“Queen’s Circle” is an oral history project and live event about the lost art of cruising in public space. Online platforms have replaced this brick-and-mortar social form and the subtle physical gestures that accompany it. I wanted to chronicle these codes while it’s inventors were still alive, and to create a live experience where a younger generation could feel their stories instead of encountering them through the dry pages of text.

Over two years, I interviewed drag queens, dykes, madames, leather daddies, police officers, defense lawyers, health officials, adult actors, politicians, and park rangers about their relationship to the surveillance, management, and celebration of hookup culture in Balboa Park, San Diego, California. Most cities have their special make-out spots, or at least rumors of their bygone days. Though the tales I heard were specific to San Diego, they spoke of a larger social pattern that emerged from when it was illegal to be gay in the US.

I conducted the interviews one-on-one in Lambda LGBTQ archives. I look like a 30-year-old Scottish milkmaid, which was a bit alarming to some of the work-hardened gay male seniors who spoke to me about how they didn’t particularly get along with women. Yet thanks to the quiet anonymity of the interview room, I heard vivid accounts of late-night rambles, infrared surveillance, and courtroom exploits. With the storyteller’s consent, I edited these hour-long audio recordings into ten-minute loops. These stories were staged as a Parkeology event called “Queen’s Circle”—a live installation that lasted from 6-11 pm. In a large parking lot at the edge of Balboa Park (known by the initiated as “The Fruit Loop”), twenty parked, unlocked cars played a different story on their sound system. In the dark of the night, 250 visitors hopped in and out of the cars, listening to tales of brushing shoulders with strangers while experiencing it in real time. Sometimes you would sit in an empty car only to smell it’s former occupant.

Many of the people who practiced the art of cruising didn’t survive it, and accounts of those lost to the AIDS crisis gained special resonance while hearing their bodiless voices ruminating in the night. Using the old performative mode of storytelling, “Queen’s Circle” reanimated the ghost codes, scars, and caresses that formed a constellation around a crumbling Californian parking lot.