Cruising (novel)

Cruising

First edition cover
Author	Gerald Walker
Language	English
Genre	Crime novel
Publisher	Stein and Day
Publication date	1970
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Hardback)
Pages	192
ISBN	0-8128-1323-5
OCLC	89443
Dewey Decimal	813/.5/4
LC Class	PZ4.W1782 Cr PS3573

Cruising is a novel written by New York Times reporter Gerald Walker and published in 1970.^[1] The novel is about an undercover policeman looking for a homosexual serial killer in the gay New York City of 1970. The murder victims were closeted or relatively open (as open as they could be at the time) men who came across the killer while cruising for sex. While undercover, the policeman develops feelings for his gay neighbor.

The novel is notable for its discussion of gay themes at a time when that was not commonplace. Joseph Hansen was one other writer of the 1970s to incorporate queerness into his crime fiction with his Brandstetter detective series. The first emergence of gay crime fiction was owed to George Baxt, who wrote about the gay detective Pharaoh Love. Hansen, Nava, Zubro and Nathan Aldyne (a pseudonym for Michael Mcdowell and Dennis Schuetz) were authors of crime fiction who also incorporated gay themes into their writing in the 1970s and 1980s, around the time Gerald Walker had written this novel. Neil Placky presents the view "Their books opened doors into gay culture at a time when homosexuality was considered a psychiatric disorder and a sure way to break a mother’s heart".^[2] Cruising explores the main character's identity as an undercover officer and the internal struggle he then faces by entering the subculture of the gay community as a key point of the plot. The novel's plot displays the varying attitudes toward the emerging gay community. In a review published in The Guardian, a year after publication, the reviewer says "Cruising was Gerald Walker's first novel. It took five years to write [...] and of course was turned down by six literary agents and no less than 18 publishers".^[3]