Gerald Hannon

Cruise Control

It's not easy anymore to get around High Park after dark if you're in a car, as I am this sweet summer night and if you're looking for more than bucolic pleasures. I'm with two friends -- one of whom seems to know every sheltering bush, welcoming washrooms and cruisy parking lot -- and he's pointing out all the lilt annoyances recently visited on the park by police and moralizing citizens' groups.

The most recent impediments -- courtesy of the city's parks and recreation services -- are metal barriers that shut off certain streets after dark, making it very difficult to cruise (and most of the cruising in this very large park has always been done by car). There are "No Parking" signs meant to discourage car-to car fraternizing. (Another friend tells me that success here might depend as much on the make of your automobile as on how physically desirable you were, a sure sign, I felt, of heavy suburban involvement.)

Festive toilets

And what is this "inappropriate activity"? Flashers, and worse. Harassers. Gay men having sex. The police and parks departments are under increasing pressure to stop all of it -- and they either can't or won't distinguish between the frightening aggressor and the consensual activity of gay men who just want to get it on with each other.

The authorities are trying to stop people from doing what they've been doing (mostly without having bothered anyone) in city parks for hundreds of years. They'll never completely succeed of course -- but they're succeeding enough to be irritating.

Over there, my friend says, was the glorious washroom of Colborne Lodge, closed years ago. Then the equally festive public toilets near the Grenadier Restaurant also closed.

There are guys cruising tonight, nonetheless. There are cars parked in the "No Parking" areas, though my friend says the level of activity is much reduced from what it used to be. To understand what used to be, come with me to parks in other times and places.

Scene one. The ravine in David Balfour Park, after 10 pm on a weekday evening in August. It's a cloudless, moonless night. There are no lights, save those that glean through the trees from apartments on the rim of the ravine.

You are in the heart of the city of two million people, but it's very dark and you feel almost frighteningly alone. You can scarcely see the trail you've been walking along since you turned off Mount Pleasant, and through there is a distant hum of traffic, what you hear mostly is the wind, the gurgling of a distant stream, small movements in the bushes as you pass.

It's suddenly much cooler, too. The grimy closeness of a city night is gone.

You begin to see other people. All men. A few are on bicycles, but most are walking. Some are heading past you, obviously on their way out of the park, but most are plunging farther in, and sometimes they head off on smaller trails that wind their way into the bushes. You can keep going straight ahead, or you can turn off, too. Whichever you choose, you will encounter more men. You will slowly realize that there are hundreds. And you will, almost inevitably, have sex with one or more of them.

I don't, this night in early August, because it's been more than a decade since I did the park's regularly, and I'm feeling a little shy and uncertain.

But I do watch (not at all a breach of park etiquette) five guys get it on together, and I enjoy the lovely arabesques of pale and shadowed flesh as they grope and suck and fuck each other.

Later, on my way out, I watch two guys sitting on a log, each blowing a different guy with his pants down around his ankles. I love the way their butts move, almost in sync.

Scene two. About a decade ago in Buena Vista Park in San Francisco. I'm taking an afternoon stroll, and I note that someone has left small packages on park benches in the somewhat more remote areas of the park.

Condom pack

Scene three. Mid-afternoon, a sunny day in August. Philosopher's Walk, a concrete pathway that runs south from Bloor, between Varsity Stadium and the ROM.

It's an enticing shortcut. The walkway meanders past trees and lawns, and the picturesque, age-patinaed brick walls of the stadium and museum rise up on either side. There are families sauntering along and students sitting under trees, books in their laps, pretending to study.

It would be a wonderful place, of an evening, to have sex. In fact, it used to be quite a popular trysting spot, but all that ended years ago. The welcoming bushes that grew along the stadium wall have been cut down and brighter lights have been installed along the walkway.

I stop to read a plaque that has been affixed to a bolder a few metres off the path. It's near a small grove of young trees, and the text reads, "These 14 trees are with sorrow planted in memory of 14 sisters slain because of their gender in Montreal on December 6, 1989. May commitment to the eradication of sexism and violence against women be likewise planted in the hearts and minds of you who stand here now and all who come after. It is not enough to look back in pain. We must create a new future."

The plaque is signed by "Women won't Forget." I stop here to think, after I read that plaque. Women probably feel safer now on Philosopher's Walk after dark. bright lights, and the absence of obvious places to hide, would discourage flashers and rapists. This is a good thing.

Brutal discouragement

Not that there haven't been over the years, more brutal ways of discouraging gay men from having sex in the parks. The police have occasionally busied themselves making arrests (while, as longtime activist George Hislop has frequently pointed out, simply urging straight couples doing it in cars to "move along").

And bashers have killed. Kenn Zeller was beaten to death in High Park in 1985. I myself recall, some 20 years ago, barely escaping the clutches of a gang of teenage boys out for blood.

The police and bashers are still a fact of life, of course, though it seems the cops no longer routinely monitor the parks. ("We can only act on complaints," staff inspector George Cushing of 11 division tells me. "We don't have the numbers for surveillance.")

Yet it seems to me there are now fewer good outdoor places than ever to go for sex. I check out that impression with Hislop, who knows the city's gay history, clandestine and otherwise, better than most, and he has a long list of vanished pleasures.

Philosopher's Walk, of course. But Queen's Park too, used to be much busier years ago. So did Winston Churchill Park, at Spadina and St. Clair, till they chopped the bushes down. The garden and fountain area between Alexander and Maitland used to be very hot until the shrubbery was trimmed and security patrols brought in.

Sex hungry

On the other hand, who wouldn't want safety features in a park? After all, everyone, not just sex-hungry gay men, should have the opportunity to enjoy the occasional sylvan moment.

There are some, however, who think "safety" has become code for other concerns it is no longer fashionable to articulate. Ken Popert, president of Pink Triangle Press, which publishes the gay bi-monthly Xtra, lives beside Cawthra Square Park and has attended several community meetings devoted to park issues.

He thinks "safety" is code for "comfort," and that many local residents are just not comfortable with the idea of men having sex in the park at night. They do not see the park as a place to be, but as a place to walk through, or to look at from their windows. They worry about their children's safety and lobbied hard for money to spend on a playground, although, as Popert points out, kids are in bed when the cruising starts, and the area already has a large school playground nearby.

"I think," he says, "the agenda for the park involves an underground but thriving homophobia among some residents." (He also feels that the park is simply too small to serve the several constituencies -- dog owners, child owners and homos -- making demands on it, and the resulting fencing and partitions make it look "like a map of the Balkans before the first world war.")

Precious sex spots ruined by officialdom

In fact, ward 2 councillor Chris Korwin-Kuczynski says the police once told him that politicians were being real hypocrites on the issue, that they were willing to go after flashers but much less eager to denounce other sexual activity.

Ridiculous equation

But of course you can and should. As ward 6 councillor Kyle Rae puts it, "There's this stuff happening that is freaking women out. It's not the same thing (as gay sex in the park), but people don't get that it's not the same thing."

And it does seem ridiculous to equate consensual sexual activity with the unwanted attention of a flasher or the violent attacks of a rapist. One is almost tempted to say that if heterosexual men were barred from our parks, all would not be well. But that is clearly not a workable or even desirable solution.

Though no one I spoke to (not the police, not city councillors, not parks department managers, not citizens' groups like Park Watch) would concede that consensual sex is a legitimate park activity, I think we have to begin by declaring that it is, and then decide as a community when and where it is appropriate.

The objections to allowing it are too patently absurd. The best people can come up with, when I ask why it shouldn't be allowed to happen, is that it upsets people walking their dogs at night, or that children might see.

If, as High Park director Zanetti says, not all gay sexual activity happens at night, perhaps that becomes part of the negotiations.

Now, one of the things you learn to do as a cosmopolitan resident of a large urban centre, is understand, accommodate, even appreciate the cultural expression of groups to which you don't belong . And though I have never been entirely happy with the idea of gay people an minority group, if we are to use that convenient shorthand, then public sex is our folk dancing. To suppress it is to suppress a venerable part of gay male culture.

It would make as much sense to declare that wedding parties must not use the park because they might offend those many homosexuals who find them aesthetically intolerable. If the parks are indeed for "everyone," as I keep being told, then they're there for us, too.

What, then are the appropriate times and places for legitimate sexual use of our parks? Pretty much where and when it's happening now. Excluding exhibitionists, most people want either privacy or the presence of only those others who will enjoy watching or who will eventually join in.

Secluded sex

There will always be tension between legitimate concerns for safety, particularly women's safety, in our parks, and the encouragement of harmless sexual activity. But we must take care that the steps we take to keep our parks safe don't become excuses to justify making all parts of a park sexually unwelcoming. There is something simply too magical, too lovely about city nights alive with so bucolic a public lust.

And it's not just that it's sex outdoors or sex in a wilderness, as Shakespeare well knew when he set his Dream in a wood near Athens. We love the dismantling of the fictions of civilization almost as much as we do the sex, and we go to parks partly because we can see the city towers in the distance, not because we can't.

Our Dream In The Park includes the day when, if we find safe-sex packs on park benches, we'll find they've been placed there courtesy of the city of Toronto. And the day when those 14 memorial trees planted along Philosopher's Walk will have grown high enough to welcome and shelter voluptuaries of any sexual orientation.