Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The Virtual Life of Sex in Public 2. Intimacies in the Multi(player)verse 3. Feeling Black and Blue 4. Justin Fucks the Future 5. The Élan Vital of DIY Porn Coda: On Not Hooking Up Notes Bibliography Index

"Most poignant are McGlotten's inclusions, stated in the first person, of his own experiences with contemporary queer sociality and its discontents. Academic writing on sex often leaves little room for the body and desire of the academic himself. McGlotten breaks this silence, insisting on the relevance of his own place in his research." — Qui Parle"This work is an original and finely crafted contribution, from an important new voice. Incisively reading personal/political longings and laying bare aspects of the author's own lifeworlds, here, Shaka McGlotten offers a close and compelling (auto)ethnographic account of what it is we look for when we login, cruise (by), remember, and look forward. Chronicling how we live lives of both virtuality and embodiment today—working, playing, desiring, losing, and dying—McGlotten's work is among the best of what is new in ethnographic writing." — Jafari S. Allen, author of ¡Venceremos? The Erotics of Black Self-making in Cuba"While the book deals with a diversity of topics from online games to black identity politics, cruising grounds, and avant-garde porn, it also weaves them together by means of a theoretical argument and a sound writer's voice." — Katrien Jacobs, author of People's Pornography: Sex and Surveillance on the Chinese Internet"Virtual Intimacies is a great book, breathtaking in its aesthetic, ethnographic, and attuned attention to the multiple mediations of an affectively attached life. Bodies and play, desire and violence, outreach and evasion, intensity and diffusion: the contemporary world of virtual embodiment is all here, and as a teacher and individual parsing the world I am so grateful to have read this." — Lauren Berlant, author of Cruel Optimism and Desire/Love