It’s difficult to pinpoint the origins of cruising. While the term was used by men seeking casual encounters with other men in the parks and streets of New York City as early as the 1920s, historical records show the practice is much older. Cruising has existed for as long as anyone outside the dominant sex and gender systems has sought sexual encounters outside of sanctioned norms. This book offers a serious exploration of queer sex and sex cultures, exploring cruising as a mode of thinking with the body and communicating through sexuality.  

A creative dialogue between a queer artist and a queer academic reminiscing about and thinking with their cruising experiences, Crossings takes queer sex practices and cultures seriously as ways of knowing and world-making. The result is an erotic hybrid form hovering between scholarship and avant-garde experimentation, between critical manifesto and sex memoir. Here, the voices of each author, merged together in one, invite the reader to inhabit the erotic spacetime between self and other, the familiar and the strange, desire and pleasure, climax and release. That is, the spaces and temporalities of cruising itself.

On July 11, 1992, eighteen years after the Carnation Revolution ended the fascist dictatorship in Portugal, the Portuguese public broadcaster ran a news story about the launch of the first ever gay magazine to reach Portuguese newsstands, one that was written in Portuguese despite still bearing the title of its parent publication, Gaie France. Five years earlier, on July 13, 1987, however, a petition had been signed at the Homosexual Summer University of Marseille denouncing Gaie France’s fascist politics. 

In this article we offer a critical picture of Gaie France’s peculiar place in the landscape of late 20th-century homosexual media in Europe. We show how the magazine advocated a complex ideology that mixed paganism, pederasty, and far-right ideology, trying to spearhead a radical conservative European homosexual movement while having to deal with the view of homosexuality as degeneracy shared by the main ideologues of the European far-right. Rejected by political actors both in the organized homosexual movement and in the “New Right,” Gaie France forged a peculiar ideological path that can help us gain a more nuanced understanding of both the European homosexual movement and of Europe itself at the turn of the new millennium.

 The roundtable, ‘Shaping Pleasure, Shifting Boundaries: A Roundtable on the Future of Porn Studies,’ took place in June 2024 via Zoom and was recorded, transcribed and then edited to cut digressions and repetitions for publication. The roundtable was intended to examine the transformative trajectory of porn studies over the last decade. With a focus on technological innovations, ethical challenges, and the labour dynamics reshaping the field, the following discussion explores how intersectionality and diverse methodologies have broadened perspectives within porn studies. Our participants also talked about the rise of platforms like OnlyFans, the impact of archival gaps, and the continuing critical tension between pleasure and danger in academic and cultural narratives. Their conversation underscores the necessity of rethinking traditional paradigms while advocating for inclusivity and the preservation of pornographic histories as part of broader cultural heritage. This conversation sets the stage for envisioning the discipline's future as it navigates a rapidly evolving sociopolitical and technological landscape.

As the year 2020 turned, the virus and viral contagion started, once again, dominating public discourse in Europe. In the context of World Health Organisation’s formal naming COVID-19 a Public Health Emergency of International Concern in January that year,¹ not only did ‘coronavirus’ enter our everyday language, but so did related terms such as ‘pandemic’, ‘social distancing’, ‘lockdown’, ‘self-isolate’, or ‘superspreader’ make it to the unprecedented Oxford Languages Word of the Year report for that year.

When, in 2019, I started planning a conference that would take place in September 2020 at the University of Exeter, my aim was to bring together a wide variety of scholars to reflect on the viral modes of contemporary masculinities. The conference was being planned in the context of an Arts and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellows grant I had been awarded, thanks to which I had been researching contemporary gay “pig” sex subcultures. That is, a kind of contemporary gay male subculture anchored in the eroticization of bodily fluid exchanges and of the corruption of the whole, self-contained, and impermeable male body hegemonically idealized in modern European thought. In a biopolitical context in which HIV infection had become something one can self-manage through highly active antiretroviral therapies, or otherwise avoid with pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) drug regimens, I contended that the twenty-first-century erotic investment in bodily fluids and transgression of the boundaries of the idealized bourgeois body makes gay “pig” subcultures a rich field of practice that can help us think about new and hopefully more capacious ways of relating to the other that no longer require identification and recognition as preconditions. Emerging at the intersection of twenty-first-century sex media, pharmacotechnologies, and sex practices, gay “pigs” are porous creatures that can simultaneously point toward new kinds of relating, of sociability, of ethics, while at the same time still often manifesting and reinforcing some of the traits that have historically defined modern European masculinities (Florêncio 2020). In short, the literal opening up of their masculinity, which I saw—and continue to see—as ethically and politically promising, still often remained dependent on a strengthening of other traits coded as masculine: endurance, athleticism, resilience, heroism, and so on; as if masculinities weren't a static monolith but indeed a fleshy psychosexual reality that manages to survive precisely because it is plastic, adaptable, receptive to change. Diversity ensures the survival of any species, I guess.