How did a failed attempt at cruising end a tyrannical royal line in Athens?
How many Republicans have been busted by the cops for cruising?
How did cruising lead to the suicide of a sitting United States senator?
Who was Mother Clap and what was a Molly-house?
What exactly is cruising? Why is sodomy so infamous?
It’s Athens in 514 B.C.E. and you’re walking around the agora, taking in the sights of the oncoming Panathenaea celebration, the keystone of the Athenian calendar1. Fabrics for the Goddess, cows for sacrifice, virgins bearing the symbols of youth in the form of flowers.
As you make your way across the agora you note the fuss of men of importance as they make as if they are “helping”–as always, the “good men of Athens” are taking charge of the execution of yet another successful festival. Well, perhaps not all the good men as some are whiling away their day looking for pleasure among the youths of the city.
One such good man was the brother of the sitting leader of Athens, the brother of the so-called tyrant of the tyranny! Although the term was more benign than its meaning today, this man was nonetheless a self-interested, selfish bombast. His eyes scan the agora, passing over the hetaerae, the prostitutes of old Athens, and he lands on the exquisite youth of a young man.
Fixing his gaze on the young man, this tyrant-by-relation began to seduce him with looks before launching a smooth, seductive move. A move denied. The youth swerves and attempts to go on to his task for the day with no time for penis sharks, their erections like fins cutting through the agora.
Blasting the kid with a litany of profanity that would make the philosophers blush, the meta-tyrant promises the worst for the youth, lancing him with angry words that must have been the ancient greek equivalent of “you aren’t even that hot, bitch!”
Intent on revenge, the tyrantlet demands to know who this brat is and finds out he’s named Harmodius and his family was set to debut their virginal youngest at the Panathenaea. In righteous, horny fury, the baby tyrant, Hipparchus, sought out the young virgin and began to hurl abuse at her, declaring to all that she was not a virgin.
This dizzy queen thought he had won, but when word got to Aristogeiton, the youth’s erastes, the queer revenge plot came fast and hot. Demanding satisfaction, Aristogeiton began to cook up a plot in which they’d kill Hipparchus and his brother, the tyrant, to make up for the insult to the family of Harmodius. When the plot failed with only a knife in Hipparchus, fatal blood loss in Harmodius, and Aristogeiton in jail, the idea of a comeuppance went to shit.
In the following four years, Hippias was deposed and Aristogeiton was dead. Relieved at the removal of their tyrant, Athenians would eventually sing songs, devote statues, and swear oaths on the memory of the tyrannicides.
When you read histories of cruising, they typically begin either in the 1890s or the 1980s. Sometimes they go back a little bit more than that, but rarely much. It’s probably a fear of being accused of “presentism,” the practice of putting today’s morals on the past. In any case, this fear has led to the weird tension between indignant gays screaming “they WERE NOT JUST FRIENDS” at historians while glossing over the seediness of the queer past.
Sodomy, you see, is fundamental.
Now, I’m not saying that being queer is about sex, necessarily, but at the same time I’m not disclaiming that. It’s a strange needle to thread, to avoid sounding like a frothing stereotype to the conservatives and to avoid dequeering things that have long avoided the light of truth. Queer people: we fuck! Respectfully.
Some would argue that a wandering eye and a flirty comment do not cruising make but I would argue that they are the base of the art. Yes, art! Cruising, you see, is as intricate a thing as a ballet. There aren’t prescribed moves, per se, but many of the typical socially-coded actions of cruising are predictable and essential: the glance, the hand near the genitals, the smirk, the lingering at the urinal, and so on. None of these are necessarily modern or “presentist,” not even the lingering piss, they’re things we’ve done since time immemorial.
Even straight guys can piss lingeringly, whether at the urinal, on the can, squat behind a bush, or standing on the side of a road.
For the ancients a wandering eye was more than just an observational tool. Often, the gods and goddesses themselves gave in. For Hera, it was zelotypia, a kind of visceral jealousy that shares a root with the word “zealotry.” Her dogged pursuit of recompense and justice from her cheating husband was made all the worse when she would have to share her imperious home with the targets of her husband’s lust, from young Ganymede to fair Semele, the mother of Dionysus. Worst still was seeing the children of the man: grey-eyed Athena, daughter of Metis as a fly, and even Dionysus, sewn into the leg of his father as a fetus when his mother burst into flames upon seeing his true form.
Oh, and let’s not forget the philogynotic scion of Zeus, Heracles, whose name was literally “Hera is Great.”
The profundity of the gaze as a tool of sexual conquest is probably made all the more pointed when it is noted that in most stories, mortals are unable to look upon the gods and so the gaze becomes unidirectional and about more than just a look. It laces together the sexual and the social, it’s a balancing of one’s social status (or godly status) and physical desire. And, additionally in the case of the gods of old, the gaze was absolute, leading to unwilling partners being shown the “full glory,” as it were, and others being sexually assulted, often violently, in what is the most unnerving aspect of the old mythologies.
Still, humans can be absolute fuck-hungry horndogs, too.
“Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men’s behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity!”2
The phrase appears in a bar in Pompeii, one of many extremely lewd markings in the walls of Ancient Rome. Here, a boast and an advertisement from a now-queer patron. Romans were not shy about sex, although they found their way to Pound Town through a maze of social mores that gave more power to class than anything else. In other words, the Romans (and the Greek thence) emulated the gods and their lusts.
This is why when we revisit the story of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, class plays heavily: Hipparchus is the scion of a wealthy tyranny which is run by his brother, Aristogeiton is just a normal schlub with the improbable luck of landing an eromenos that could tempt the meta-tyrant. The Greek and Romans were certainly not above a good fuck at a party but it seemed that outside of procreative sex the people were more interested in the song-and-dance of power plays.
As we will explore later, the historic appraisal of sexuality was dependent on a mix of canonical godly sex tips and a struggle over power. Sodomy and cruising and, well, basically any kind of action done with one’s genitals, were viewed as vulgar sometimes and sometimes as a divine emulation. After all, you couldn’t have a baby without the direct intervention of the gods–should the same then be believed about erections and orgasms, too? With few exceptions, size didn’t matter much to the Greeks and subsequent classical civilizations, and when we hear about ejaculation it’s often seen in an embarrassing context, like Hephaestus and Athena in which the god must cum on the floor because his attempt to seduce and violate Athena failed.
When we think about cruising today, it’s hard to not think of it in the context of tops and bottoms, of aggressor and passive. The old patina of a respectful, class-aware fuck is still there, somewhat, and the same moral and ethical struggles persist. Eventually, interdictions against homosexuality would go so far as to attempt to ban open communication between two queer people in public, a whole-hog extension of the old idea that conversations about homosexuality by homosexuals will necessarily lead to fucking, and that solicitation by a queer person could be construed as an attempt at sex when targeted by the right homophobe.
- Thucydides
- Wilhelm (1871)