[[José Esteban Muñoz]] # Cruising Utopia Acknowledgments Introduction: Feeling Utopia 1. Queerness as Horizon: Utopian Hermeneutics in the Face of Gay Pragmatism 19 2. Ghosts of Public Sex: Utopian Longings, Queer Memories 33 3. The Future Is in the Present: Sexual Avant-Gardes and the Performance of Utopia 49 4. Gesture, Ephemera, and Queer Feeling: Approaching Kevin Aviance 65 5. Cruising the Toilet: LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Radical Black Traditions, and Queer Futurity 83 6. Stages: Queers, Punks, and the Utopian Performative 97 7. Utopia’s Seating Chart: Ray Johnson, Jill Johnston, and Queer Intermedia as System 115 8. Just Like Heaven: Queer Utopian Art and the Aesthetic Dimension 131 9. A Jeté Out the Window: Fred Herko’s Incandescent Illumination 147 10. After Jack: Queer Failure, Queer Virtuosity 169 11. Conclusion: “Take Ecstasy with Me” 185 “A map of the world that does not include utopia is not worth glancing at. —Oscar Wilde Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds. Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing. Often we can glimpse the worlds proposed and promised by queerness in the realm of the aesthetic. The aesthetic, especially the queer aesthetic, frequently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity. Both the ornamental and the quotidian can contain a map of the utopia that is queerness. Turning to the aesthetic in the case of queerness is nothing like an escape from the social realm, insofar as queer aesthetics map future social relations. Queerness is also a performative because it is not simply a being but a doing for and toward the future. Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.” (“Cruising Utopia, 10th Anniversary Edition”, p. 1)