Room 5

Cities have always had areas on the periphery where working-class leisure was linked to sex work and nightlife. As the contemporary, postindustrial city developed, marginalized communities began to gain a foothold in alternative geographies, constructing heterotopias for community socialization. Cruising is an example of these vital tactics: it describes a furtive drift through a territory of desire where romantic or sexual encounters between men are possible. At the same time, it is in these areas that redefined the urban periphery where artists seeking alternative circuits began to carry out their performances, architectural interventions, or documentary photography practices with a high degree of radicalism. 

This was the case with the New York docks in the early 1980s, San Francisco (the pre-AIDS world gay capital), and the emerging Madrid neighborhood of Chueca. Regarding the first, the Museo Reina Sofía holds a significant collection of works displayed in the exhibition Mixed Use, Manhattan, curated in 2010 by Lynne Cooke and Douglas Crimp.