This research project examines cruising-related artworks from the past fifteen years to explore the impact that cultural developments and new technologies have had on discourses relating to queer sexuality. Theorising queer sex as haunted – by the sting of abjection, the trauma of loss, the idealistic hopes of liberation and queer futurity – it demonstrates how the gravitational force of these spectral pasts and inchoate futures can overburden sex with meaning, agency and ethicopolitical potential. By adopting an eidolontological mode of analysis – a novel critical methodology I developed that combines hauntology with the concept of the eidolon – each chapter explores artistic case studies undergirded by feelings of crisis, lack and unease. Turning towards these negative feelings allows me to untangle the hauntological dimensions of present-day perspectives on public sex. Cruising can chafe with contemporary homonormative and queer ideals relating to pride, visibility, agency and the careful management of self. Instead of reactively idealising these practices as queerly radical, this project turns towards the complicated aspects of cruising cultures. Each chapter delves into queer sex’s unsettling impurities to determine what we can learn from anxious cruising discourses that foreground the risks of forgetting (Chapter 2), promiscuity and addiction (Chapter 3), silence and invisibility (Chapter 4), and mediated intimacies (Chapter 5). In doing so, the PhD works to deidealise and deperilise dissident sex, untethering it from the responsibility of realising utopia or dystopia.