In the literature about cruising from the late twentieth century, what stands out is the physical choreography of it. David Wojnarowicz, in his 1991 memoir, “Close to the Knives,” describes walking through abandoned warehouses on Manhattan’s west-side waterfront and “passing through shadowed walls and along hallways, seeing briefly framed in the recesses of a room a series of men in various stages of leaning.” Andrew Holleran, in his 1978 novel, “Dancer from the Dance,” conjures “dark clots of people who coagulate in empty lots, parked trucks, alleyways, worshiping Priapus under the summer moon.” And when Samuel Delany brings a female friend to witness the sexual scene at a late-night movie theatre in Manhattan, in his memoir “Times Square Red, Times Square Blue,” she observes, “There are a lot of people in here walking around . . .”
Delany’s memoir, which was published in 1999, was a lament for the shuttering of urban spaces where people, most of them men seeking men, once went for anonymous sexual encounters. Cruising, broadly defined, is the search for impersonal sex in public places—bathrooms, parks, saunas, movie theatres. It is as old as the existence of cities and traditionally a response to prohibitions on certain kinds of sexual relationships. “Exchanging brief glances or knowing nods at the wall of urinals, tapping the foot, dropping strands of wrinkled toilet paper,” Alex Espinoza writes in “Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime,” from 2019. “We developed ways to communicate in a secret and coded language because we had to.” In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, cruising spots were listed in printed directories, such as Bob Damron’s “Address Book,” a self-published index of gay bars and “cruisy areas” around the country and, eventually, abroad. But in the wake of the AIDS epidemic, and the disappearance of many urban cruising grounds in response to health ordinances and gentrification, an in-person practice shifted online.
In “Petite Mort: Recollections of a Queer Public,” a 2011 collection of essays by writers and artists about public sex in New York City, edited by Carlos Motta and Joshua Lubin-Levy, the tone is unmistakably nostalgic. “There was every combination of guys there: from workmen, delivery boys, shop workers, executives, tourists, random dads, and well . . . you name it,” Aiken Forrett writes of a bathroom on a lower level of the World Trade Center. In the same collection, the legal scholar Katherine Franke chronicles “the afterlife of homophobia,” in which queer sex—following the decriminalization of “sodomy” in the 2003 Supreme Court case Lawrence v. Texas—was legitimatized, but also privatized. Franke calls for something of a reëxamination: “It’s time sex pushed back and resisted a hygienic sexual politics that aims to cleanse homosexuality of its raunchier elaborations.”
The arrival of Grindr, the first major dating app to use geolocation technology, in 2009, marked the start of a new era for dating culture. Its liberatory potential—sex freely available through one’s phone—captured the heterosexual imagination as much as the queer one, and OkCupid, Tinder, Scruff, and Growlr soon mimicked Grindr’s feed, which showed its users’ proximity to one another. But what was initially presented as a new freedom became, over time, its own form of labor: the effort of crafting a sexually appealing profile using select photographs and a short bio; the hours of scrolling. Today, Grindr is perhaps the most popular L.G.B.T.Q. social networks, with more than fourteen million average monthly users, but it has also been blamed for further driving gay life into private spaces—one study found a thirty-six-per-cent decline in the number of L.G.B.T.Q. bars in America from 2007 to 2019.
As the pursuit of sexual connections became increasingly digitized, a palpable longing began to emerge, not for the moral repression that brought cruising into being but for its qualities of anonymity and spontaneity. The novelist Garth Greenwell, in a 2016 essay in praise of cruising, wrote about spaces “in which the radical potential of queerness still inheres, a potential that has been very nearly expunged from a mainstreaming, homonormative version of gay life.” It was in the context of a nostalgia for something less overdetermined that, in 2018, a website called Sniffies.com started to take off.
Sniffies advertises itself as “a map-based app for gay, bi, trans, and curious cruisers.” You can access it through a web browser. There is no requirement to set up a profile, no obligation to upload photographs or even provide an e-mail address. Open it up, log on as an anonymous user, and you’ll get a real-time sexual map of your neighborhood. Sniffies allows users to notify others of their presence at public places such as parks, bars, and gyms, and to invite people to parties in private spaces. “Anybody else here?” a person might post, after arriving at a known cruising ground, many of which predate the internet. The first time I logged on, in Los Angeles, I saw a group gathered near what looked like a highway overpass.
People go on Sniffies not to chat, make friends, or meet for coffee, but with the expectation of immediate sexual gratification. A few users upload photographs of their faces, but most post photos of other body parts first, along with their physical specs, fetishes, H.I.V. status, and comfort level with being around drugs. As one Sniffies enthusiast, who called it “Grindr without the wink,” explained, “On Grindr, the third thing that you send is a picture of your genitalia; on Sniffies, it’s your profile picture.”
“The name came from the idea of sniffing people out, sniffing who’s around,” Sniffies’ founder, Blake Gallagher, who is based in Seattle, told me. In 2018, Gallagher, who was working as an architect but dabbled in computer programming, built a model of the site and posted about it in the Personals section of Craigslist. He posed as a fan, then watched as people logged on. The first two people on the map turned into four, then eight, then sixteen. “It just doubled and doubled,” he said. “I remember looking and realizing that, Wow, there’s only a couple dozen people on this map, they’re miles apart from each other but still in this very urban context of Seattle, and they’re coming back every day.” Soon, he began to notice an ad-hoc user base developing in Houston, then one in Columbus, Ohio, as people found out about the map and shared about it online. He said that it “just sort of organically began to grow.”
Sniffies users will often narrate their trajectory from trepidation to enthusiasm. “Just learned about Sniffies and trying to see if it’s worth it,” one post on Reddit reads. “And also if I’ll get murdered lol. All those headless XXX profile pics give me major back-in-the-day-Craigslist-vibes.”
John Smith (not his real name), a graduate student in art history, remembered a friend showing it to him at the Eagle, a gay bar in Los Angeles. He recalled it as “this awful little blue map”—a sea of sexually explicit photographs, each one belonging to a person potentially seeking an immediate connection. The friend he was with was on there, just another dick pic floating in a blue bubble over the coördinates of East L.A. “It’s, like, Oh, well, I guess we do know each other,” he recalled thinking.
A couple of years later, Smith moved from L.A. to Minneapolis for graduate school and began to view Sniffies differently. “All of the gay bars here suck,” he told me. Grindr wasn’t much better: “I’m sure you’ve heard the joke that a Minnesotan will give you directions to anywhere but their house.” He returned to the app his friend had shown him a few years before. “Sniffies functions slightly more anonymously,” he said. “In Minnesota, it’s just a little bit easier to use because that pressure of being known is removed.”
Even for those in bigger cities, Sniffies seemed to provide a sense of newfound possibility. “For a long time, I felt like maybe the best sexual period of my life was over,” a physician in L.A. told me. He was in a long-term open relationship, and both he and his partner sometimes went on Grindr to meet people. Grindr started crashing on his phone, so he began using Sniffies: “It really felt, like, Oh, I am a sexual being, I am desired, and I can fulfill some of these fantasies.” He described having a “sexual renaissance”—being able to look at the site’s map and see who he might want to hang out with while travelling around the city. “I can wake up on a Saturday and be, like, O.K., I don’t have a lot to do today, I should clean my house, but instead I’m just going to go out and have sex with someone.”
Before long, Sniffies was ubiquitous in most major cities. These days, many users compare the app, sometimes with skepticism, to Uber Eats. Fetishes can be specific—on the map of my neighborhood, the sexual trends have included “CMNM” (short for an asymmetrical encounter of “clothed male, naked male”) and “watersports”—but most of the desires being expressed are straightforward: people say what they offer and what they won’t do. (One person advised sex workers not to message him—he did not pay for “community dick.”) People advertise about missed connections; they check in at a local park; they indicate with a badge if they are willing to host a visitor. There’s a neighborhood bar in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, where people gather surreptitiously for a Sniffies-organized “DL night” (as in “down low,” slang for men who sleep with other men but identify as heterosexual). Attendees are instructed to rip the label on their beer bottles to indicate that they are interested in sex.
On a recent afternoon, I met Gallagher, Sniffies’ founder, in the company’s office in Bushwick, Brooklyn, in a converted factory where unlicensed parties used to be held. “I feel like Bushwick really embodies that Sniffies mentality of just a little underground, a little gritty and cool, kind of up-and-coming,” Eli Martin, the company’s chief marketing officer, told me.
Gallagher and I sat at a table covered with phrases scrawled in paint marker and branded “Hello My Name Is” Sniffies stickers, like the interior of a bar bathroom stall. Post-it notes on the room’s glass wall had ideas for upcoming episodes of “Cruising Confessions,” a podcast that Sniffies produces, which included “wrestling kink,” “cruising for daddies,” and “Jerrod Carmichael or other celeb.” Several coffee tables were decorated with a mix of high and low literature—a vintage pornographic paperback called “Crotch Bait” sat next to a Semiotext(e) edition of “I Could Not Believe It: The 1979 Teenage Diaries of Sean DeLear.” Sniffies prides itself as a product made “by enthusiasts, for enthusiasts,” and most of the people milling around the office were young and queer.
Gallagher, who is forty-four years old, wore a tip-dyed black sweatshirt, jeans, and high-tops. He still lives in Seattle, and was in town for a semi-annual meeting of all the company’s employees. (The fifty-plus-person workforce is mostly remote.) As an architect, Gallagher had worked for more than a decade on large-scale projects such as airports, hospitals, and residential towers. In the mid-twenty-tens, he picked up coding as a hobby, at first just teaching himself basic skills, “like how you would animate the Fibonacci spiral or something like that,” he told me, and then moving on to imagining products he might build. He was interested in the way that popular apps such as Uber and Pokémon Go were changing how humans navigate physical space—“these sorts of technological products that were layering themselves into our urban environments in ways that we had never seen before,” he said. Gallagher began tailoring his coding toward mapping, asking himself what a social network might look like if it were visible geographically. When he looked for a theme that would draw the users together, his mind turned to cruising—“a layer that existed within our urban experience that no one really talks about.”
