Join poet and scholar Jack Parlett and historian Hugh Ryan, author of When Brooklyn Was Queer, for a conversation about cruising, poetry and Parlett’s new book The Poetics of Cruising: Queer Visual Culture From Whitman to Grindr. From Walt Whitman’s addresses to passing strangers in the late nineteenth century and Langston Hughes’s portraits of subway intimacies, to more recent works by contemporary writers exploring hook-up app culture, there is a long and rich tradition of queer poets writing about cruising. What is it that happens in these transient moments of encounter, where looks between strangers are intensified and eroticized? Parlett’s book traces the history of writers cruising for sex in New York City – a history that also includes Frank O’Hara, David Wojnarowicz and Eileen Myles – and illuminates its subject as a site where questions of desire, power and visuality meet.

This event will take place in person at the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, on the second floor (room 210) of The LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th St., NYC, 10011.

Safety protocol:

In an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19:

Please note that masks are required at all times inside The LGBT Community Center, where the Bureau is located.

If you have any symptoms associated with COVID-19 in the days leading up to the event, we ask you to please stay home.

Suggested donation $10 to benefit the Bureau’s work.

All are welcome to attend, with or without donation.

We will pass a bag for donations at the start of the event, but we can also take credit card donations at the register or you can donate in advance on Eventbrite.

Purchase Jack Parlett’s The Poetics of Cruising: Queer Visual Culture From Whitman to Grindr (University of Minnesota Press, 2022, paperback, $27) from the Bureau’s online store (click on the title).

Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

Copies are also available at the Bureau’s physical store.

Jack Parlett is a writer, poet and scholar. His research focuses on 20th and 21st century American literature and culture, with an emphasis on queer writing. He completed a PhD in English at Cambridge University, which was recently published as a monograph by the University of Minnesota Press, entitled The Poetics of Cruising: Queer Visual Culture from Whitman to Grindr. His next book, Fire Island: Love, Loss and Liberation in an American Paradise, will be published by Hanover Square Press in June 2022. He currently holds a Junior Research Fellowship at University College, Oxford, where he also teaches modern American literature and literary theory. His debut poetry chapbook, Same Blue, Different You, was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2020, and his essays have appeared in Poetry London, Lit Hub and elsewhere. He lives in Oxford. Author photo by Alex Krook.

Hugh Ryan is a writer, historian and curator in New York City. Hugh’s current project, entitled The Women’s House of Detention, is a queer history of the Women’s House of Detention in Greenwich Village. It is the story of one building: the people it caged, the neighborhood it changed, and the resistance it inspired. Hugh’s first book, When Brooklyn Was Queer, was called a “boisterous, motley new history” and “an entertaining and insightful chronicle” by the New York Times, who made it an Editor’s Pick in 2019. In 2019, Hugh was honored by the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Committee on LGBT History of the American Historical Association, and the Brooklyn Borough President. Hugh has received the 2016 Martin Duberman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, several New York Foundation for the Arts grants in Nonfiction Literature, the 2019-2020 Allan Berube Prize for outstanding work in public LGBT History from the Committee on LGBT History at the American Historical Association, and the 2019 New York City Book Award. Hugh regularly teaches Creative Nonfiction in the MFA Program at SUNY Stonybrook, and is currently on the Board of Advisers for the Archives at the LGBT Center in Manhattan and The Stonewall National Museum and Archives in Ft. Lauderdale. Author photo by Jia Oak Baker.