Watching and Being Watched: Surveillance in Queer Cruising Spaces
In this post, Miles Kenyon reflects on his piece ‘Capital City Cruising: Surveillance, Pleasure, and Discursive Practices of Queer Communities in Ottawa’, which appeared in the 22(1) special issue of Surveillance & Society on the Pleasures of Surveillance.
Queer people know what it’s like to be watched. Sometimes, the watching is welcome: a held gaze might be a sign of friendly flirtation. Other times, it’s an unwelcome sign that you’ve been discovered–outed–in a dangerous place. This mix of pleasure and perception is at the heart of cruising: the act of looking for sexual encounters in non traditional areas. In my recent article in Surveillance & Society, I look at how queer men discern, discuss, and defy issues of surveillance while cruising in Ottawa.
Despite the deeply rooted and complex history of queer communities and surveillance, I found that queer perspectives were often missing from research on the topic. To challenge this, I wanted to centre my research around the lived experiences of cruisers. I reviewed, analyzed and coded over 4000 comments on the website Squirt. Well known as a hook-up site, it also contains profiles on cruising locations: places where queer men are known to engage in spontaneous sex. The profiles are user-generated and full of comments, directions, and tips for newcomers. But these profiles also include rich information on surveillance practices.
Users would often share information about surveillance and safety issues, all in an effort to avoid detection and protect themselves. Popular categories of surveillance include interactions with everyday people (“Janitorial crew cleans every 4–6 hours”), police entities (“RCMP driving by making random sweeps”), and environmental considerations (“This is a quiet bathroom with private stalls and a loud door”).
Firstly, and quite significantly, this research shows that surveillance is normalized and expected while cruising. While comments related to safety and surveillance make up only a small percentage of the total comments, the comments that do reference surveillance make it clear it is an anticipated risk to be managed and navigated. Additionally, the data make clear that anyone not cruising is a potential threat or danger, and that the cruisers go out of their way to avoid interactions with non-cruisers. Finally, missing from the data is any reference to the psychological or emotional impacts of surveillance on cruisers: users do not discuss how navigating and circumventing surveillance might contribute to feelings of anxiety or fear.
What does this all mean for the wider realm of surveillance? It’s important to note that the cruisers are well aware of the surveillance elements around them and that they try to avoid them. In other words: they accept the presence of surveillance but not the inevitable impact of it. This complicates the theory of surveillance realism, which describes how individuals have grown increasingly resigned to the presence of surveillance in their lives. If surveillance were wholly accepted and cruisers lacked the imagination to dream of alternative arrangements without surveillance, they would likely not share surveillance information.
There are many reasons why we see this complication of surveillance realism (including technological and methodological approaches to research). But what is clear is that queerness, cruising, and pleasure constitute lenses through which existing theories of surveillance can be scrutinized and — potentially — strengthened.
