Remembering the ghosts of public sex

This article cruises through the topic of gay cruising to unsettle static and heteronormative notions of space and place within criminological thinking. Specifically, taking the newly coined ‘criminology of the domestic’ as my point of departure, I rethink the conventional meaning of ‘home’, and suggest that it should be understood fluidly as capturing spaces, places, feelings, practices, and states of being in the world. Troubling the public/private binary, I invoke the practice of cruising and illustrate the ways that queers conceptualise ‘public’ beats as ‘homes’. Many gays and queers seek ‘homes’ out of sight of the heteronormative gaze, yet heteronormativity can nevertheless infiltrate these spaces through the expression of homophobic and queerphobic violence, and I use the wave of Sydney gay hate crimes (1970s–1990s) as a case study, where many gay men died at or near beats. I illustrate the ways that heteronormativity has undergirded the response to these cases as they have been downplayed, erased, forgotten, or in some cases, the victims (and fellow cruisers) blamed for their cruisy way of life. Against this backdrop, I encourage a form of queer grief that may be used to build a queer utopia, where mourning and remembering the ghosts of public sex can be used to mobilise queer ways of being in the world.