Cruising and Boundary Crossing

The ability to travel, sometimes moving across boundaries of race and class, characterizes male cruising for sex along the Redneck Riviera at midcentury. Access to cars, busses, and boats coupled with the ever expanding and improving transportation infrastructure greatly expanded sexual possibilities for mobile men at this time. In ones and twos they turned their cars into gay spaces, they queered public restrooms, and they found each other on urban streets. Hustlers in Pensacola created networks and shared information about how to procure sexual partners and supplement their incomes, while some played with gender and notions of community. This chapter uses Florida Legislative Investigation Committee interrogations as a guide to the queer geography of the region and explores some of the inventive ways that men took advantage of mobility in the search for sexual partners.