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I was waiting at the bus stop and I was sitting there listening to my walkman right, And I'm sitting there and this car pulls up. He rolled the window down and leaned across and said, do you need a ride? And I said yeah. And the minute I said yeah, I knew exactly what was going to happen. There's no manual, right, but I just knew the way he said it that I was going to have my first sexual encounter with someone. It just it made me feel powerful. It made me feel like I was in control.
As a gay kid, growing up religious and in the South, I thought being gay was the worst thing I could ever Now, as a journalist, I'm trying to unlearn that by seeking out our history, and what I've found are people and stories full of courage, perseverance, and love. In this episode, we'll meet Alex Espinoza, the author of the world's most comprehensive history on gay cruising. We'll learn about his own cruising experiences and how anonymous sex empowered him
to find the love he'd always been searching for. From My Heart Podcast I'm Jordan and Solves, and this is what we loved. Cruising basically refers to the practice of anonymous sex in a public place. It's believed that the word itself derives from a Dutch word called kroisen. It means to cross personally. I've never had a cruising experience, but one time I was walking in Central Park and this really handsome man was sitting on a park bench and he made eyes at me. I was so shy
I immediately looked away. But when I looked back at him, he was staring directly at me, and he was tapping his foot and smirking. My stomach just dropped and I ran away. But even just him looking at me gave me a rush. I didn't realize it, but that handsome man was just trying to partake in the ancient tradition of cruising. Cruising can be traced back to the sixteen hundreds in London, when the city built its first public toilets.
At night, men would go there to have sex with each other, but cruising has probably been around since the beginning of time. In cities where same sex attraction was stigmatized or criminalized, these public spaces offered some of the only opportunities for queer intimacy at all. My next guest, Alex Espinosa, is the author of Cruising, An Intimate History of a radical Pastime, one of the only official histories
on gay cruising in existence. He's a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, but before that he had his own cruising experiences. He grew up in southern California in the seventies and eighties in a big Mexican Catholic family. He also grew up with a disability that I would shape his relationship with his body, with sex and with his sense of worthiness.
I was born with limited use in my right arm, so my right arm is stunted, so it's smaller than my left arm, and you know that prevented me from doing any real physical activity. I couldn't play sports. I also had have a condition called lopcire where I've lost my hair, So it was either going to a doctor for my arm or going to the dermatologist who would give me shots Cortisan shots in my scalp to promote hair growth. And those are some of my earliest memories
as a kid. Like five years old, sitting on this table, this exam table, and like ten doctors parading in and me in my underwear and then just like watching me, you know, poking me.
What effect did that have on you?
I grew up, ye, feeling like my body was infirm, you know, that I had an that I had an illness, that I was sick, that my body was wrong and needed to be corrected. So they created within me this sensation that I was apart from my body. I was I wasn't a part of it, I was apart from it, and and that my body was wrong, that it was you know, sick, that it was weak.
So when did you actually know that you were gay?
One of the things I remember is being attracted to hairy chests. For some reason, I can call that gay per se, but I just remember being incredibly attracted to that, like like thinking that that was amazing. Also, I just knew that I felt more comfortable and say, in fact,
surrounded by women. When I remember as a kid going and visiting my grandparents, and like my brothers were always would always go outside with their cousins in the garage, right That's where they would hang out, and I would stay in the kitchen with my mom and my grandma and my aunts. I always felt safest in the spaces you know that I occupied with women.
What were some of the first messages that you got around being gay at that time.
The first messages that I got were that it was, you know, an aberration, that gay men were weak and effeminate and were lesser, were picked on, made fun of, ridiculed. And I remember watching like talk shows right, like Phil Donahue, or for my mother, like the Spanish ones like Christina right, and they would have segments with gay people, and you know, she would just like shake her head and say, oh my god, like those people would like, you know, when
an embarrassment. It's hard hearing that from someone who gave birth to you, who you know, mothered you and loved you, that harbors that can harbor such raw anger at the same time that they love you. So it was really painful. It was really lonely, and you know, but I didn't have many I didn't have any gay role models. I didn't have anyone that I could look to. And this was in the eighties and we were hearing about AIDS, and my mom definitely considered AIDS a punishment from God.
So you grew up in a religious household.
My mom, you know, and my father were both very Catholic. Catholicism was really sort of encoded into our brain right from a very young age. You know, you were expected to go to church every Sunday. We were expected to confess, we were expected to you know, obey our parents, we were expected to do all of those things. Was an ultar boy, you know, I did the whole thing, and it really, for good or bad, shaped my perception about my sexuality in relationship to sort of, you know, something bigger.
What was it like coming of age as a gay person in the nineteen eighties.
It was scary. It was frightening. I saw the rise of AIDS again and you know, people were dying. If you were diagnosed with it, you're basically outed. So it definitely scared the hell out of me. I grew up at a time and it was just incredibly frightening to be gay, to be an outsider, to be a quote unquote misfit. I felt like I didn't have anyone to talk to, and it felt like I was some sort
of anomaly. Was born into a world that didn't want me, that did need me, and that didn't appreciate people like me.
So it's the late eighties and being gay was really difficult. How do you sort of then go from that to cruising? What was your first sexual experience?
Like I was about and I want to say sixteen, and I used to work at the mall and I was on my way to pick up my check and I would take the bus. I was wearing white. I was wearing all white. I was wearing white shorts, a white sweatshirt even though it was really hot, because I used to always hide my arm because I was ashamed
of it. And I was wearing a white hat. Woh awesome, a little white hat that I would use because I also have alopecia, so I'd lost all my hair, and back then, I used to have bald spots, so I would always wear a hat to conceal that. And I was waiting at the bus stop and I was sitting there listening to my walkman right, it was the boy with the thorn in his side by the Smiths. And I'm sitting there and this car pulls up. It was a Hyundai HNDAI Excel hatchback. He kind of, you know,
leaned over. It was a Latino guy, long hair, hair sprayed with gel on the sides, spiky up top. I'd say he was in maybe his twenties. He was muscular, he was fit, he had a nice body. He was in the driver's side and kind of looked at me and then drove off. And then he came around again, and this time he got out and he pretended to expect this the tire, the back tire, and then he kept looking at me and then drove away again, and
so I was like, what's that about? And then he drove by again the third time, and this time he rolled the window down and leaned across and said, do you need a ride? And I said yeah. And the minute I said yeah, I knew exactly what was going to happen. There was no manual, right, but I just knew the way he said it that I was going to have my first sexual encounter with someone. So we ended up parking in a field, and it was instinctual for me. It was like I knew exactly what to do.
I gave him a blowjob. Yeah, I remember, I remember going down on him, you know, while he was you know, in his seat, in the driver's seat, and remember the steering wheel against my shoulder. But it was it was hot and it was fun. I'm not gonna lie. It was fun. I finally felt sexual, right, I felt like I had power and that's how it began for me.
And this was during broad daylight that you guys pulled up and you hooked up in a car. Basically, well, after this encounter, how did you feel?
I felt empowered. It was erotic. It was like, you know. The the really messed up thing was he didn't drop me off at the mall. He just kind of left me. No, he didn't. I remember afterwards sitting on the bus and you know, looking around and seeing, you know, all the other people and thinking like I have this secret, you know, I did this thing and nobody knows about it. And I remember just feeling very just like empowered, you know, just I felt like I was wanted, that somebody desired me.
I felt like I'd been initiated into a culture, like a subculture, even though I didn't know what that was.
I remember going to a movie theater with my brother and my mother, and I remember going and going to use the bathroom and using it as an opportunity to like stand at the urinals and watch, you know, watch men right pull their their digs out, and I remember I remember a couple of the men very being very obvious about showing it to me, and I remember liking that, like I never reached out and touched them, but I remember like, hush, like this this goes on, right, Things
like this happen. I learned that there was a subculture that existed beyond the veil of our every day that I could enter into and out of as as I pleased.
It's the late eighties. Alex is in his late teens and has just discovered cruising. Having grown up with a disability that made one of his arms shorter than the other and having alopecia, which meant that he was balding at a young age, he felt undesirable. He felt like beauty was a currency for how lovable you were, and because he believed he wasn't beautiful, he also believed that he wasn't lovable, but cruising was an escape from that. In the cruising world, people wanted to have sex with him.
He felt desirable and deserving for the first time. So where would you cruise? I mean, once you as in your own words, once you were initiated into this secret society, where were some of the places that you would go to find these sexual opportunities.
Well, when I first started, like when I was younger, or like in my late teens, after my first encounter, it was it was always like bathrooms or parks places like that. I remember one time there was a park that I found out was a cruisy park by a friend of mine who was straight. Actually, she said, oh, yeah,
John and I. That was her boyfriend. She said, John and I were here one night and we were parked and we were just like sitting in the car talking, and you know, it was night, and we kept seeing all these cars drive up and guys get out, you know, guys getting out of their cars. And she said, she said it was her boyfriend that told her, oh, you know what that's you know what that is. Those guys are like cooking up, you know, they're they're having sex
with each other. And so when she said that to me, I was like, ah, I know where I'm going.
She told it to you as gossip, but then you used it as functional in front.
I was like, interesting, how weird? Right?
So basically, you know what you're saying is all of these sort of public places that you might go shopping at or to the park or to buy a book. There's this underground, unseen world that the common eye, the common person doesn't even know about is happening. There's all these men that are having sex and hooking up while we're going shopping for a baby shower, yeah, or going to the park for a walk or something. M hm.
You know, that's the real power of cruising of this culture is that you can sort of step into an alternate world almost right, And if you don't know about it, it's just the bathroom in a department store. But if you know that bathroom and that space becomes something very different, it becomes a very different type of location for an exchange. I can just remember the thrill of it. Remember one when being in a stall. This was at a bathroom
in Macy's. I went in and I sat there. A lot of times, you just sit there for a while, and I knew the bathroom was cruising. I knew that that things happened there. But then you know, the person person came into my left and sat and the minute they sit like you, there's just an energy that's that's exchanged like a sort of a feeling, right, a vibe, a pheromone, I don't know what you want to call it.
But the guy sitting next to me, and you know, he pulls his pants down and and then he starts tapping his foot right casually, and then I tap my foot casually, and then he does it again, and then I do it again, so where it's clear that it's not it's not like an unconditional response, right, that we're doing it with intention. Then you know, he and I you know, start doing our thing, like we sort of go under the stall and you know, and then and another person came in and he moved into the stall
to my right. So again me and this other guy are not doing anything because there's somebody there now, so we're like trying to act like we're using the bathroom. And then this other guy does the same thing, right, he pulls his pants down, and then I see him starting to kind of you know, tap his foot, He lowers his hand, he kind of moves his hand under the stall mm in the space, and then that was it. You know, we just sort of had a phone with each other.
Wow. I wonder, you know, in those moments, like what did you like about cruising, I felt empowered.
I mean, you know, I never considered myself a very attractive person. Right, The gay culture of my time was like everybody went to West Hollywood, and in those spaces, I was not very attractive, you know. I I have this disability. You know, I was losing my hair. You know, I felt very, very unattractive. But I think when I started cruising, I found that I was attractive. People men liked my dick, and I I was gonna use it. It's all. It's the only thing I had. It's the
only thing I had that gave me confidence. Right, was like, I better use this thing then, And boy did I in a world where I had no control over my upbringing, you know, my situation, my financial situation, my family situation, in this space, I had control.
It sounds like in the outside world you had thought of yourself as someone unworthy of love or of sex, or of people finding you attractive. But then in this cruising world you are sort of like the top of the so called pyramid. I wonder, you know, putting myself in your shoes, there's so much adrenaline going on, like having sex with these people you don't know and and the fear of getting caught. Was that rush and that adrenaline part of what kept you doing it?
Oh yeah, totally. I mean that's one of the main reasons why I did it. You know it is really it gives you some Yeah, it gives you a high. It's very erotic, it's taboo. You know, you're doing something that you're not supposed to be doing with another person, and you're doing it in a public space. Right, there's an adrenaline rush. You're experiencing this very intimate moment with a stranger in a space, and then you're just gonna pick up and go on, you know, your merry way,
and you know no one will ever know it. Just it made me feel powerful. It made me feel like I was in control, and who doesn't want that?
Well, you know the other part of this alex was that you were cruising during the peak of the AIDS pandemic. This is like the nineties, the early nineties, late eighties. Were you ever scared that you were putting yourself at risk of contracting HIV?
Oh of course, I mean that was you know, I was petrified of that, But I also knew that I couldn't ignore my feelings. Right, The alternative was what celibacy Like, I don't have that much.
Control, and so I do kind of wonder like knowing that there was this really big risk. What kept you going? What kept you having these encounters, these anonymous encounters.
Again, I didn't consider myself very attractive. I felt like, you know, I I couldn't find a partner. So for me, it was what kept me going back was was that sense of intimacy that I would experience every time I'd do it right, and it was it was so powerful that I was willing to risk contracting a deadly virus for it.
Right, I'm just thinking about your Catholic conservative upbringing. How did that tie in?
You know? As I went on, Like I said, the first few times, it's when it's you know, a novelty, it's it's kind of exciting and you're you know, you're charged and all that. But as I got older and I had some age behind me, some years, I would feel a lot of shame. I would tell myself, I'm never going to do it again, and you know, that's it, like I'm not visiting those places anymore. But then I'd
find myself there again. When you're in the moment, it's it's such an intense high, right, But whatever intense high, there comes a you know, a down, right you have to crash. And I always felt just horrible, you know, it felt like a just a terrible human being, you know, just an absolute like sinful, horrible person that's gonna go to hell.
Other than the sex, what do you think you were searching for?
I think I wanted to be loved. I think I just wanted someone to love me, you know, intimately, right, And that was the closest that I could get at the time, and the moments that I was cruising, I knew that it wasn't love I was encountering, right, it was it was intimacy, but at the time I couldn't distinguish the two. It's not that like I would meet these guys and like fall in love with them, No, but it was the closest thing to quote love that I could get.
And what do you think was stopping you from truly experiencing the love and the intimacy that that you were really looking for.
I still wasn't comfortable with myself. I wasn't willing to accept all parts of me. And again in the cruising space. It was like they weren't seeing all of me. They were only seeing a part of me, right, so they weren't getting a full picture of me, and so I And that's not to say that that people who cruise, you know, are uncomfortable, you know, in their skin.
I'm not.
I don't want to generalize anybody's experiences. Their experiences are their own right. But that's what it was for me was I clearly was not comfortable in my own skin yet, and I didn't feel like I was worthy of being loved intimately by someone else.
It's the late nineties and Alex is in his twenties. He was cruising regularly by this point, and it felt like a superpower. It was an escape from the painful feeling that he was unlovable. Years of hating the body that he was born in, coupled with the shame that he had lugged around for being gay, was a lot to bear. Anonymous sex also gave him a short lived
sense of intimacy, and he liked that. The feeling of being close to another man, even for a moment, even with a man he didn't know anything about, was powerful. But what he really wanted was to be loved authentically, to be fully accepted. There came a point where he also realized that he had been avoiding a huge fear of his getting tested for HIV. This was the late nineties and HIV drugs were new, but people were still dying from the virus that could be spread through sexual contact,
including many in the gay community. Alex was almost certain that he was HIV positive. What was the boiling point for you?
I was living out in La here. If I was going out, I was partying, and you know, at night, I would hook up with guys. I would go to you know, sex clubs and do all kinds of things. And after a while I kind of realized, like, I'm not really doing anything with my life. I'm just sort of partying and waking up and going to work at the stead and job. And it was that time that I kind of took stock of like everything I'd done.
I was like, oh my god, you know, I had all these risky experiences, I'd done all these things, and I finally just faced my fear on like I just need to and this I need to get tested. I remember this was the late nineties, like it was nineties, you.
Mean an HIV test. Yeah, why were you sort of avoiding that test?
Well, because I was scared. I was frightened. It was frightened that I had it, frightened that I'd given it to other people and not known about it. Right. So I remember talking to my best friend and then we were having a conversation about he's straight, and we're having a conversation about like HIV tests or something, and I said, you know, I should probably get tested too, and he At that time there were these tests that you would
mail off right and you would have to wait. So I was like, I'm just petrified of it and I can't do it. And then my best friend was like, if you're scared, I'll do it. Like I'll do it with you, I'll do it for you. So I said, okay, you know. So we went and we got it, I remember, and it was at his place. I remember I was there. And then we went and we got it and then we opened it up and then like he pricked my finger, we put it on the little sample thing and mailed
it off. And I remember weeks later and I was back at home and I was on my computer and I was on AOL. This was AOL America online and I was on my Alel instant chattam and then he sent me an instant message and it said negative. And he called me and he said, yeah, he's like, you're testing back in your negative. It was just an average day, nothing special about it. It was just a normal day.
And I remember just getting up and going in the bathroom and brushing my teeth and all of that, and just having a realization and looking at myself and just realizing that I did love myself. I looked at my body, and I realized that my body wasn't something that was defective or infirm or weak. It showed signs of survival. And you know, I wore the wounds, the scars, and it was that moment that I realized, like, I've got a lot to offer, and I need to start remembering that,
and I need to start loving myself more. It was the first time I really took account of my body, I took account for myself and and and realized that I was still standing. You know, I hadn't succumbed, not just not just aids or but like to all the threats right that I, you know, experienced as a kid. You know, my my Catholicism and my my culture, my cheesemol, like I had survived all of that, all of it.
In other words, what you're saying is that you had, up until that point looked at your own body as something that was not lovable.
Mm hmm.
You then realized, having this moment where you're staring at yoursel self, that this is the same body that's carried me through so much and I've actually survived and I'm still living exactly.
And it was a real moment where I took agency right and just decided that I was going to love myself more, and that learning to love myself meant accepting every facet of myself, including my imperfections, my quote unquote imperfections. And it was really it was really liberating, but it was also kind of sad and painful because I think, I you know, I liked my misery, right, I liked my sadness.
It was all you ever knew.
Yeah, So you take that away and it's like, well, like you're sort of like you're walking into like the harsh light of day.
Right, sort of like who am I once?
Yeah? Who do I become? Now? Right now that I've no, I'm no longer participating in the script. So that meant really sort of rethinking everything about myself. That's intimacy for me.
You know, I'm curious, did you end up finding that love that you were searching for?
I did, Yeah, I found that love. We actually met online, ironically, and it was like two thousand. You know, back then it was it was still an anomaly for people to meet online. It was kind of seen as something kind of tawdry. And so I went logged on and chatted
with the person that would eventually become my partner. He was where I was in terms of like accepting his situation and accepting, you know, who he was and what he had to offer that we both kind of thought, well, we both said to each other, like we you know, we've done the hooking up, we've done that, we've messed around, and it's kind of time for something different. And so we agreed to meet. And when we met, nothing intimate happened.
We had tea in his apartment, and then I left and we stayed in touch.
And then twenty years later, twenty plus years later, yeah you're still together.
We're still together. Yeah.
Well, now shifting gears a little bit, what did you learn from writing this comprehensive analysis of cruising.
I learned a couple things while writing it. I learned that this practice is one that's been going on ever since there have been societies, that it's a practice that no matter how many times a society tries to quell it or stop it, it only comes back stronger. And I learned also that other men who'd had cruising experiences experienced the exact same thing that I did. Like we talked about like the the uncoded language, the sort of knowledge of knowing that something was going to happen without
any words being exchanged. A lot of the men that I interviewed, we're grateful that I had pulled them aside and said, tell me about your experience, because they were harboring this right and they felt like this is something they needed to get off their chest for years, right, and nobody had given them the license to do it. And suddenly I was like, hey, tell me about you know, tell me about the bathroom at your college. And it
was a bittersweet experience. I think looking back at some of those moments, and again, it was rehashing a lot of a lot of the pain and a lot of the fear and a lot of the doubt that I had. But that's what art, That's what we do as artists. We take our pain and we turn it into something. We turn it into a work of art, right, or something that we can provide the world with. It was the first time that I, you know, that I was able to make sense of all of it for.
Me, and and so it was sort of part of your unshaming journey in a sense.
Exactly.
Well, so, now pivoting a little bit, this show is about basically creating role models for young people, and you've sort of now taken on this new role as an educator and writing books for young queer people to engage in. I wonder, though, if you were to be a role model to your younger self looking back all those years, what advice would you give to your younger self as you were trying to find your.
Way love yourself more, you know?
And what advice do you have for young queer people now that are trying to find their way with sex and dating and figuring out who they.
Are, accept every facet of yourself.
It sort of sounds like the advice that you will give to your younger selves.
Yeah, I think it's the same thing in a way.
Basically, the generations are different, but the advice on how to navigate queer life is the same.
It still is, It still is a lot of things haven't changed, right in our culture and our experiences that our experiences are very they're unique, but in a lot of ways they're very similar. Right. That we all grow up, you know, facing the potential for stigma, for rejection, right, so it's no surprise that the advice that I that I would give my younger self is similar to the one that I would give to someone else now.
And there's a lot of hope in young people leaning on older queer people for those answers and for that advice exactly. But We Loved is hosted by me Jordan Can Solve This. New episodes drop every Wednesday. A tiny note will be going on a small break for the next two weeks, but we'll be back in September. If you want to write in to tell your story, email us at Buttweloved at gmail dot com or send us a message on Instagram or TikTok at but We Loved.
We are a production of the Outspoken Podcast Network and iHeart podcas but We Loved was originally developed with Pushkin Industries. Our producers Areshena Ozaki, Michael June, Emily Meronoff, and Joey patt Our. Executive producers are Me and Maya Howard. Fact checking by Marisa Brown. Original music by Steve Bohone. Special thanks to Jay Brunson and Roquel Willis. If you loved this episode, leave us a rating and follow us on
Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and thank you for listening. I'll see you the first week of September.