GG: Well, the act of cruising, but yes, also the fact that I was there, so that was my sexual education, as opposed to what I think of as a typical heterosexual education, where there are these sort of guardrails that you were talking about. It was interesting for me to learn about the history and the context of cruising in Eastern Europe. And then, I’ve talked before about the fact that one of the sparks for What Belongs to You was discovering that place you mention, the bathrooms underneath the National Palace. Certainly to how I accessed any of the positive effects available to queerness, like community and pleasure and joy and friendship, all of that came through cruising. Cruising has been part of my life since I was 14, and it was central to how I came into my identity as a queer person.
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Garth Greenwell: Oh, well, I didn’t do any academic research.
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And I’m just wondering, what kind of research did you embark on, in terms of the historical context of cruising? And what did you learn about cruising in the west, more generally? I would like to thank Garth Greenwell for taking the time to help me transcribe this conversation which has been slightly edited for clarity.Īndrew Sciallo: In your first book, the main character goes to the National Palace of Culture in Bulgaria to cruise. This painfully and ironically reinforced the argument that Greenwell made throughout our talk: that there is a need and a value for such spaces existing. Since our conversation, which often touched on the importance of queer spaces, an increasing number of those very same spaces are now at risk of disappearing. I sat down with the bestselling author of What Belongs to You and Cleanness, Garth Greenwell last year, after the release of the new anthology of sexy short stories, Kink, which Greenwell co-edited with R.O.