In 1957, Guy Debord published THE NAKED CITY – Illustration de l’hypothèse des plaques tournantes en psychogeographique (Illustration of the hub hypothesis in psychogeography), the first treatise on cruising in the closet. This recomposed map of Paris as a hub turns Haussmann’s military planning on its head. The city is no longer the business of architects, but of bodies in search of the pleasures buried in its entrails. These urban planners, with their pants down, design a city within the city, an inverted Pompeii that can only be seen in an advanced state of inebriation. These drifting bodies, which according to traditional psychogeography had to be soaked, now use a whole chemical range of subjectivity-altering technologies: Poppers, Cocaine, 3MMC, 4MMC, Crystal.

We can only speculate on what psychogeography would have been like if Guy Debord, as an international faggot, had wandered the streets of Paris in search of a plaque tournante where he could indulge in a quick blowjob. Cruising is also an advanced form of piracy. It builds nothing but appropriates and diverts spaces from their uses. A blasphemous act par excellence, it turns urban symbols inside out. A family square becomes a monument dedicated to non-reproductive pleasures, a memorial sculpture is transformed a rallying banner for the international pederast movement, a beef jerky advert turns into a call for public indecency. Cruising is Henri Lefèbvre’s right to the city taken to its libidinal extreme. The latter advocated for “places of encounters, places where exchange would not go through exchange value, commerce and profit.” Cruising is the entry point through which the city ceases to be the cardinal instrument of bourgeois morality and becomes alternatively a wanton faggot and clenched-fist dyke.

“As we all know, the shape of a city changes faster than the heart of a mortal. But before leaving it behind, prey to its memories — seized as it is, like all cities, by the vertigo of metamorphosis that is the hallmark of the second half of our century — it also happens, it happens more than once that, this heart, it has changed it in its own way, simply by subjecting it, still new, to its climate and its landscape, by imposing on its intimate perspectives as well as its daydreams the canvas of its streets, its boulevards and its parks.”

In 1966, New York Unexpurgated was published under the name of a certain Petronius with the following subtitle: “An amoral guide for the jaded, tired, evil, non-conforming, corrupt, condemned and the curious.” Its cover, opening onto the New York skyline at night, holds all the promises of the invisible city. The city of all cities, stretching from Paris to Taipei like an underground network of fables. New York Unexpurgated is one of a string of stories, along with John Rechy’s City of Night, Guy Hocquenghem’s Le Gay Voyage and Pat Califia’s Macho Sluts, to name but a few, sketching out the thousand and one nights of modern cities. These books are little studied in architecture, but they were the raw material for the courses we and Octave Perrault gave at HEAD–Haute école d'art et de design de Genève, at the invitation of Javier Fernandez Contreras, and which were at the same time the origin of our book project. From October to December 2021, we invited a group of students to untangle the Gordian knot formed when desire and politics find themselves sucked together into a few square meters. The result was a dozen of the contributions featured in this book. Essays, plans drawn from testimonies and spatial collages are all porno-dissident architectural treatises, odes to the unsung Satyricon heroes of modern times.

Cruising Pavilion attempts to reveal the poetic power of the metropolis through the writing of the bodies that tirelessly traverse it. It develops a picaresque narrative that embraces the fragmented subjectivity of the cruiser, a Don Quixote-like figure who alternately transforms great contemporary structures, civilisational relics and neglected vaults into castles of subversion in the grip of an incandescent imagination. The cruiser is a transitional figure with a hundred faces: hunter, therapist, anthropologist, lascar, lesbian dandy, queer migrant, drag queen, one-day escort, lifelong junkie, white-collar faggot, derelict, pater familia or Alma Mater, CEO on the wagon, ambassador adrift, cyber dyke, etc.… The cruiser reveals the genius loci sexualis of the city and wrests from its architecture a vision of excess. It pulls it out of its dreary realism and makes it do unspeakable things, shattering its principles and mutilating its functions. Cruisers stalk the compulsive side of things, annihilating, at least in part, the rage of an entire discipline for the concrete, which stems above all from a panic fear of the indeterminate. Such could be the manifesto of our obscure project, were it not itself insensitive to the very idea of fixity. Here lies the duality of the dissidence evoked in the title of the book. On the one hand, it is a dissidence from heterosexuality that precedes and distinguishes itself from the sexual or cultural identification with the LGBTQI+ communities. On the other hand, it’s a dissidence in the use of spaces, which is able to distill unavowable secrets from the cold heart of stones.

Though the book is divided into five distinct parts, the chapters spill over into one another, as cruising unfolds over an oblique space that punctures walls with glory holes and burns spatial conventions. It brings together interviews, essays, fictions, testimonies, documents, and various visual narratives in a typology of spaces that can be grasped chronologically, from the oldest to the most recent forms, but above all synchronically, as these different cultures overlap to form a tangle of topographically hybrid rituals. Each site was selected because it embodies a pioneering dimension of cruising, i.e. the ability to make space in the shadow of, or under the nose of, hetero space, but also because it is home to artistic avant-gardes. The first feeding the second and vice versa. Although most of the places listed are in western countries, we’ve tried to broaden our search as much as possible, but there are countless places that, for various reasons, could not be included in this book. Likewise, we have tried to broaden our scope of research as much as possible outside of cis-male cruising in order to include lesbian, queer and trans cruising cultures. Our time and means were finite and much needs to be done still. Finally, it is important to add that the ethical and intellectual ambition of this book attempts to follow what Roland Barthes describes in The Neutral: “What I am looking for […] is an introduction to living, a guide to life (ethical project): I want to live according to nuance. Now there is a teacher of nuance, literature; try to live according to the nuances that literature teaches me.” This book does not advocate one position over another, taking one side and turning it against its adversary. In this respect, this book does not provide a definitive answer to the question it poses: Can we still speak of cruising outside of its existence in the public space? Indeed, cruising, in the traditional and primary sense of the term, is the choreography of bodies exploiting the city and its hollows as a sexual playground. However, this definition excludes all forms of cruising that take place in the comfort and protection of an enclosed space, be it a club, a bathhouse, a porn cinema or an apartment, and which are part of Cruising Pavilion. Similarly, the book presents, without answering it, the question whether one can think of cruising as a democratic intersectional utopia, or rather as an opportunity for the collapse of the self, leading to the overthrow of the civilisational logic that orders bodies and minds.

Through a myriad of sometimes antagonistic points of view, it attempts to sketch the contours of sexual Atlantis, which was initially the fruit of religious, medical and societal condemnation before becoming, in certain regions of the world, a network of more or less united secret societies with their own codes and practices, culminating in the current state of affairs: a horizon of extreme disparity. Sometime, the world we’re talking about will take the form of an extremely realistic, no-holds-barred account of the most brutal and penetrating aspects of the world. Likewise, it will have the flavor of a fairy-tale, a bygone golden age that can now only be talked about in the past tense. Some of these stories have been told many times before. But it’s precisely for this reason that we must not allow the dangerous radicalities that founded them to fade under the weight of habit. These writings are works of combat that enabled the conquest of entire worlds, still too few in relation to the battles to be waged. The worlds we’re going to talk about have had many names in the perilous history that has tied bodies and cities together: Babylon, Naked City, Inverted Pompeii, Cours des Miracles, Lesbos, Downbelow, Sin City, Grindrplex, etc. … We’ve tried to visit them all, in vain.

BOOK

Cruising Pavilion: Architecture, Dissident Sex and Cruising Cultures (Spector Books, 2026) considers spatial practices through the lens of artistic avant-gardes that have emerged at the intersection of homosexuality, art, and architecture. It follows the eponymous curatorial project initiated by Pierre-Alexandre Mateos, Rasmus Myrup, Octave Perrault, and Charles Teyssou, which traveled from Paris to Venice and on to New York, Fire Island, and Stockholm. 

From the appropriation of parks, public restrooms and streets to purpose-built spaces like sex clubs, bars, and bathhouses, as well as the virtual dérives generated by geosocial dating apps, cruising has subverted the libidinal cartography and use of the modern metropolis. The book examines the influence of cruising cultures on architecture and urban life, unfolding a typology of spaces produced by homosexual subcultures.

BIOS

Pierre Alexandre Mateos is a Paris-based curator, writer and editor. In collaboration with Charles Teyssou, recent projects include Paris Orbital, a public programme at the Pinault Collection—Bourse de Commerce exploring the intersections of Parisian mythologies and pulp culture, and the co-edited publication Cruising Pavilions: Architecture, Dissident Sex and Cruising Cultures (Spector Books, 2026). Together, they have also curated an exhibition dedicated to Jacques de Bascher at Kunsthalle Bern and Treize, Paris, as well as the internationally acclaimed Cruising Pavilion, first presented at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale. Previously an editor at L'Officiel Art, Mateos regularly contributes to international publications on contemporary art, architecture and culture.

Charles Teyssou is a Paris-based curator, writer and artistic director of Stavanger Secession. In collaboration with Pierre Alexandre Mateos, recent projects include Paris Orbital, a public program at the Pinault Collection—Bourse de Commerce focused on the links between Parisian mythologies and pulp culture, and the co-edited publication Cruising Pavilions: Architecture, Dissident Sex and Cruising Cultures (Spector Books, 2026). In 2020 they curated an exhibition dedicated to Jacques de Bascher at the Kunsthalle Bern and at Treize in Paris.