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Park Cruising: What Happens When We Wander Off the Path
An intimate look at one of culture’s most enduring taboos: public sex. Park Cruising takes a long look at the men who cruise for sex in urban parks. Human rights lawyer Marcus McCann uses park cruising as a point of departure for discussions of consent, empathy, public health, municipal planning, and our relationship to strangers. Prompted by his work opposing a police sting in a suburban park, McCann’s ruminations go beyond targeted enforcement and police indifference to violence to examine cruising as a type of world-building. The result is a series of insightful and poetic walks through history, law, literature, and popular representations of cruising in search of the social value of sex. What McCann ultimately reveals is a world of connection, care, and unexpected lessons about the value of pleasure.
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Published May 2, 2023
About the author
Marcus McCann
4 books20 followersMarcus McCann is a poet and journalist. He grew up in Hamilton. From 2006-2011, he worked at Xtra, where he held various posts including managing editor of both the Toronto and Ottawa editions. He’s the author of two books of poems, Soft Where and The Hard Return, and a number of chapbooks. He was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert and Robert Kroetsch awards, and he’s won the John Newlove Award and the EJ Pratt Medal for poetry. He now lives in Toronto.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 45 reviews
July 21, 2024
Canadian human rights lawyer Marcus McCann ponders legal regulations regarding sex between consenting adults, and how sex-negative moral standpoints cause morally motivated policing (rather than policing that actually protects citizens, especially minorities). His main example, as the title indicates: Gay men cruising in parks. We all remember the scandal around singer George Michael, who was arrested and publicly shamed for his cruising activities - but he refused to feel responsible for other people's moral indignation about his private behaviors and instead turned the whole incident into this iconic masterpiece. McCann's book is legally supported activism that revolves around this whole point: He questions what harm might actually be done, and what might be the individual and social benefits of gay cruising, bath houses, sex clubs etc.
McCann particularly talks about safety issues, about consent and health, about questions of class, gender and sexual orientation. He also illustrates the history of public sex and how today's police activities (in Canada) miss the mark when it comes to actually increasing safety and justice.
So sure, the whole book aims to support McCann's convictions, and he also states that cruising is apparently a controversial issue in the gay community, but I have to admit that I've never heard anyone argue from his standpoint, especially supported with legal arguments, so for me, this was very informative and it broadened my perspective. It also made me question many aspects of the law's approach towards regulating sexuality, especially as legal norms are nothing but moral convictions written down by the people's representatives and interpreted by legal professionals. Who do we as a society want to protect, and from what?
McCann particularly talks about safety issues, about consent and health, about questions of class, gender and sexual orientation. He also illustrates the history of public sex and how today's police activities (in Canada) miss the mark when it comes to actually increasing safety and justice.
So sure, the whole book aims to support McCann's convictions, and he also states that cruising is apparently a controversial issue in the gay community, but I have to admit that I've never heard anyone argue from his standpoint, especially supported with legal arguments, so for me, this was very informative and it broadened my perspective. It also made me question many aspects of the law's approach towards regulating sexuality, especially as legal norms are nothing but moral convictions written down by the people's representatives and interpreted by legal professionals. Who do we as a society want to protect, and from what?
June 3, 2023
i’m pretty sure i’m a lawyer now
March 6, 2024
A very insightful philosophy of sex-positivity.
January 15, 2024
Micro-history at its finest. Very good summation of primarily Canadian responses to cruising— something that has happened since the 15th century! Essays were organized and structured well, containing personal accounts, urban planning strategies, unruly police stings, and Supreme Court case law. McCann gives readers a well thought out introduction to the topic and contains sources of other readings to learn even more.
May 17, 2023
I loved this book of essays on park cruising by Toronto lawyer and cruiser Marcus McCann. Also loved being in the boisterous and salacious crowd celebrating its launch a couple of weeks ago at Glad Day Bookshop. I still imagine the book as flowing primarily from resistance against 2016 police operations targeting cruising in Marie Curtis Park in Etobicoke by the Queers Crash the Beat collective, although only one or two of the essays are really about that topic. (I remember vividly reading in the Star at the time that it was uncovered that the cop who seemed to be both primarily pushing for police intervention and who was actually doing the entrapment of men in the park was himself facing sexual misconduct charges within the force.) But each of the other essays in the book look at cruising from other angles: the pleasure of cruising itself, the spaces that lend themselves to cruising, park cruising and consent, park cruising and urban planning, the history of the law of indecency in Canada, park cruising and gaybashing, and more. McCann's writing swept me away.
July 4, 2024
Was on libby looking for books on urban design (I think that I straight up searched 'Parks') and found this book by a local author I'd never heard of. I didn't really have any expectations, but this book completely blew me away. It's a collection of essays featuring some fantastic Canadian history at the level of policy, activist groups, and individuals, all coming together to try and answer what place sexuality has in a country whose laws only ever frame it as either a risk or an attack on public decency. McCann is a charming and persuasive figure throughout, giving his own experiences when relevant while always staying focused on the core topic of each chapter.
I found this book looking for something about urban planning, realized it was so much more, then was blindsided again when it STILL had really interesting information about ways to design parks that meet the needs of their communities.
I found this book looking for something about urban planning, realized it was so much more, then was blindsided again when it STILL had really interesting information about ways to design parks that meet the needs of their communities.
February 28, 2024
4.5/5–McCann’s is the kind of riveting scholarship where even the Notes section is engaging. With a literary sleight of hand, he turns what could have been static legal arguments or single-minded advocacy into nuanced, convivial excursions into the heart of desire and its antagonists. He has a warm, open style and a naturalist’s eye for landscape description, and he’s a fleet, incisive thinker, his lawyerly aptitude for connection and proof offering clarity.
Like McCann on a beach outing, “Park Cruising” swings from Grindr messages to heady theoretical texts, and everywhere in between. Though we could hear more from park cruisers themselves, the reading experience remains brisk, never bogged down, immersing you in the sweep of cause and effect, prejudice and progress. Among other pursuits as far-ranging as the inherent sexiness of consent, the defining features of indecency, and chilling attacks in 1989 Ottawa and beyond, McCann connects police intervention in park cruising to larger patterns of racism, excessive policing, and societal notions of sexual morality. His argument returning, fruitfully, to the sexy possibilities and social benefits of park cruising and not its nebulous, unfounded social detriments.
“Park Cruising” will leave you feeling empowered, whatever your persuasion or proclivity.
Like McCann on a beach outing, “Park Cruising” swings from Grindr messages to heady theoretical texts, and everywhere in between. Though we could hear more from park cruisers themselves, the reading experience remains brisk, never bogged down, immersing you in the sweep of cause and effect, prejudice and progress. Among other pursuits as far-ranging as the inherent sexiness of consent, the defining features of indecency, and chilling attacks in 1989 Ottawa and beyond, McCann connects police intervention in park cruising to larger patterns of racism, excessive policing, and societal notions of sexual morality. His argument returning, fruitfully, to the sexy possibilities and social benefits of park cruising and not its nebulous, unfounded social detriments.
“Park Cruising” will leave you feeling empowered, whatever your persuasion or proclivity.
April 1, 2024
am I ever gonna go park cruising? no. but its always fun to be well informed. super approachable and compellingly written, with such obvious compassion etc etc. a great mix of theory, social policy, politics, law, the personal and more. I can only apologise for the ways in which im gonna bastardise these great essays for my AOM essay, oops.
June 15, 2024
Loved this book. Chocked full of great essays.
September 17, 2023
This was a great non-academic glance at cruising, a queer practice that as McCann mentions, remains under-discussed (in part, on purpose), and often condemned (by even queer people, something that McCann also explores). This book introduces cruising as a practice in community care, as instruction for consent, as a prompt for abolition--and it does these things through McCann's personal reflections on his own experiences cruising, and the 2016 police raids at his local Toronto cruising spot, where at least seventy-two men were arrested.
The book's center comes at the very beginning: "The law does not have language that accounts for park cruising as something that may contain elements of social good." McCann is a lawyer, in addition to being a writer. Throughout the book, he weaves together analyses of city planning, lessons pulled both from the AIDS crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, and a history of indecency laws to ultimately argue for sex-positive approaches to law. While I found that the book was at its strongest when McCann's personal experiences were at the center (leaning on his background as a poet), the legal argument was quite engaging and very interesting to me as someone without a legal background, but an interest in abolition!
I found this book quietly tucked away towards the back of the queer books section at my favorite queer-coded bookstore in DC. It having caught my eye, just a bit off of the path, feels only right! I'd recommend for fans of Gay Bar by Jeremy Atherton Lin, We Do This 'Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba, or anyone interested in city planning and public spaces.
The book's center comes at the very beginning: "The law does not have language that accounts for park cruising as something that may contain elements of social good." McCann is a lawyer, in addition to being a writer. Throughout the book, he weaves together analyses of city planning, lessons pulled both from the AIDS crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, and a history of indecency laws to ultimately argue for sex-positive approaches to law. While I found that the book was at its strongest when McCann's personal experiences were at the center (leaning on his background as a poet), the legal argument was quite engaging and very interesting to me as someone without a legal background, but an interest in abolition!
I found this book quietly tucked away towards the back of the queer books section at my favorite queer-coded bookstore in DC. It having caught my eye, just a bit off of the path, feels only right! I'd recommend for fans of Gay Bar by Jeremy Atherton Lin, We Do This 'Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba, or anyone interested in city planning and public spaces.
January 2, 2024
Reading this book felt like someone was gentle parenting me through all my misconceptions about cruising.
July 18, 2024
A compelling and sex-positive exploration of the outdoor spaces frequented by men who cruise for sex in public. The book also contains essential details on the queer history of Toronto.
June 16, 2023
Combining personal insight with a keen legal and academic analysis, McCann persuasively argues for a common sense revisioning of public sex in a way that is queer and radical yet practical and grounded.
May 27, 2024
McCann's book addresses the issue of cruising in public spaces, specifically, public parks in Canada. He places gay cruising in a larger legal context in a collection of articles that have been collected together to address this issue.
Here is adhesiveness, it is not previously fashion’d,
its is apropos;
Do you know what it is as you pass to be loved
by strangers?
Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road”
Park cruising is a site of identity formation. It can reduce loneliness and the attendant risks that come with isolation. It is a site of the distribution of sex material (and, in the age of COVID-19, it reduces the spread of airborne pathogens among sexual partners). It takes place away from commercial spaces, and people don't need money to engage it. It can lend distinctiveness to a place and become a source of tourism. 9
CRUISING
The terms “cursing” and “public sex” are often used synonymously, but that's not quite right. Cruising is a way of looking, a way of making yourself available to meeting people. The natural corollary is that cruising is also way of being seen. When people cruise in parks, they are using coded signs-loitering, prolonged eye contact, a strategic tug-to indicate sexual availability. The sex that follows, if it follows, can take place anywhere: in the park, a bathroom, a car, someone's home.
The academic Leo Bersani wants described cruising as “sexual sociability,” which is partway there. For me at least, the defining characteristic of cruising is it porousness. Cruisers show deliberate vulnerability toward strangers. They develop an alertness to the way other people—very often people outside of their ordinary social worlds-are thinking and feeling in any particular moment. Most cruisers would be hesitant to describe these as social or emotional skills, but that is just what they are, and they are powerful and underused, both in and out of the sexual milieu. 11
CRUISING & PUBLIC SEX
Park Cruising is a lot older than most people think. Michael Rocke has written about street cruising in fifteenth-century Florence. Neil Bartlett Records an example of cruising told as witness testimony from a trial in London in 1742. Walt Whitman cruised New York in the nineteenth century. It turns out that park cruising long predates the invention of a homosexual identity in the 1860s. 14
CRUISING
Most cruising encounters, in Delany's estimation, are “affable but brief.” When you have sex with a stranger qua stranger, you're not necessarily reinforcing your relationship with that person. Rather, as Delany points out, your reinforcing your relationship to a loose associative network, a network of friends, neighbours, and indeed, complete strangers.
Michael Warner riffs on this idea in his book The Trouble with Normal. “Contrary to myth,” he says, "what one relishes and loving strangers is not mere anonymity, meaningless release. It is the pleasure of belonging to a sexual world, in which one sexuality finds an answering residence not just one another, but in a world of others.” 26
COMMUNITY: SAMUEL DELANY; MICHAEL WARNER
But nothing is one thing only. Our experiences are multiple, overflowing, sometimes contradictory. “My desire is the surest of guides,” André Gide wrote, ,” and this morning I am in love with the whole world. A thousand luminous threads cross in entwine on my heart.” 27
COMMUNITY: ANDRE GIDE
I often think of the ways in which non-monogamous and queer people build intimate relationships not with one or two people but as a kind of fabric is interwoven strand overlap. My lovers are connected to their lovers, who are connected to others I have never met. Or, Samuel R. Delany says of his relationships in New York's porn theatres, “They braided. They interwove. They were simultaneous.” 33
CONNECTIONS: SAMUEL DELANY
Even if the relationship between cruising and democracy is fuzzy, the idea’s very persistence holds important truths. Instead of “democracy,” I am tempted to say “Community,” or or “neighbourliness,” or perhaps even “empathy.” Park cruising is a practice that connects people. It requires participants to watch, to see and about how strangers are acting and what it means about how they think and feel. This feeling of empathy is captured by Delany's concept of contact: the stranger remains strange, so park cruisers train themselves to remain open toward people they do not know with whom they may never develop a deeper connection. 33-34
COMMUNITY: SAMUEL DELANY
Whether we realize it or not, our wider and looser networks spread out and lighten the burden on anyone node. Our communities are stretchy, elastic. There is give. That is the one lesson of the AIDS crisis. The impact of a personal tragedy spreads from an epicentre, but when we are at our best, the fibres of our communities provide support with some degree of elasticity. 34
COMMUNITY & SUPPORT
As Mark W. Turner has said, “Cruising is the stuff of fleeting, ephemeral moments not intended to be captured. The problem with writing about cruising is that of writing about many other urban experiences-it doesn't remain static, it passes quickly, it's over in the time it takes to shift one’s eyes.” 36-37
CRUISING
The public indecency charges that stemmed from the Village Mall sting were dubious. To find someone guilty of public indecency, the Crown must establish that the indecent activity was conducted in front of one or more persons. This may sound obvious, but most people stop engaging in sexual activities if a non-participant stumbles upon the scene, usually before that person sees anything. In places where non-participant is more likely to appear, cruising norms in corporate stop-and-start pattern into the rhythm of the encounter. 40
PUBLIC INDECENCY
Novelist Garth Greenwell writes that one of the virtues of cruising spaces is that they present “the possibility of being surprised by desire, of having an unexpected response to the presence of another.” To be surprised by desire be wrenched out of your ordinary way of seeing, of feeling. And to be surprised by desire is, for many people, to be over burdened with feelings of shame and self hatred and helplessness. And what could be scarier than that? 44
DESIRE
…echoes Patrick Califia’ comments in his essay “Sexual Outlaws v. the Sex Police” 20 years earlier. Califia points out the police go to great lakes to protect men from being solicited but that the same police steadfastly refused to protect women from street harassment or queer people from gaybashing. It's a matter of priorities, Califia says. 70-71
POLICE
The 1981 bathhouse raids are iconic not because of the actions of the police but because of the community’s response. The night after the raids, thousands of people took to the streets and protest and fought back against the crowd control measures of the police. “No more shit!” They chanted. The men who were charged fought in court and, mostly, they won. 92
BATHHOUSE RAIDS
The other reason Marie Curtis Park has remained popular for so long is that it is a good example of an “unruly site,” to use geographer Matthew Gandy's term. 98
PUBLIC SEX
…to Gandy, there is an "innate connection” between public space and sex. But the apparatus of control of public displays of sexuality is never complete, and sometimes loses its grip. This can happen at unruly sites, which Gandy defines as places “that do not play a clearly defined role, or characterized by ill-defined use or ownership, that app uses other than those for which they were originally intended.” 99
PUBLIC SEX
The New York City Piers of the 1970s and 1980s are described in a similar way by Jonathan Weinberg, who credits “disuse and collapse” for creating circumstances in which a public sex culture was able to flourish. His book on the subject, Pier Groups, ends with a meditation on the city’s High Line, the elevated train line turned public park, which has evoked so much praise from urban planners. Weinberg calls it “linear, prescribed, and curated,” the antithesis of unruly spaces like the piers. “The waterfront,” he writes, “once a site of capitalist power, was at least for a brief time cracked open, overrun.” 99-100
PUBLIC SEX-NYC PIERS
In 2005, The U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services produced a guide that summarized the tools available for police to combat park cruising and other types of public sexual activity. To its credit, the Department of Justice discouraged raids and crackdowns as expensive, temporary, and prone to backfiring. Instead, it mainly recommended ways to eliminate environmental factors that provided privacy, some of which will sound familiar. 100
PUBLIC POLICY
This is morality-first planning, extreme spatial reconfigurations prompted by a kind of social unease. It goes beyond the idea that people should be protected from seeing cruising. The goal is to root cruising even when it is unseen, and in that sense, it is intended to comfort those who were distressed by the mere idea that it is taking place. 103
MORALITY
As Marsha McLeod and Jen Roberton pointed out in Spacing magazine shortly after Project Marie, planning 10 and should count for the mixed used character of such bases not by designing cruising out of parks but through inclusive design. They say Amsterdam’s Vondelpark, were sexual activities are permitted as long as participants stay away from open areas, only in the evening or overnight, and clean up after themselves. 108
DESIGN
To combat public urination, city officials built many new toilets and public spaces and parks. The city introduce streetlight to reduce the number of dark streets at night. And campaigns for street lights and public washrooms were undertaken for the purposes of hygiene and safety, Valverde says, they were also driven by the idea that they would stamp out vice. Almost immediately, men began to use the new public washrooms to meet each other, and according to Maynard these spaces became the site of cruising and sex. 114
PUBLIC TOILETS
The full complexity of the lives of men who met for sex in Toronto parks and alleyways a hundred years ago is lost to us. Court records can only tell their stories in the context of a legal proceeding. But even from these incomplete account, it is clear these men are not so different from today's park cruisers. Their motivations were messy and complicated, their actions at turns brazen and furtive, source of anxiety and fear and pleasure and connection. 115
CRUISING
For almost all the post-Confederation period, Canada has had two prohibitions on public indecency. The first is simply called “indecency,” captured by section 173(1) of the Criminal Code. Indecency is the provision that ostensively prohibits, among other things, park sex. In order to convict, the act must be found to be indecent, and in addition it requires both that the act be conducted in a public place and the presence of one or more other people.
There has long been a companion to indecency that captured similar activities even when they take place indoors. Section 197 of the Criminal Code prohibited being a proprietor or patron of “a common bawdy house” if indecent acts took place there. This prohibition has been used to target strip clubs, sex clubs, and bathhouses. But because there is no definition of “indecent” in the Criminal Code the parameters of indecency were set up by courts in interpreting these two provisions.
For almost one hundred years-from 1868 to 1962-the test for what was “indecent” was whether the activity would tend to corrupt the morals of those who might be susceptible. Built into this definition was an assumption that a certain kind of person-White, Male, upper class-could be exposed to vice with without temptation but that others were more vulnerable, especially women, Young people, Indigenous and other racialized people, and working classes. This also highlighted a pre-Stonewall lack of rigidity around categories of sexual identity. Working class men and men of poor moral character were imagine to be susceptible to being glued into same sex licentiousness and vice. 115-116
Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, known as the Wolfenden Report, there was a wave of legislative reform that in Canada culminated in 1969 with the partial decriminalization of sex between men….Sex between men was permitted under three conditions: the participants had to be twenty-one years of age or older; the encounter could only be between two (and not more than two) men; and sex had to take place in private. 116
INDECENCY
It was after the 1957 release of the Wolfenden Report but before the 1969 amendments to Canada Criminal Code that the legal tests of “indecency” changed. In 1962, following amendment to the Code, the Supreme Court’s decision in R v. Brodie removed the requirement that judges consider the corruption of morals of those who are susceptible. The test was reconceived as one of community standards of tolerance, which indecency has that which the community has a whole would not abide other people doing. 117
INDECENCY
Today, the test for indecency is, well, a bit of a mouthful. It comes from a pair of decisions affectionally known in legal circles as the Montreal swingers’ club decisions. Those cases, R. v. Labaye and R. v. Kouri, were released in 2005, and in them the Supreme Court updated the definition of indecency for the first time since 1962…
Under the new definition of indecency, the Crown must prove two things. First, it must establish that the alleged indecent act “causes harm or presents a significant risk of harm to individuals or society in a way that undermines or threatens to undermine of value reflected in and thus formally endorsed through the Constitution or similar fundamental laws.” The court has given some examples of how this branch of the test can be met-for example, by “confronting members of the public with conduct that significantly interferes with their autonomy and liberty” or "predisposing others to anti-social behaviour.”
The Crown is also required to prove the second branch of the test, which is that the harm caused by the supposedly indecent act must be serious. Although judges can enforce this more or less stringently, the Supreme Court’s guidance on this point is that, in order to qualify as indecent, “the harm or risk of harm [must be] of a degree that is incompatible with the proper functioning of society.” As shorthand, lawyers called this two-part analysis the “harm test.” 125-126
INDECENCY
Canada has not seen a major bathhouse raid since the Montreal swingers’ club decisions were handed down in 2005. I am reluctant to say the Supreme Court decriminalized bathhouses and sex clubs, because the Criminal Code provision of operating a bawdy house for the purpose of indecent acts was not replaced until 2019. And as we saw with police investigations at Remington’s, the Bijou, and Pussy Palace, police don't need the indecency provisions of the Criminal Code to prosecute. They can still use other Criminal Code provisions and even by-law in fractions to target, harass, and shut down sexually explicit spaces. 127
BATTHOUSE RAIDS
In R. v. Clark (2005), the Supreme Court considered the case of a man arrested for masturbating near his homes illuminated, uncovered window without intent to offend anyone. Given that he could be seen from the street, a key question was whether the act was carried out in public. The court found that “in a public place” meant in a “place to which the public have access as of right or by invitation,” as the accused’s home did not meet the test. He was acquitted. But the language of “access as of right or by invitation” is tricky, and it means that a wide variety of private commercial spaces could potentially be captured. A private members-only sex club is probably outside the definition, but a shopping mall bathroom probably fits within it. Where gay bars’ dark rooms fit is not settled law. 128
PUBLIC SEX
Activists in Canada only began to track police rates of parks starting in the 1970s, when the Body Politic began publishing news items about arrests. In the decade following, Tom Warner identifies 300 arrests of men for public indecency recorded by activists.
INDECENCY
In my hometown of Hamilton, Ontario, police targeted park cruising in 1996 at the Royal Botanical Gardens, arresting twenty men. In 1998, police installed cameras in the men's washroom at the Calgary zoo to catch men looking for sex there. In 2000, police in London, Ontario, conducted an undercover sting operation at Gibbons Park. 131
PARK ARRESTS
This story has an odd coda, because the Criminal Code section at play in the Montreal swingers’ club decisions was quietly repealed by Justin Trudeau's government in 2019. Specifically, the government repealed the portion of the bawdy house law that pertained to “indecent acts,” removing the provision of the Code that had been used to target bars, Bath houses, Strip clubs, and sex clubs from so many years.
However, indecency-with its requirements of publicness, non-participant observers, and harm-remains on the books. The types of acts that qualify as in decent still take their definition from the test set out in Labaye, even though the case is interpreting a part of the Criminal Code that has now been removed. 132
INDECENCY
As Allyson Lunny points out in her doctoral research on gaybashing. 178
The idea that families, children, or single women are made more vulnerable by the presences of men seeking sex with other men is not just not true. It is a heterosexist fantasy. “The people most likely to suffer actual physical harm in public sex situation,” Steven Ruszczycky, a professor at California Polytechnic State University, reminded me in a letter, “are the people having sex, not the ‘innocent’ bystander who stumbles upon them.” 193
Laud Humphrey’s first-hand observations of men cruising for sex in washrooms in Los Angeles were published as Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places. Released in 1970, Humphrey’s book was based on academic research he conducted as part of a PhD, and his descriptions came from a form of participant observation in which he acted as a “scout” or “lookout” lingering in a bathroom’s doorway and altering the men inside to the approach of non-participants. 218
TEAROOM TRADE: 1970
Here is adhesiveness, it is not previously fashion’d,
its is apropos;
Do you know what it is as you pass to be loved
by strangers?
Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road”
Park cruising is a site of identity formation. It can reduce loneliness and the attendant risks that come with isolation. It is a site of the distribution of sex material (and, in the age of COVID-19, it reduces the spread of airborne pathogens among sexual partners). It takes place away from commercial spaces, and people don't need money to engage it. It can lend distinctiveness to a place and become a source of tourism. 9
CRUISING
The terms “cursing” and “public sex” are often used synonymously, but that's not quite right. Cruising is a way of looking, a way of making yourself available to meeting people. The natural corollary is that cruising is also way of being seen. When people cruise in parks, they are using coded signs-loitering, prolonged eye contact, a strategic tug-to indicate sexual availability. The sex that follows, if it follows, can take place anywhere: in the park, a bathroom, a car, someone's home.
The academic Leo Bersani wants described cruising as “sexual sociability,” which is partway there. For me at least, the defining characteristic of cruising is it porousness. Cruisers show deliberate vulnerability toward strangers. They develop an alertness to the way other people—very often people outside of their ordinary social worlds-are thinking and feeling in any particular moment. Most cruisers would be hesitant to describe these as social or emotional skills, but that is just what they are, and they are powerful and underused, both in and out of the sexual milieu. 11
CRUISING & PUBLIC SEX
Park Cruising is a lot older than most people think. Michael Rocke has written about street cruising in fifteenth-century Florence. Neil Bartlett Records an example of cruising told as witness testimony from a trial in London in 1742. Walt Whitman cruised New York in the nineteenth century. It turns out that park cruising long predates the invention of a homosexual identity in the 1860s. 14
CRUISING
Most cruising encounters, in Delany's estimation, are “affable but brief.” When you have sex with a stranger qua stranger, you're not necessarily reinforcing your relationship with that person. Rather, as Delany points out, your reinforcing your relationship to a loose associative network, a network of friends, neighbours, and indeed, complete strangers.
Michael Warner riffs on this idea in his book The Trouble with Normal. “Contrary to myth,” he says, "what one relishes and loving strangers is not mere anonymity, meaningless release. It is the pleasure of belonging to a sexual world, in which one sexuality finds an answering residence not just one another, but in a world of others.” 26
COMMUNITY: SAMUEL DELANY; MICHAEL WARNER
But nothing is one thing only. Our experiences are multiple, overflowing, sometimes contradictory. “My desire is the surest of guides,” André Gide wrote, ,” and this morning I am in love with the whole world. A thousand luminous threads cross in entwine on my heart.” 27
COMMUNITY: ANDRE GIDE
I often think of the ways in which non-monogamous and queer people build intimate relationships not with one or two people but as a kind of fabric is interwoven strand overlap. My lovers are connected to their lovers, who are connected to others I have never met. Or, Samuel R. Delany says of his relationships in New York's porn theatres, “They braided. They interwove. They were simultaneous.” 33
CONNECTIONS: SAMUEL DELANY
Even if the relationship between cruising and democracy is fuzzy, the idea’s very persistence holds important truths. Instead of “democracy,” I am tempted to say “Community,” or or “neighbourliness,” or perhaps even “empathy.” Park cruising is a practice that connects people. It requires participants to watch, to see and about how strangers are acting and what it means about how they think and feel. This feeling of empathy is captured by Delany's concept of contact: the stranger remains strange, so park cruisers train themselves to remain open toward people they do not know with whom they may never develop a deeper connection. 33-34
COMMUNITY: SAMUEL DELANY
Whether we realize it or not, our wider and looser networks spread out and lighten the burden on anyone node. Our communities are stretchy, elastic. There is give. That is the one lesson of the AIDS crisis. The impact of a personal tragedy spreads from an epicentre, but when we are at our best, the fibres of our communities provide support with some degree of elasticity. 34
COMMUNITY & SUPPORT
As Mark W. Turner has said, “Cruising is the stuff of fleeting, ephemeral moments not intended to be captured. The problem with writing about cruising is that of writing about many other urban experiences-it doesn't remain static, it passes quickly, it's over in the time it takes to shift one’s eyes.” 36-37
CRUISING
The public indecency charges that stemmed from the Village Mall sting were dubious. To find someone guilty of public indecency, the Crown must establish that the indecent activity was conducted in front of one or more persons. This may sound obvious, but most people stop engaging in sexual activities if a non-participant stumbles upon the scene, usually before that person sees anything. In places where non-participant is more likely to appear, cruising norms in corporate stop-and-start pattern into the rhythm of the encounter. 40
PUBLIC INDECENCY
Novelist Garth Greenwell writes that one of the virtues of cruising spaces is that they present “the possibility of being surprised by desire, of having an unexpected response to the presence of another.” To be surprised by desire be wrenched out of your ordinary way of seeing, of feeling. And to be surprised by desire is, for many people, to be over burdened with feelings of shame and self hatred and helplessness. And what could be scarier than that? 44
DESIRE
…echoes Patrick Califia’ comments in his essay “Sexual Outlaws v. the Sex Police” 20 years earlier. Califia points out the police go to great lakes to protect men from being solicited but that the same police steadfastly refused to protect women from street harassment or queer people from gaybashing. It's a matter of priorities, Califia says. 70-71
POLICE
The 1981 bathhouse raids are iconic not because of the actions of the police but because of the community’s response. The night after the raids, thousands of people took to the streets and protest and fought back against the crowd control measures of the police. “No more shit!” They chanted. The men who were charged fought in court and, mostly, they won. 92
BATHHOUSE RAIDS
The other reason Marie Curtis Park has remained popular for so long is that it is a good example of an “unruly site,” to use geographer Matthew Gandy's term. 98
PUBLIC SEX
…to Gandy, there is an "innate connection” between public space and sex. But the apparatus of control of public displays of sexuality is never complete, and sometimes loses its grip. This can happen at unruly sites, which Gandy defines as places “that do not play a clearly defined role, or characterized by ill-defined use or ownership, that app uses other than those for which they were originally intended.” 99
PUBLIC SEX
The New York City Piers of the 1970s and 1980s are described in a similar way by Jonathan Weinberg, who credits “disuse and collapse” for creating circumstances in which a public sex culture was able to flourish. His book on the subject, Pier Groups, ends with a meditation on the city’s High Line, the elevated train line turned public park, which has evoked so much praise from urban planners. Weinberg calls it “linear, prescribed, and curated,” the antithesis of unruly spaces like the piers. “The waterfront,” he writes, “once a site of capitalist power, was at least for a brief time cracked open, overrun.” 99-100
PUBLIC SEX-NYC PIERS
In 2005, The U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services produced a guide that summarized the tools available for police to combat park cruising and other types of public sexual activity. To its credit, the Department of Justice discouraged raids and crackdowns as expensive, temporary, and prone to backfiring. Instead, it mainly recommended ways to eliminate environmental factors that provided privacy, some of which will sound familiar. 100
PUBLIC POLICY
This is morality-first planning, extreme spatial reconfigurations prompted by a kind of social unease. It goes beyond the idea that people should be protected from seeing cruising. The goal is to root cruising even when it is unseen, and in that sense, it is intended to comfort those who were distressed by the mere idea that it is taking place. 103
MORALITY
As Marsha McLeod and Jen Roberton pointed out in Spacing magazine shortly after Project Marie, planning 10 and should count for the mixed used character of such bases not by designing cruising out of parks but through inclusive design. They say Amsterdam’s Vondelpark, were sexual activities are permitted as long as participants stay away from open areas, only in the evening or overnight, and clean up after themselves. 108
DESIGN
To combat public urination, city officials built many new toilets and public spaces and parks. The city introduce streetlight to reduce the number of dark streets at night. And campaigns for street lights and public washrooms were undertaken for the purposes of hygiene and safety, Valverde says, they were also driven by the idea that they would stamp out vice. Almost immediately, men began to use the new public washrooms to meet each other, and according to Maynard these spaces became the site of cruising and sex. 114
PUBLIC TOILETS
The full complexity of the lives of men who met for sex in Toronto parks and alleyways a hundred years ago is lost to us. Court records can only tell their stories in the context of a legal proceeding. But even from these incomplete account, it is clear these men are not so different from today's park cruisers. Their motivations were messy and complicated, their actions at turns brazen and furtive, source of anxiety and fear and pleasure and connection. 115
CRUISING
For almost all the post-Confederation period, Canada has had two prohibitions on public indecency. The first is simply called “indecency,” captured by section 173(1) of the Criminal Code. Indecency is the provision that ostensively prohibits, among other things, park sex. In order to convict, the act must be found to be indecent, and in addition it requires both that the act be conducted in a public place and the presence of one or more other people.
There has long been a companion to indecency that captured similar activities even when they take place indoors. Section 197 of the Criminal Code prohibited being a proprietor or patron of “a common bawdy house” if indecent acts took place there. This prohibition has been used to target strip clubs, sex clubs, and bathhouses. But because there is no definition of “indecent” in the Criminal Code the parameters of indecency were set up by courts in interpreting these two provisions.
For almost one hundred years-from 1868 to 1962-the test for what was “indecent” was whether the activity would tend to corrupt the morals of those who might be susceptible. Built into this definition was an assumption that a certain kind of person-White, Male, upper class-could be exposed to vice with without temptation but that others were more vulnerable, especially women, Young people, Indigenous and other racialized people, and working classes. This also highlighted a pre-Stonewall lack of rigidity around categories of sexual identity. Working class men and men of poor moral character were imagine to be susceptible to being glued into same sex licentiousness and vice. 115-116
Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, known as the Wolfenden Report, there was a wave of legislative reform that in Canada culminated in 1969 with the partial decriminalization of sex between men….Sex between men was permitted under three conditions: the participants had to be twenty-one years of age or older; the encounter could only be between two (and not more than two) men; and sex had to take place in private. 116
INDECENCY
It was after the 1957 release of the Wolfenden Report but before the 1969 amendments to Canada Criminal Code that the legal tests of “indecency” changed. In 1962, following amendment to the Code, the Supreme Court’s decision in R v. Brodie removed the requirement that judges consider the corruption of morals of those who are susceptible. The test was reconceived as one of community standards of tolerance, which indecency has that which the community has a whole would not abide other people doing. 117
INDECENCY
Today, the test for indecency is, well, a bit of a mouthful. It comes from a pair of decisions affectionally known in legal circles as the Montreal swingers’ club decisions. Those cases, R. v. Labaye and R. v. Kouri, were released in 2005, and in them the Supreme Court updated the definition of indecency for the first time since 1962…
Under the new definition of indecency, the Crown must prove two things. First, it must establish that the alleged indecent act “causes harm or presents a significant risk of harm to individuals or society in a way that undermines or threatens to undermine of value reflected in and thus formally endorsed through the Constitution or similar fundamental laws.” The court has given some examples of how this branch of the test can be met-for example, by “confronting members of the public with conduct that significantly interferes with their autonomy and liberty” or "predisposing others to anti-social behaviour.”
The Crown is also required to prove the second branch of the test, which is that the harm caused by the supposedly indecent act must be serious. Although judges can enforce this more or less stringently, the Supreme Court’s guidance on this point is that, in order to qualify as indecent, “the harm or risk of harm [must be] of a degree that is incompatible with the proper functioning of society.” As shorthand, lawyers called this two-part analysis the “harm test.” 125-126
INDECENCY
Canada has not seen a major bathhouse raid since the Montreal swingers’ club decisions were handed down in 2005. I am reluctant to say the Supreme Court decriminalized bathhouses and sex clubs, because the Criminal Code provision of operating a bawdy house for the purpose of indecent acts was not replaced until 2019. And as we saw with police investigations at Remington’s, the Bijou, and Pussy Palace, police don't need the indecency provisions of the Criminal Code to prosecute. They can still use other Criminal Code provisions and even by-law in fractions to target, harass, and shut down sexually explicit spaces. 127
BATTHOUSE RAIDS
In R. v. Clark (2005), the Supreme Court considered the case of a man arrested for masturbating near his homes illuminated, uncovered window without intent to offend anyone. Given that he could be seen from the street, a key question was whether the act was carried out in public. The court found that “in a public place” meant in a “place to which the public have access as of right or by invitation,” as the accused’s home did not meet the test. He was acquitted. But the language of “access as of right or by invitation” is tricky, and it means that a wide variety of private commercial spaces could potentially be captured. A private members-only sex club is probably outside the definition, but a shopping mall bathroom probably fits within it. Where gay bars’ dark rooms fit is not settled law. 128
PUBLIC SEX
Activists in Canada only began to track police rates of parks starting in the 1970s, when the Body Politic began publishing news items about arrests. In the decade following, Tom Warner identifies 300 arrests of men for public indecency recorded by activists.
INDECENCY
In my hometown of Hamilton, Ontario, police targeted park cruising in 1996 at the Royal Botanical Gardens, arresting twenty men. In 1998, police installed cameras in the men's washroom at the Calgary zoo to catch men looking for sex there. In 2000, police in London, Ontario, conducted an undercover sting operation at Gibbons Park. 131
PARK ARRESTS
This story has an odd coda, because the Criminal Code section at play in the Montreal swingers’ club decisions was quietly repealed by Justin Trudeau's government in 2019. Specifically, the government repealed the portion of the bawdy house law that pertained to “indecent acts,” removing the provision of the Code that had been used to target bars, Bath houses, Strip clubs, and sex clubs from so many years.
However, indecency-with its requirements of publicness, non-participant observers, and harm-remains on the books. The types of acts that qualify as in decent still take their definition from the test set out in Labaye, even though the case is interpreting a part of the Criminal Code that has now been removed. 132
INDECENCY
As Allyson Lunny points out in her doctoral research on gaybashing. 178
The idea that families, children, or single women are made more vulnerable by the presences of men seeking sex with other men is not just not true. It is a heterosexist fantasy. “The people most likely to suffer actual physical harm in public sex situation,” Steven Ruszczycky, a professor at California Polytechnic State University, reminded me in a letter, “are the people having sex, not the ‘innocent’ bystander who stumbles upon them.” 193
Laud Humphrey’s first-hand observations of men cruising for sex in washrooms in Los Angeles were published as Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places. Released in 1970, Humphrey’s book was based on academic research he conducted as part of a PhD, and his descriptions came from a form of participant observation in which he acted as a “scout” or “lookout” lingering in a bathroom’s doorway and altering the men inside to the approach of non-participants. 218
TEAROOM TRADE: 1970
August 7, 2023
An interesting examination of the practice of cruising by cis gay men, primarily in Toronto Ontario with some examination of it in Ottawa and in other parts of the world, notably the Netherlands.
I think it's important to have positive reflections of the practice of cruising, that are not just critical of dominant framings, but actually provide alternative framings and examine the potential benefits of cruising. That said, I think this book will largely speak to the already converted or those most inclined to positive views of cruising; I don't think it does much to bring readers into this world who are reluctant or opposed.
My main critique is that it invokes trans people and sex workers frequently as being "in community" with people who cruise, but as far as I could tell, did not include any actual narratives or experiences of either community cruising, though it did speak to connections between harmful legislation that impacts people who cruise and people who engage in sex work. References to trans people were exclusively superficial, with no in depth discussion or examination of our experiences cruising or the impacts of sex-negative legislation on our communities. I think the book could have benefited from direct engagement with both of these communities for a more well-rounded analysis.
I'm also not convinced that the chapter on consent added to a subject that has been extensively written about and explored by feminists in much more complex ways and with consideration for the many complicating factors in consent that this author didn't consider. I would say the exploration of consent presented in this book is a 101 on consent for cis men who may not be familiar with the vast literature on the subject.
The most interesting insight in my view was the analysis of legislative frameworks exclusively considering sex a risk or potential harm without consideration for the benefits and rights of individuals to engage in sex and to be fully self actualized in a sexual sense. Sex is an important aspect of well-being for many and framing it exclusively as a harm obfuscates the important role it plays in our lives.
I think it's important to have positive reflections of the practice of cruising, that are not just critical of dominant framings, but actually provide alternative framings and examine the potential benefits of cruising. That said, I think this book will largely speak to the already converted or those most inclined to positive views of cruising; I don't think it does much to bring readers into this world who are reluctant or opposed.
My main critique is that it invokes trans people and sex workers frequently as being "in community" with people who cruise, but as far as I could tell, did not include any actual narratives or experiences of either community cruising, though it did speak to connections between harmful legislation that impacts people who cruise and people who engage in sex work. References to trans people were exclusively superficial, with no in depth discussion or examination of our experiences cruising or the impacts of sex-negative legislation on our communities. I think the book could have benefited from direct engagement with both of these communities for a more well-rounded analysis.
I'm also not convinced that the chapter on consent added to a subject that has been extensively written about and explored by feminists in much more complex ways and with consideration for the many complicating factors in consent that this author didn't consider. I would say the exploration of consent presented in this book is a 101 on consent for cis men who may not be familiar with the vast literature on the subject.
The most interesting insight in my view was the analysis of legislative frameworks exclusively considering sex a risk or potential harm without consideration for the benefits and rights of individuals to engage in sex and to be fully self actualized in a sexual sense. Sex is an important aspect of well-being for many and framing it exclusively as a harm obfuscates the important role it plays in our lives.
June 27, 2024
Real Rating: 3.75* of five
The Publisher Says: An intimate look at one of culture’s most enduring taboos: public sex.
Park Cruising takes a long look at the men who cruise for sex in urban parks. Human rights lawyer Marcus McCann uses park cruising as a point of departure for discussions of consent, empathy, public health, municipal planning, and our relationship to strangers.
Prompted by his work opposing a police sting in a suburban park, McCann’s ruminations go beyond targeted enforcement and police indifference to violence to examine cruising as a type of world-building. The result is a series of insightful and poetic walks through history, law, literature, and popular representations of cruising in search of the social value of sex. What McCann ultimately reveals is a world of connection, care, and unexpected lessons about the value of pleasure.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: The book takes a "pro" position on this fraught topic, and uses rgetorical flourishes to distract from the difficulty of the central issue having no easy solution. Had he made his argument solely about entrapment I'd be all over it; but I do not, in the most intense possible terms, want to encounter straight people or lesbians in the throes of passion.
No.
YEEECCCHHH
So why should they want to see what I'll avidly watch? The book's strength is its weakness; complaining that they do it, why shouldn't we, is very much an adolescent attitude. Confine yourself to the cruising, and I'm supportive; but the minute someone's genitals come into public view for sexual use, and that's a hard (!) no from me.
Nudity doesn't seem to me to be shocking, so public nudity, while *I* ain't doin' it...sunburned balls sound horrifying to me, and the peeling process is too grisly to contemplate...I agree that the laws around it are clearly designed to make purseylipped prudes safe from the vapors, and should be repealed. Body shame is a major source of social control. Best to jettison it, and the case for this bit is a good one. Unlikely to succeed, though, because the Vaporous Vanguard will screech about their little no-neck monsters being corrupted and that ends any and all discussion. Otherwise you who oppose them are A Pedophile, and once those screeches start, you are toast. Does not matter in the slightest if they are true or not, these screeches are stickier than blood, and utterly indelible.
The book is an interesting read but not a how-to manual or even an advocacy guide. It will shift no one's position. It's good for starting conversations about how society enforces a standard of conduct that is inherently judgmental, and unfairlt enforced, and clearly the laws are written to give gay men nightmares about their sex lives being judged and punished in a way y'all straight people's are not.
Useful, then; just not effective as a tool for short-term attitude change.
The Publisher Says: An intimate look at one of culture’s most enduring taboos: public sex.
Park Cruising takes a long look at the men who cruise for sex in urban parks. Human rights lawyer Marcus McCann uses park cruising as a point of departure for discussions of consent, empathy, public health, municipal planning, and our relationship to strangers.
Prompted by his work opposing a police sting in a suburban park, McCann’s ruminations go beyond targeted enforcement and police indifference to violence to examine cruising as a type of world-building. The result is a series of insightful and poetic walks through history, law, literature, and popular representations of cruising in search of the social value of sex. What McCann ultimately reveals is a world of connection, care, and unexpected lessons about the value of pleasure.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: The book takes a "pro" position on this fraught topic, and uses rgetorical flourishes to distract from the difficulty of the central issue having no easy solution. Had he made his argument solely about entrapment I'd be all over it; but I do not, in the most intense possible terms, want to encounter straight people or lesbians in the throes of passion.
No.
YEEECCCHHH
So why should they want to see what I'll avidly watch? The book's strength is its weakness; complaining that they do it, why shouldn't we, is very much an adolescent attitude. Confine yourself to the cruising, and I'm supportive; but the minute someone's genitals come into public view for sexual use, and that's a hard (!) no from me.
Nudity doesn't seem to me to be shocking, so public nudity, while *I* ain't doin' it...sunburned balls sound horrifying to me, and the peeling process is too grisly to contemplate...I agree that the laws around it are clearly designed to make purseylipped prudes safe from the vapors, and should be repealed. Body shame is a major source of social control. Best to jettison it, and the case for this bit is a good one. Unlikely to succeed, though, because the Vaporous Vanguard will screech about their little no-neck monsters being corrupted and that ends any and all discussion. Otherwise you who oppose them are A Pedophile, and once those screeches start, you are toast. Does not matter in the slightest if they are true or not, these screeches are stickier than blood, and utterly indelible.
The book is an interesting read but not a how-to manual or even an advocacy guide. It will shift no one's position. It's good for starting conversations about how society enforces a standard of conduct that is inherently judgmental, and unfairlt enforced, and clearly the laws are written to give gay men nightmares about their sex lives being judged and punished in a way y'all straight people's are not.
Useful, then; just not effective as a tool for short-term attitude change.
Read
May 20, 2024This was a great, albeit specific, dive into the history, cultural importance, legal ramifications, and hypothesized future of queer park cruising culture. While it does speak generally about the history, it is largely focused on the current practice in Canada, and more specifically in the Toronto area, diving into police stings, legal cases, and specific parks around that region.
I really enjoyed how it framed park cruising as something that has essentially always taken place and always will take place, but also the degree that it fully explained how (as it is defined) it is a harmless action. The book argues that individuals who engage in park cruising (with few exceptions) specifically do it to not be seen, creating their own private, intimate space within a public setting. With the action being illegal, it truly is enshrining a moral issue into the legal system, existing only to put hardship on not only marginalized individuals, but also individuals who are likely going out of their way to conceal their sexual orientation or sexual exploration.
I appreciated the argument closely tying queer culture to the practice of cruising, but I do think there was a missed opportunity to explore how the action is actually one of the exteremely rare instances where the world of heterosexual, cis men intermingles with the world of gay men and trans women with an air of, dare I say, mutual respect? By coloring cruising as a "radical queer activity ingrained in queer culture," I think it forgets that a large part of cruising culture is actually built up from self-identifying straight men, and I think that would have been a fascinating topic to broach.
Also, this isn't a huge gripe, but I also think the author was generous in associating the larger queer community with the act of cruising, rather than focusing on how, within the queer community, it is overwhelmingly gay men and trans women who engage in the practice. And while the book did touch on several cases of swingers clubs, I think making such a distinction would have been a great opportunity for the author to explore if there are other cases of cruising behavior that, say, lesbians prefer to engage in, or have ever engaged in historically.
This was a really fascinating, quick read. Difficult at times as parts of it focused on extreme violence and shitty policing practices, but its necessary to paint the whole picture of park cruising. I think this book was successful in its arguments, and would be interested in reading similar stuff.
I really enjoyed how it framed park cruising as something that has essentially always taken place and always will take place, but also the degree that it fully explained how (as it is defined) it is a harmless action. The book argues that individuals who engage in park cruising (with few exceptions) specifically do it to not be seen, creating their own private, intimate space within a public setting. With the action being illegal, it truly is enshrining a moral issue into the legal system, existing only to put hardship on not only marginalized individuals, but also individuals who are likely going out of their way to conceal their sexual orientation or sexual exploration.
I appreciated the argument closely tying queer culture to the practice of cruising, but I do think there was a missed opportunity to explore how the action is actually one of the exteremely rare instances where the world of heterosexual, cis men intermingles with the world of gay men and trans women with an air of, dare I say, mutual respect? By coloring cruising as a "radical queer activity ingrained in queer culture," I think it forgets that a large part of cruising culture is actually built up from self-identifying straight men, and I think that would have been a fascinating topic to broach.
Also, this isn't a huge gripe, but I also think the author was generous in associating the larger queer community with the act of cruising, rather than focusing on how, within the queer community, it is overwhelmingly gay men and trans women who engage in the practice. And while the book did touch on several cases of swingers clubs, I think making such a distinction would have been a great opportunity for the author to explore if there are other cases of cruising behavior that, say, lesbians prefer to engage in, or have ever engaged in historically.
This was a really fascinating, quick read. Difficult at times as parts of it focused on extreme violence and shitty policing practices, but its necessary to paint the whole picture of park cruising. I think this book was successful in its arguments, and would be interested in reading similar stuff.
September 21, 2023
Outstanding book, with unfortunate woke moments
The investigative aspect of this book is riveting. McCann's dissection of the Marie Curtis Park affair is fascinating and welcome. His discussion of park murders (Kenn Zeller; Ottawa men) is a sad reminder that there remains much work to be done to get justice for all. Overall an important book.
So why not more stars? Wince moments happen when McCann locates himself in progressive ranks wherein he discusses theory as if it were practice, a major fault of the woke arena. For example, he accuses the New York artist (now deceased) David Wojnarowicz for "cod[ing] violence along racial lines" and thus being guilty of anti-black racism. But if it were only the case that DW was drawing attention to black violence because it really was black violence, then should DW have remained silent? If I were to mention the fact that Black attitudes towards queer people of any colour are disproportionately negative --and there is a good deal of academic research that says that this is the case -- am I being racist? Or just not senstive, and that I should just not say anything because, facts aside, I might contribute to anti-black racism? McCann reveals that he knows little of DW's history and his work, which was radical and very progressive. (And of course, DW isn't here to defend himself.)
McCann also lashes himself for not being more aware when a person attending an activist meeting guilts McCann's group for not paying more attention to (racial and ethnic) minorities when it comes to policing queer people -- and then strangely mentions three men murdered by police, none of whom were gay. (And I'll note here, that Andrew Loku's death was/is hijacked by BLM to make an [otherwise valid] point about racism in the police force, while negating in the process that Loku was mentally ill and that police have a terrible record in dealing with mentally ill people.) Yes, it is certainly important to be inclusive in all (activist) activities; but being everything to everyone will result in you being of no help to anyone, as energies become unfocussed and scattered.
Finally, the "he/him" self-description in the bio. Really? Why? The ongoing highlighting of identity politics for no other reason than the performative is dismaying.
The investigative aspect of this book is riveting. McCann's dissection of the Marie Curtis Park affair is fascinating and welcome. His discussion of park murders (Kenn Zeller; Ottawa men) is a sad reminder that there remains much work to be done to get justice for all. Overall an important book.
So why not more stars? Wince moments happen when McCann locates himself in progressive ranks wherein he discusses theory as if it were practice, a major fault of the woke arena. For example, he accuses the New York artist (now deceased) David Wojnarowicz for "cod[ing] violence along racial lines" and thus being guilty of anti-black racism. But if it were only the case that DW was drawing attention to black violence because it really was black violence, then should DW have remained silent? If I were to mention the fact that Black attitudes towards queer people of any colour are disproportionately negative --and there is a good deal of academic research that says that this is the case -- am I being racist? Or just not senstive, and that I should just not say anything because, facts aside, I might contribute to anti-black racism? McCann reveals that he knows little of DW's history and his work, which was radical and very progressive. (And of course, DW isn't here to defend himself.)
McCann also lashes himself for not being more aware when a person attending an activist meeting guilts McCann's group for not paying more attention to (racial and ethnic) minorities when it comes to policing queer people -- and then strangely mentions three men murdered by police, none of whom were gay. (And I'll note here, that Andrew Loku's death was/is hijacked by BLM to make an [otherwise valid] point about racism in the police force, while negating in the process that Loku was mentally ill and that police have a terrible record in dealing with mentally ill people.) Yes, it is certainly important to be inclusive in all (activist) activities; but being everything to everyone will result in you being of no help to anyone, as energies become unfocussed and scattered.
Finally, the "he/him" self-description in the bio. Really? Why? The ongoing highlighting of identity politics for no other reason than the performative is dismaying.
March 31, 2024
A high-level and history-filled essay collection which lawyerly examines different aspects of cruising and society, from police entrapment, to victim narratives and social organization, to legal theories around sex positivity. Even urban design and and park management appear to show the prudishmess that underlies so many of our anti-cruising policies.
McCann, a former journalist, inserts plenty of himself and his organizing work, focusing mostly in Toronto, but including Ottawa and Montreal and BC to give a bit more range. We get the parks and beaches and wry comments about McCann’s own practices to paint a sympathetic and demystifying picture of a discriminated community and practice.
It’s a nice read for advocacy and for a greater understanding of just how biased our laws are against an activity which tries its best to be hidden and non-harmful to the general public. There’s even a nuanced discussion on how public spaces and the dance of cruising can lead to safer sex encounters.
McCann addresses the whiteness and respectability politics of a lot of gay advocacy, and it’s a solid history of a lot of the fights including the bathhouse and Pussy Palace raids. A breezy, accessible history of a practice that deserves to be brought out in the open.
http://lawrencedebbs.home.blog/2024/0...
McCann, a former journalist, inserts plenty of himself and his organizing work, focusing mostly in Toronto, but including Ottawa and Montreal and BC to give a bit more range. We get the parks and beaches and wry comments about McCann’s own practices to paint a sympathetic and demystifying picture of a discriminated community and practice.
It’s a nice read for advocacy and for a greater understanding of just how biased our laws are against an activity which tries its best to be hidden and non-harmful to the general public. There’s even a nuanced discussion on how public spaces and the dance of cruising can lead to safer sex encounters.
McCann addresses the whiteness and respectability politics of a lot of gay advocacy, and it’s a solid history of a lot of the fights including the bathhouse and Pussy Palace raids. A breezy, accessible history of a practice that deserves to be brought out in the open.
http://lawrencedebbs.home.blog/2024/0...
October 5, 2023
This was a particularly interesting read for me, having moved to Toronto in 1978 and I was enthralled with the acres of greenbelt, parks and ravines making an otherwise dense city particularly beautiful. I also lived there during the bath house raids and the ensuing public protest against the police actions This book is particularly interesting as it dissects the reasons why gay men cruise public parks and provides a surprising identity to the type of man who cruises public parks and washrooms. It goes further in attempting to present a benefit analysis, offsetting loneliness and feelings of disconnect as a gay man surrounded by straight coworkers and communities. McCann suggests that the real crime is the automatic assumption by one and all that the cruising practice is a deviant behavior without admitting that particularly pre internet this was an only option for men to meet and has been happening for centuries. Slowly an acceptance of sex positivity is evolving but we are still miles away from having legislation that acknowledges that our sexuality is an important part of who we are and our sex lives are integral to our conception of a good life.
March 2, 2024
This book is a surprisingly easy read, given how skillfully McCann moves from reportage to analysis to cultural theory and back. He offers a convincing case for the idea that gay men's cruising in parks (and other places) is actually a good thing. (Most frequently, in my experience, the phenomenon is considered to be at best, a necessary evil, or, worse, a social blight.) McCann manages to maintain the academic rigor of scholar but to also embed himself, when appropriate, in the text.
My only significant complaint about the book is that it is too often repetitive. I attribute this to the fact that Park Cruising is actually a collection of essays, rather than a single, multi-chapter argument. Obviously, the essays have been edited and updated to fit into this volume, but much redundancy remains.
My only significant complaint about the book is that it is too often repetitive. I attribute this to the fact that Park Cruising is actually a collection of essays, rather than a single, multi-chapter argument. Obviously, the essays have been edited and updated to fit into this volume, but much redundancy remains.
June 24, 2024
Bumping up to 5 stars, because I learned a lot! The first half of the book felt very intuitive and self-explanatory to me, but then I realized the author was intentionally humanizing and trying to make readers sympathize with the needs of park cruisers before arguing for ways that do/don't make them safer. That section was much more interesting to me, especially as it was affected by courts and police vs community safety measures.
I found the author really earnest and humble, and I loved that he seems to be really deeply involved in this topic as an activist of many years. It gave this book a much different (and more holistic) perspective compared to a neutral history captured by a pure outsider academic.
Best chapters (in my opinion): "No hard feelings" and "Keeping our antennae up."
I found the author really earnest and humble, and I loved that he seems to be really deeply involved in this topic as an activist of many years. It gave this book a much different (and more holistic) perspective compared to a neutral history captured by a pure outsider academic.
Best chapters (in my opinion): "No hard feelings" and "Keeping our antennae up."
May 2, 2024
Guilt is when you feel bad about something you've done; shame is when you feel bad about who you are.In depth account of Canada's history of legislature and the policing of queer bodies through the lens of park cruising. What does it mean to participate in a sexual act? When is said act transgressive, when does it offend? (How) does it harm others? And how are the queer participants harmed? McCann manages to present insights and draws upon previous works on the subject of park cruising and how a more liberal approach could help out issues such as sexual freedom, public safety and queer liberation. At times a bit too drab, at other times not enough in-depth. However, what stays true is the magic and beauty of cruising. It remains an art.
June 30, 2023
This was a well thought and very well written series of essays. The way the writer informs and weaves nuggets of information without coming across as over bearing or lecturing was a pleasant surprise.
It’s a well researched book about something that many people don’t see or understand the value of. Cruising culture has been around for a long time and continues to thrive. It’s a judgment free read.
And the works and resources mentioned throughout offer a plethora of new material for those interested.
It’s a well researched book about something that many people don’t see or understand the value of. Cruising culture has been around for a long time and continues to thrive. It’s a judgment free read.
And the works and resources mentioned throughout offer a plethora of new material for those interested.
January 20, 2024
A book I didn’t know I needed. Turns out park cruising, the topic, has a lot to say about how the law/society views sex in general, which is to say, not good. But McCann counters all this brilliantly with his knowledge of the law, his own activism, and his experience as a queer park cruiser himself and reminds us that this long-held practice can actually be a vision of a sex-positivity, joy and connection. Yes there is a lot of law talk in this book and case examples but it is written for the lay-person in mind so it was easy enough to read.
May 24, 2024
Appreciate how it gives an alternative perspective to the velvet rage.
It does seem like a glass half full view of park cruising(i.e. allowing park cruisingis tak is making use of publicspaces at nught when no one else uses them or better to meet in a park ratherthen a strangers home ), definitely makes me want talk about it more. I like the idea that people are going to be whoever they are sexually wherever they choose---parks are just a social location to get people together
It does seem like a glass half full view of park cruising(i.e. allowing park cruisingis tak is making use of publicspaces at nught when no one else uses them or better to meet in a park ratherthen a strangers home ), definitely makes me want talk about it more. I like the idea that people are going to be whoever they are sexually wherever they choose---parks are just a social location to get people together
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 12, 2024
Really great read. Some of the essays definitely shine more than others or are more widely applicable than others, but I feel like I learned a crucial part of queer history that helps recontextualize how I should think about my own life, the community around me, and what our collective values are or should evolve towards.
July 13, 2023
a look at park cruising history in toronto and canadian law. An informative and thought provoking look and this issue that is current and relevant. A recommended read for those working in MSM sexual health fields.
September 23, 2023
I really enjoyed this book. I found the mix of legal analysis and narrative really enjoyable. It really challenges you to think about the ethics and technicalities of policing. A sophisticated yet accessible read. Highly recommend!
November 27, 2023
Unpretentious read. The author makes an interesting plea defending park cruising. It makes a good case on how once you understand the unwritten rules about it it’s safer for everyone than almost any outlet available for sexual encounters.
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