Can Cruising Survive Influencers?
It was a balmy July day and Joseph had dick on the brain. The 25-year-old Brooklyn barista had agreed to walk a friend’s dog in Washington Square Park, so he figured that while he was in Manhattan he’d check in on one of his favorite cruising spots: a men’s restroom at Penn Station. Those in the know know this bathroom; Joseph (his middle name) estimates he’d cruised for sex there about eight times before. He likes that among the fresh faces he will often see the same old queens catching up in their de facto third space. Sure, he could open Grindr or Scruff to find a hookup, but then he’ll get picky and end up scrolling endlessly. Cruising feels more authentic, more real. It’s a ritual. A hunt.
In the early hours of the afternoon, he’d expected the restroom to be livelier. (Rush hour can bring too many commuters seeking to use the bathroom for its intended purpose.) But there was one guy standing at a urinal: a handsome Latino man with dark hair and eyes, and big, beefy arms protruding from his orange high-visability safety vest. This man nodded to Joseph as he entered, which he took as a sign to install himself at the adjacent urinal. The construction worker appeared to be rubbing himself and smiling, Joseph recalled. “He was looking at me. He was trying to peek over. He was doing it. He seemed seasoned at this,” Joseph said. “He was giving an Oscar-winning performance.”
That performance ended when Joseph, thinking he’d met a fellow traveler, flashed the guy his penis. “We got one,” the undercover Amtrak police officer immediately said into a radio microphone hidden in his collar. Stunned and embarrassed, Joseph barely had time to put his penis away before he was handcuffed and marched through the station—his fly still unbuttoned—to a holding room, where he spent the next few hours. One other man was already there, looking humiliated and sad. Two more were eventually brought in as part of the same sting operation: one who was adamant he’d just been in the bathroom to pee and another man in his 20s who spoke only Spanish. Joseph then watched as this man, freaking out, was eventually handed over to immigration agents.
Joseph is among almost 200 people who have been arrested since June 1 as part of a crackdown on cruising in the Penn Station restroom, an Amtrak spokesperson told me. At least 20 of these men were immigrants transferred to ICE custody. While other mass public indecency arrests were made in Indiana, Arizona, and Illinois during the same period, the Penn Station operation was unique in its scale and length. Rep. Jerry Nadler and other outraged lawmakers dubbed it a “hostile arrest campaign reminiscent of anti-LGBTQ policing from the Stonewall era.”
There is a major difference, though, between that era and now: the once-secret world of cruising has never been more out in the open. As Amtrak police were arresting men, nearby cinemas were screening Plainclothes, a movie in which Tom Blyth portrays an undercover New York cop who patrols bathrooms and falls for one of his targets, played by Russell Tovey. When thousands gathered in a Clinton Hill warehouse during Pride Month for the “Twinks vs. Dolls” event, they did so amid ample signage and merchandise from co-sponsor, Sniffies, the map-based cruising app. Mainstream media stories about cruising and orgies have outraged some gay men who say that their safe spaces have been exposed.
But cruising’s real “outing” has occurred on social media, where a growing cottage industry of men are vying to become the Rick Steves of cruising. Guys on TikTok or Instagram will now teach you how to cruise at your gym or how to avoid getting caught in the steamroom. You can learn the best ways to pick up guys in a Barnes & Noble (Step One: “Pick a book you’re not actually reading”) or at your Lowes hardware store. (Step One: “Dress like you know your way around wood.”) You can see videos of men following each other among trees in public parks or tapping their feet in bathroom stalls in the manner of Larry Craig. One creator named Connor (who did not respond to requests for comment) has amassed over 375,000 followers over various accounts with a seemingly endless stream of videos in which he boasts graphically about cruising in airport bathrooms, waterparks, or at his local Macy’s. On X, where content guidelines are much freer, adult performers with hundreds of thousands of followers share explicit videos of themselves having sex with blurry-faced strangers in what appear to be department store changing rooms.
“I’m a teacher by nature and so I thought, Hey, cruising has been around forever. It’s part of our history. Why not teach on it?” said Chandler (his last name), a 34-year-old adult creator who posts instructional guides or suggestive stories themed to what he calls “CruiseTok.” He puts his openness on social media down to a desire for authenticity. “I think in today’s world, it’s more acceptable to be who you are. If that means showing your expression or passion, then yeah!”
But amid a resurgent right-wing that has sought to wind back LGBTQ rights, all this openness has left some, including Joseph, uncomfortable or even worried about what they see as unwanted attention. “I think calling attention to it and trying to get your social media clout from it is annoying,” he said. “The whole point—the whole, historical purpose of cruising was to be super low-key and discreet.” While information about cruising has always been available for people who wanted to seek it out, it’s now being entrusted to algorithms that can push it on people who aren’t, including, potentially, the authorities. All this has left some men wondering whether certain things should still be gate-kept.
“A lot of these much younger people that are 22 and excited about this activity, their natural inclination is just supposed to post it online. There’s no way to control that fire,” said Leo Herrera, an artist and author who self-published a guide to cruising last year. He likened cruising to manning a grill: You need some exposure to act as oxygen to get the fire going, but you want to be able to control it. In the past, cruising might have been fueled by scribbles on bathroom doors or gay hotlines or newspapers, but now it’s an algorithm. “It supercharges it to a level where it just kind of blows up in our face,” Herrera said. “How do we celebrate our sexuality while protecting it?”
Cruising is as old as New York City itself—as old as the very idea of cities to begin with. In his book Cruising: An Intimate History of A Radical Pastime, Alex Espinoza traces cruising back to the vice squads in Renaissance Florence, the first recorded glory hole in a 1707 London “bog house,” and the 18th-century Parisians cruising for sex in the city’s first public park, the Tuileries Garden. Cruising once functioned as the only way that same-sex attracted men could find one another. More than a century ago, newcomers who weren’t yet privy to the New York’s underground speakeasies were cruising Riverside Park and elsewhere for hook-ups that could also turn into friendships or even romances, per George Chauncey’s seminal book Gay New York. Pockets of Central Park—including, of course, the isolated and woody grove of The Ramble—were so infamous for cruising that they earned nicknames like the Fruited Plain, Vaseline Alley, or Bitches’ Walk. Police were never far away. By the 1920s and 30s, an average of 650 men were being convicted each year in Manhattan alone of the misdemeanor crime of “degeneracy.” A 17-year-old Harvey Milk was among a group of shirtless men detained in one such sweep of the park in 1947.
The internet transformed cruising, much as it did everything else. Message boards for like-minded men evolved into websites like Squirt.org, a Canadian site founded in 1999 where users can create profiles and rate cruising spots. In the late aughts, smartphone apps like Grindr and Scruff allowed men to discover one another based on their geographic proximity. In 2018, Sniffies finally merged these concepts, enabling users—even anonymous ones—to see a “real-time sexual map” of their neighborhood, in the words of the New Yorker. To open Sniffies, which is typically used in a browser after its removal from Apple’s App Store for content violations, is to see a litany of nearby men with their genitals as profile pictures organizing encounters—sometimes singles, sometimes groups, sometimes private, sometimes public—or discussing particular hotspots, from gyms to the Penn Station restroom.
Yet despite all this access to dick-on-demand, old-fashioned cruising has endured. “It’s the thrill of the chase,” Espinoza, the cruising historian, told me. He described cruising as satisfying an almost primal demand both for sex and the forbidden: “It’s the allure of doing something in public that’s considered by many to be taboo and participating in an act that is seen as sort of rebellious. I think a lot of men get off on that.” Posting openly about cruising on social media may thus play into this desire to break the taboo, Espinoza speculated, or it might just be part of the Instagram urge to document everything and achieve influencer status.
The cruising videos now blanketing social media tend to fall into four main categories: advice or tips, boastful anecdotes, clips that tease the act of cruising (i.e. skulking through a hardware store), and actual sex. In almost all of these, though, the videos’ main function is to pique viewer curiosity and drive engagement to the creators’ OnlyFans or other subscription sites where they might see longer videos for a price. In other words, they’re ads—and should be viewed with suspicion accordingly. One such creator, a 36-year-old erotic masseuse outside D.C. who asked that I only refer to him by his handle Bliss Bodywork, told me his videos flirting with men in steam rooms, nature trails, or hardware stores typically feature his consenting clients and function as roleplay fantasy content. More explicit ones he posts to X might mix set-up clips filmed in an actual department store with sex scenes later filmed in private spaces, he said. “On social media, people love to pretend everything’s real,” Bodywork said. “I just really try hard to make it seem like a real hidden cam, like it’s spontaneous. I put a lot of effort into making sure I show certain set-up clips just to give the illusion.”
Jonah Wheeler, a 37-year-old adult entertainer in Brooklyn who has made educational Instagram Reels about cruising, told me he objected to videos filmed in risky public areas or that showed people who clearly did not consent to being filmed. He recalled one such video showing a performer semi-discreetly jerking off another man in a park as members of the public walked by. “I’m upset that other people are doing it because it’s bad for cruising,” Wheeler said. “It potentially gets us communally in legal trouble. It casts pornographic performers and general sluts in a bad light. I think it’s ultimately harmful for us as a community to behave irresponsibly around this.”
Instead, Wheeler said he tries to consider how to post about cruising in a responsible manner. He doesn’t, for example, name any specific locations and stresses concepts of consent and discretion. “Cruising is only viable if the people who don’t want to see it never see it,” he says in one video. Herrera, the author of the self-published guide, also said he is working on updated advice about how he posts online in ways that promote what he called “ethical cruising.” This includes Herrera asking himself whether he is “encouraging others to post irresponsibly” or if he is “teaching discretion by example.”
Anyone posting about their cruising adventures online should be aware that they are engaging in legally risky behavior, said Jared Trujillo, an assistant professor at the CUNY School of Law and former defense attorney for the Legal Aid Society. “The defense attorney in me is always just like, Maybe don’t admit to doing things that are not legal online? There’s always that little bit of cringe in me,” he said. But Trujillo stressed he really blamed police for what he called their “overuse of surveillance” to crackdown on cruising. During the Penn Station operation in September, Trujillo said he was contacted by a dozen of the arrested men after he put out a video warning about the crackdown and advising anyone ensnared not to speak to authorities without an attorney. He criticized Amtrak Police for what he described as entrapping men who, unlike Joseph, were just trying to pee and said that he suspected, but could not prove, their intention was to publicly shame the men or to seek out immigrants.
Trujillo said he had recently spoken with the partner of one asylee who was arrested in the restroom and who remains in immigration custody for simply seeking to urinate. “But even if it were for cruising, should deportation be the remedy? It all seems incredibly Orwellian,” Trujillo said. (In a statement, an Amtrak Police spokesperson said the department employed “effective crime prevention strategies through ethical practices” and that heightened patrols had led to a significant decline in the number of “disruptive activity” incidents. The department “does not target or profile specific populations as part of its law enforcement efforts,” the spokesperson said.)
In 2022, Port Authority police agreed to cease plainclothes bathroom stings as part of a settlement in a class action lawsuit brought by men who said they were wrongfully arrested and discriminated against for their actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender expression. That had followed successful lawsuits brought by other men. But Amtrak Police are a federal unit and have made no such pledge. Still, Jennvine Wong with the Legal Aid Society said her colleagues were discussing whether to file a lawsuit on behalf of the dozens and dozens of men they represented who were arrested at Penn Station this summer. Wong questioned the purpose of the entire police operation, however, given she was not aware of any of the cases having made it to trial. The vast majority were either dismissed entirely or resolved through what’s known as an adjournment in contemplation of dismissal, which can involve community service or participation in some sort of diversion program.
That’s what happened to Joseph when he showed up to the Midtown Community Court in August after receiving his summons for public lewdness. His assigned attorney told him the judge didn’t even want to hear the case. Instead, his charge would be dismissed and his arrest record sealed if he participated in an hour-long class that day which involved watching a video on stress management, which he happily did.
Despite his brush with the law, Joseph said he hasn’t been put off cruising. He just hopes that people online cool it with the videos for fear of drawing “negative and foolish” attention. Still, he had one piece of praise for the Amtrak Police; They were smart, he said, for baiting him with an officer who was hot: “The cops did put out their trade that day.”
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