Hummers In the Park
The New York Times published an article this morning about public sex this morning, and Andy Towle is apoplectic. I'm merely nonplussed.
While I share Andy's basic concern, i.e., Why was this article published?, I fail to share his outrage. It's not as if an article about gay men having sex in public is exactly news, since there's nothing new about it. Gay men have been poking (heh heh) around in the bushes ever since there were men and bushes.
There are two things I found most interesting about the piece. One was the matter-of-fact listing of cruising spots on Long Island and the outer boroughs, e.g., "Two Mile Hollow Beach in East Hampton, the Field 6 parking lot at Jones Beach, a rest stop near Exit 52 on the Long Island Expressway and the park-and-ride lot on Route 110 in Melville," news that was once usually confined to the pages of a Damron guide.
The other was the mechanics of the cruising at the spot the author visited (Cunningham Park in Queens). It seems that since there are no readily accessible bathrooms or shrubbery, men do the deed entirely within their cars, with perhaps an occasional trip to a motel for a longer-term hookup.
The Times has been writing articles about the lives of gay men with apparent increasing frequency. One of Andy's commentators noted that the Times recently posted an article about gay black churches in Brooklyn. However, it seems that there is no effort to tie these explorations of gay life together, or even to acknowledge that these pieces are explorations.
Surely we have arrived at a place where we can examine what it means to live life day to day as a gay man without worrying whether the examination shines an unfavorable light. Today's article briefly touches on the fact that many of the men who have sex at Cunningham Park are married. Are these men secretly gay or bisexual? If so, why didn't the Times write an article about them? Why didn't the Times write about the tensions of being a man who is married and has children yet who is also sexually drawn to men?
Perhaps some of these men aren't really gay at all. How does a man who has no appreciable sexual attraction to men find himself in Cunningham Park getting a hummer in the back of his Grand Cherokee? And how did he find out where to go?
Perhaps the most revealing insight of the whole article is that the cruising takes place within plain sight of the entire park community, yet is invisible to them. Softball players and soccer moms use the lot as well. When asked about the cruising, Mark Haken, the president of the Friends of Cunningham Park said that he was "totally unaware" of the sexual activity, although he added "I don't think that 10-year-olds in a parking lot on the way to soccer should see some guy getting oral sex in a car."
That's where Andy blew up.
We see what we want to see, even in one of the most populous and crowded cities in the world.
While I share Andy's basic concern, i.e., Why was this article published?, I fail to share his outrage. It's not as if an article about gay men having sex in public is exactly news, since there's nothing new about it. Gay men have been poking (heh heh) around in the bushes ever since there were men and bushes.
There are two things I found most interesting about the piece. One was the matter-of-fact listing of cruising spots on Long Island and the outer boroughs, e.g., "Two Mile Hollow Beach in East Hampton, the Field 6 parking lot at Jones Beach, a rest stop near Exit 52 on the Long Island Expressway and the park-and-ride lot on Route 110 in Melville," news that was once usually confined to the pages of a Damron guide.
The other was the mechanics of the cruising at the spot the author visited (Cunningham Park in Queens). It seems that since there are no readily accessible bathrooms or shrubbery, men do the deed entirely within their cars, with perhaps an occasional trip to a motel for a longer-term hookup.
The Times has been writing articles about the lives of gay men with apparent increasing frequency. One of Andy's commentators noted that the Times recently posted an article about gay black churches in Brooklyn. However, it seems that there is no effort to tie these explorations of gay life together, or even to acknowledge that these pieces are explorations.
Surely we have arrived at a place where we can examine what it means to live life day to day as a gay man without worrying whether the examination shines an unfavorable light. Today's article briefly touches on the fact that many of the men who have sex at Cunningham Park are married. Are these men secretly gay or bisexual? If so, why didn't the Times write an article about them? Why didn't the Times write about the tensions of being a man who is married and has children yet who is also sexually drawn to men?
Perhaps some of these men aren't really gay at all. How does a man who has no appreciable sexual attraction to men find himself in Cunningham Park getting a hummer in the back of his Grand Cherokee? And how did he find out where to go?
Perhaps the most revealing insight of the whole article is that the cruising takes place within plain sight of the entire park community, yet is invisible to them. Softball players and soccer moms use the lot as well. When asked about the cruising, Mark Haken, the president of the Friends of Cunningham Park said that he was "totally unaware" of the sexual activity, although he added "I don't think that 10-year-olds in a parking lot on the way to soccer should see some guy getting oral sex in a car."
That's where Andy blew up.
From sentence one the writer chooses to associate the gay men cruising with the children playing baseball. Just sick. While the suggestion that cruising in rest areas and parking lots is a behavior common among all gay men is disgusting enough, this further association with pedophilia is not something I thought I'd see ever happen in the Times.I think Andy's (and Mark Haken's) concern is misplaced. Doesn't the fact that the cruising has happened under the noses of the softball players and soccer moms for so long establish that innocent 10-year-olds will not interrupt a vehicular rendezvous? The cruising spot exists because it is invisible, yet it is invisible in an extremely visible spot.
We see what we want to see, even in one of the most populous and crowded cities in the world.
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