual recognition amid the otherwise alienating effects of the anonymous crowd.” It is, he argues, “a practice that exploits the fluidity and multiplicity of the modern city to its advantage,” a “process of counter movement” that “necessarily resists totalizing ways” of narrating the temporal and spatial character of cruising. Cruising is, Turner emphasizes, “the stuff of fleeting, ephemeral moments not intended to be captured.”13 Tim Dean offers a similar account in Unlimited Intimacy, his book on contemporary barebacking cultures. “Since cruising is a practice of the ephemeral and the contingent,” Dean argues, echoing Charles Baudelaire’s paradigmatic definition of the experience of modernity, and Turner’s evocation of it in Backward Glances, “it is all the more remarkable that it has given rise to such a voluminous archive.”14

Cruising, then, even as it exploits urban anonymity and is structurally dependent on movement and ephemerality, has a queer historical orientation that is both imaginative and material, as is perceptible in the erotic use of ruined buildings along the Manhattan waterfront in the late 1970s. In this chapter, focusing on Wojnarowicz’s early written work and his sense of the waterfront as an imaginative space, embedded with vestiges of its erotic uses, I trace a material history of the waterfront area as a cruising ground, from historic bathhouses and empty trucks in the 1960s to warehouses and piers in the 1970s, rooting through archival ephemera and photographic traces of rusted metal and rotting wood.

From the trucks to the baths

In Manhattan in the early 1960s, underneath the elevated West Side Highway, commercial haulage vehicles were frequently parked overnight, waiting to load or unload goods at the warehouses on the nearby waterfront. In and between the trucks, men cruised for anonymous sex with other men. Since drivers routinely left the trucks “unattended, with the backs unlocked,” it was notoriously difficult for police to arrest cruisers on grounds of trespassing.15 Samuel Delany, in The Motion of Light in Water (1988), his memoir of 1960s West Village life as a black, queer writer (during the early years of his marriage to the poet Marilyn Hacker), describes moving through a labyrinthine landscape of “waist-high tires,” the parked trucks forming “van-walled alleys” in the darkness.16 The labyrinth, as Ira Tattelman has observed, was a common spatial trope in urban areas appropriated for cruising during the 1960s, sites that offered means of evading exposure, arrest, and homophobic violence. “To participate in sex that was prohibited in both private and public spaces,” he wrote,

gay men found out-of-the-way places in which to engage in sexual relations. Wooded parks, often called meat racks, became a web of passageways and meeting rooms. . . . Darkened alleys and dead-ends were disrupted by the watchful eyes of seemingly aloof but ultimately eager partners.17

The trucks beneath the highway became renowned as “a place to go at night for instant sex.” Delany remembers “between thirty-five and a hundred fifty (on weekends) men . . . slipping through and between and out of the trailers, some to watch, but most to participate in, numberless silent sexual acts.” On his first visit, he “stayed for six hours” and “had sex seven or eight times.”18 He describes “a hugely ordered, highly social, attentive, silent . . . community” of men of between the trucks, where, at times, a state of what he terms “libidinal saturation” would be achieved:

cock passed from mouth to mouth to hand to ass to mouth without ever breaking contact with other flesh for more than seconds; mouth, hand, ass, passed over whatever you held out to them, sans interstice.19

Delany’s account suggests a diverse community, in terms of class, age, and race. During one predawn visit, he notices “a tall black guy, in jeans and a red T-shirt, about thirty, whom I’d seen there every night I’d ever come,” then makes it with slightly balding “white guy in his late twenties, early thirties” in “workman’s greens, short sleeves rolled up over muscular arms,” who “looked like a driver from one of the trucks,” and then “a black guy who’d stepped up to watch us.” Exhausted, the men leave the truck as “the sky was getting light”; the nighttime river, he writes, “had taken a blue glaze” and “the water shook and shimmered with the cobalt reflection.”20

The expansion of the cruising scene at the trucks coincided with “a massive campaign of police harassment against homosexuals” across Manhattan under Mayor Robert Wagner, which peaked in 1963 “as the city began a concerted drive to make homosexuals invisible in time for the 1964–1965 World’s Fair.”21 This echoed an earlier crackdown, ordered by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia in preparation for the 1939 world’s fair. But, as Burton Peretti has observed, while police then made a number of highly public arrests of “transvestites” and closed down numerous popular and publicly visible gay venues, “the city raised little objection . . . when gangsters began to underwrite a new network of clandestine and unpretentious gay bars.”22 These bars, throughout Greenwich Village and Harlem, provided Mafiosi a means to evade tax and sell contraband liquor after the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment in late 1933 brought Prohibition to an end. The institutional homophobia of the State Liquor Authority (SLA), the post-Prohibition agency “authorized to issue liquor licenses and . . . expected to revoke the licenses of establishments that served homosexuals and other groups considered disreputable, such as prostitutes and gamblers,” bolstered the association, forcing bar owners to “resort to police payoffs and protection from organized crime to avoid the common fate of license revocation.”23 In their salacious midcentury city guide New York: Confidential!, Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer note matter-of-factly that “all fairy night clubs and gathering places are illegal, and operate only through pay-offs to the authorities. They are organized into a national circuit, controlled by the Mafia.”24 An increase in police raids on gay bars in Greenwich Village in the mid- to late 1960s was accompanied by increased Mafia involvement in the area’s nightlife. In 1966 younger members of the Genovese family, which allegedly controlled much of the New Jersey shore as Manhattan port activity declined in the 1950s, “put up $3,500 to reopen the Stonewall [Inn] as a gay club,” running it successfully without a liquor license.25

In the years preceding the June 1969 riots at the Stonewall Inn, where protests erupted after a routine police raid, as “steady progress on court rulings . . . continually ate away at the SLA’s ability to revoke or withhold liquor licences from gay bars,” waterfront cruising at the trucks continued.26 As its visibility along the thoroughfares by the river increased by the late 1960s, “so did harassment and violence” by representatives of other city authorities, including the Transit Police.27 The Gay Liberation Front (GLF), founded in New York in 1969, began handing out flyers at the trucks, encou...