public sex

A Nova Scotia Mayor Wants to Close a Public Park to Cruising. Here’s Why That’s a Terrible Idea

Citing his Christian beliefs, and the worry that a pedophile-rights group might one day want to fly a flag of their own, Nova Scotia’s Bill Mills, the mayor of Truro, refused to fly a rainbow flag at city hall during pride week in 2007. His latest foray shutting out the gays? Closing off vehicle access to certain area of of Victoria Park — which local gays, and Mills, know to be a cruising hot spot. The Dutch city Slotervaart, southwest of Amsterdam, faced the same issue and opted to post signs in De Oeverlanden Park warning visitors of gay cruising areas so man- and dog-lovers could avoid one another. Two reasonable different solutions to the same problem of people having sex in public areas ostensibly nearby families and children. But should Truro tolerate public sex (as some horny man-lovers in the area prefer) or zone it out of existence? And is wanting rid an area of illegal public sex in and of itself homophobic?

You may imagine gay cruising areas as seedy spaces filled with closeted, sex-addicted men grabbing their crotches and blowing each other in the nearest bush or bathroom stall. Will your five-minute lover be a meth-head, your married boss, a cop, or a gay-basher? You don’t know! But they’re not always so fraught with horrors. Some of these spots are just meeting places for gay men to consensually get their rocks off, not much worse than the backrooms of bars you may attend (sometimes without knowing it, as we had the unfortunate experience of realizing once).

But while it makes better sense to fight for gay cruising areas in areas without other meet-n-greet options, upholding them as “a gay right” is untenable. Nevermind that park cruising, despite being one of George Michael‘s pastimes, exists in an era pre-Manhunt and Grindr. It’s also illegal. And should be. No one wants to sit in spunk or accidentally pick up a Santorum-covered condom. And parents should not have to worry about their children, toddlers or teens, being exposed to public sex, homo or otherwise.

 
 

But proponents of cruising areas aren’t looking to repeal sex laws so much as suggest better ways to expend public resources. Take Victoria Park for example. According to one report, there have been 45 complaints in the park in the past four years—only one has been of an indecent act and two of public nudity. That’s hardly worth spending thousands of Canadian dollars to reconstruct one of its entrances. In contrast, the signs warning people of gay sex areas in De Oeverlanden Park seem not only a permissive, but pragmatic alternative.

Keep in mind, rezoning to ban vehicles is not a politically neutral act. It’s never just about increasing property values through gentrification. Behind it lays a desire to segregate and control physical and psychological space. Consider the scouring of Times Square in 1993 by then-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. He’s credited with driving out the prostitutes and porn cinemas that gave Times Square its sleazy, blighted, and crime-ridden reputation, and transforming the area into a world-class tourist destination where AMC, Disney, and Viacom could take their places. (That there’s also a giant Hershey’s store is not, the NYC tourism board assures us, a nod to the gays.)

On one hand, Times Square before its transformation was a hell hole. There were 2,300 crimes on the block in 1984 alone, 20 percent of them serious felonies such as murder or rape. Let William J. Stern, head of the Mayor Cuomo’s Urban Development Corporation, take you on a quick tour through the sleaze:

“No legitimate business—indeed, scarcely a normal person—would willingly visit so blighted and threatening an area. As head of the UDC during the mid-eighties, I would walk through Times Square at night, a state trooper by my side, and feel revulsion. We’d hurry past prostitute-filled single-room-occupancy hotels and massage parlors, greasy spoons and pornographic bookstores; past X-rated movie houses and peep shows and a pathetic assortment of junkies and pushers and johns and hookers and pimps—the whole panorama of big-city low life. Everywhere I’d look, I’d see—except for female prostitutes—only men. A UDC study later verified my impression empirically: 90 percent of those who walked Times Square’s streets were adult males. Times Square was haunted with them, like a circle of lost souls in Dante.”

But in scrubbing that hell to a heavenly shine, gay sci-fi writer Samuel Delaney argues that the city had to wage an ideological battle against part of its cultural population. He details this struggle in his book on the area’s transformation, “Times Square Red, Times Square Blue”:

“In order to bring about this redevelopment, the city has instituted not only a violent reconfiguration of its own landscape but also a legal and moral revamping of its own discursive structures, changing laws about sex, health, and zoning, in the course of which it has been willing even anxious to exploit everything from homophobia and AIDS to family values and fear of drugs…

The idea that all that is going was ugly and awful is as absurd as it would be to propose that what was there was only of any one moral color. What was there was a complex of interlocking systems and subsystems…some of those subsystems were surprisingly beneficent—beneficent in ways that will be lost permanently unless people report on their own contact and experience with those subsystems.”

One need only consider the closing of The Gaiety Theater, Manhattan’s last male strip club, to get a sense of lost counter-cultural world that once thrived there: “Andy Warhol, John Waters, and Divine were all patrons back in the day but the theatre attracted legions more…In 1992 Madonna published her Sex book and shined a spotlight on the theatre, employing some of its dancers, along with porn star Joey Stefano and German cult movie actor Udo Kier in her erotic adventure.” Such exceptional spaces have been sterilized and wiped away without a transplant. When we lose those spaces, we also lose an creative link to gay culture.

That’s not to say that Victoria Park’s gay cruising area would become a gay cultural mecca if only Mayor Mills would let it be!

 
 

But Mills’ desire to close it is certainly a form of sexual control, if not homophobic censorship. Fucking in public is the most counter-cultural act there is. It’s an expression of sexual liberation and cums in the face of any moral and social constraint. Mills would rather do away with it than ask why Truro’s men are going there in the first place.

Looking at the Rainbow Proud organizational website, one gets the sense that Nova Scotia’s Truro is no Times Square. It’s entirely possible that Victoria Park has remained an important outlet for gay sexual behavior because the conservative city has few venues to express that desire elsewhere. Undoubtedly, any attempts to curb gay hookups in Victoria Park could ensure that humping homos pop up in less savory places, putting the city’s gay population and its municipal powers even moreso at odds. (Glory holes inside the City Hall loos, anyone?)

In the meantime, Mills is under investigation for hate crimes for singling out gay sex as the reason behind his Victoria Park zoning proposal. Meanwhile, the city council is searching for other, non-sexual reasons to reduce vehicle access to the park (pedestrian safety, anyone?). But they’ve delayed a vote, possibly with an eye towards letting the issue die a quiet death.

To envision the end game of Mill’s proposal, one need only consider that that the “complete and literal” Disneyfication of Time Square that’s upon us. In Fall 2010, Disney will open up a princess castle store featuring theme park attractions, children’s exhibits, and an animation/storytelling theater. The space, which was once a nightclub, is now family-friendly, scrubbed of all character, and entirely infantilized through a desire to make it profitable, tourist-friendly place (though one hardly wholesome).

That’s not to say that Disney inevitably pops up in any place we scrub clean of sex. People may well start rebelliously fucking in Disney’s bathrooms as a way to reclaim the space. But perhaps Disney is the best antithesis to public sex areas imaginable. Hell, they even scrubbed the adultery out of Hercules, though they still managed to slip a cock into the poster of The Little Mermaid.

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