Derek Blair Cooper May 15, 2016 Mapping the Genealogies of Gay Intimacy from Place to Space: Privacy, Cruising and Counterpublics in New York City, 1970–Present Intimate life is the endlessly cited elsewhere of political public discourse, a promised haven that distracts citizens from the unequal conditions of their political and economic lives, consoles them for the damaged humanity of mass society, and shames them for any divergence between their lives and the intimate sphere that is alleged to be simple personhood. –– Michael Warner & Lauren Berlant in “Sex in Public” Introduction: Place, Space, and Queer Intimacy “Hey, how are you?” “Chillin. You? “Layin’ in bed, horny.” “Looking for? Into?” For the users of ‘gay’ ‘hookup’ apps such as Grindr and Scruff this string of words looks incredibly familiar. This conversation is how one might begin a moment of queer intimacy, driven by technological means from the relative ‘privacy’ of your own smartphone. It is at odds with the kinds of queer relationality occurred post-Stonewall that is generally written about in terms of ‘cruising for sex’. By defining these interfaces with the words ‘gay’ and ‘hookup’ we are foreclosing the almost unlimited potentialities that might exist with this domain of engagement and interaction, in the performances of queer intimacy that manage to find a way to surface beyond the purely sexual. What is at stake here is truly understanding relationality and queer sociality as interdependent with but not limited to the act of spatializing sexual desire. This paper aims to locate queer intimacy in the contemporary moment, defining the performance of ‘cruising’ as a spatializing gesture, which is specifically queer, tracing the histories of gay public sex and their sanitization from everyday public life through spatial techniques of domination such as juridical re-zoning laws and urban planning.