Founded in 2022 by Irish artists Jack Scollard and Jordan Hearns, SMUT Press has quickly become one of London’s most exciting and innovative independent presses. Over the past two years, SMUT has released zines and photo books by both Scollard and Hearns, as well as fellow queer artists such as Dani d’Ingeo. Their latest release, Cruising Archeology, began life as an Instagram account documenting the detritus and debris discarded in over half a dozen renowned cruising locations around London. With a foreword from author Marcus McCann, the book features over 100 unique relics that serve as a testimonial to the often invisible sexual practice of cruising.

“For queer people, the boundaries between the sexual and the social can be very porous,” Scollard and Hearns tell us. “We would argue that cruising areas are much more than simply sex spaces – that they are also places to socialise and hang out. Against a backdrop of an increasingly privatised public sphere and culture of individualism, cruising areas represent one of the most accessible and wide reaching sites in which strangers from a variety of classes, generations and ethnicities can come to meet and connect.

Outside of erotic framework, cruising teaches us to have a greater degree of empathy and understanding and exemplifies a momentary disposition of care and kindness towards strangers, offering us a new way to think about how we relate to each other in cities.
We would like to thank everyone who came on Saturday to celebrate Cruising Archaeology and to the amazing team of people who helped us to set up. We could not have done it without you.”

Having launched Cruising Archeology at the Paris Ass Book Fair in May, the London launch took place in a well-known cruising area in the Walthamstow Marshes with DJs Seb Odyssey, Jimmy Acid and Bby Guinness performing over a DIY sound system among the trees. Below, we exclusively share imagery of the launch by artist Dani d’Ingeo, showing revellers between the trees as the evening light fades.

Cruising Archeology can be purchased in London in Donlon Books, The Photographer’s Gallery, Tenderbooks, Artwords, and Pages of Hackney, as well as through SMUT Press’s website.

All images by Dani d’Ingeo, courtesy of SMUT Press.