Book Review: Backward glances: cruising the queer streets of New York and London

Mark Turner’s basic premise is simple: ‘the city is an active force, an agent that creates certain kinds of behaviour, true to the modern urban sensibility’ (p. 127). His focus is one such ‘behaviour’: cruising / the glances exchanged between men on New York and London’s streets. The idea that modern urban life actuates particular social practices is well established. The streets’ erotics have their literary and academic canon. But Backward glances compels us to rethink how we understand both ways of being in the city and what makes cities sexy. Its distinctiveness is twofold. First, Turner locates the pleasures of ‘mutual recognition’ in precisely the fragmentation and anonymity of urban culture. Cruising, indeed, ‘exploits the ambivalences and uncertainties inherent in the city’ (p. 7). It is, as such, characteristic of urban modernity. Ranging from Whitman to Hockney, Turner moves to evoke the erotic ‘excitement of the passing moment’ (p. 118). Second: Turner’s cruiser disrupts the dominant status of the ‘Ur-man of urban modernity’ / the ever-watching flâneur (p. 29). If the flâneur is outside the crowd, the cruiser is immersed in it. Reciprocal glances are ‘a vital point of interaction, an expression of togetherness rather than of alienation, of connection rather than separation’ (p. 59). Turner highlights those everyday fleeting connections when individuals look at those around them. The cruiser suggests alternative modes of urban movement. Backward glances thus challenges us to think about the erotics of the city, and the relationship between social formation and subject formation more generally. More problematically, it raises questions about how we write the history of sex and the city. Turner’s ‘backward glance’ signifies his engagement with the past. But what’s he glancing at? ‘I look to the past to help me understand something about cruising, and our cities, and sexuality, and the ways we have of representing all of these, in the present, now ’ (p. 9). This only gets us so far: how are ‘now’ and ‘then’ related? Cruising, Turner states, ‘is not transhistorical’ (p. 9). Moreover, he repeatedly defines his as a queer history, not the ‘recovery’ of hidden ‘gay’ cruisers (pp. 42 /6, 112). Strangely, however, Turner’s analysis effaces these points. Turner works by laying fragments from different times alongside one another / moving between 1880s porn and Jarman’s journals in one paragraph (pp. 50 /1). Sometimes this highlights