The view from somewhere : liquid, geologic, and queer bodies

At Elizabeth Bay, located on the south side of Sydney Harbour, the edge of the 1880s reclamation is never more than 40 metres out from the former waterline. The sea is hence a real and constant presence for anyone who happens to be in the small park that occupies the space of the reclamation. This chapter focuses on the small late-nineteenth century reclamation at Elizabeth Bay on Sydney Harbour. It navigates a queer logic between those gay men who in the 1970s and 80s hijacked the park on the Elizabeth Bay reclamation for the purposes of cruising and those less unfortunate men who, convicted in the nineteenth century of the crime of sodomy, found themselves imprisoned with the sandstone walls of Darlinghurst gaol. One of the ways sexuality can be understood, according to Elizabeth Grosz, is as 'an impulse or form of propulsion, directing a subject towards an object'.