Backward Glances ─ Cruising the Queer Streets of New York and London

Backward Glances explores the history of male street cruising in two world cities. Too often in discussions of urban space and interpretations of urban culture, streetwalking implies a rigid model for the way we inhabit the streets. Beginning with the simple premise that we walk the streets in different ways, Mark W. Turner suggests that male cruising operates through encounter and connection rather than alienation, and that this is the defining experience of modern life.
Backward Glance is the first gay urban history of its kind, examining cruising across a range of cultural material, including novels, poems, pornography, journalism, gay guides, paintings, the internet, and fragments of writing about the city, including Walt Whitman's notebooks and David Hockney's graffiti. It presents a new way of understanding what it means for a man to walk the city's streets. This book is for all readers interested in the life of the city and queer cultural history.

Mark W. Turner is Lecturer in English at King's College, University of London.