Brent Ingram

Summer Love-In: Celebrating public sex with the Wreck Beach Boys [cover]

p.16.

The Importance Of Public Sex

In summer months I have a place for public sex. Heading out to Wreck Beach, I travel across a series of spaces with connections to queer history and geography, a queerscape connected by muddy trails where the Fraser River meets the Strait of Georgia. Queer space emerged in many of the areas at the south end of Wreck as part of a "zone of discard": the steep muddy trails made the beach unattractive to most other than heterosexual nudists and sexual minorities.

While still claimed as Musqueam territory, this beach strip is controlled by the Greater Vancouver Regional District (GVRD) -- a suburb-oriented agency will [sic] little history of queer-friendliness. The exceptional queerness of the southern part of Wreck emerged in the land management vacuum that has involved UBC, GVRD, homophobic neighbours, wildlife conservationists, and highly organized naturists.

The area at the bottom of the access trail to Wreck Beach was, not so long ago, the former seasonal Salish camp Keekullukhum -- "little stockade." After the Second World War, this main beach area became a major location for male homosexual cruising. The main beach area became swamped with heterosexuals in the late 1960s but a small queer enclave, amidst the hundreds of people, has re-emerged in recent years.

A kilometre to the north along the beach is Tower Beach with a mixed scene including a waning lesbian presence. Going south along the shore from the main trail through marsh is the beginning of a three kilometre strip that is primarily gay male. Here are The Flats, the former site of a stockade and camp, Kullukhun. This was the first gay male nude beach that emerged in the late 1960s. Behind The Flats is forest where old style, silent sex still takes place in abundance. Moving south along the maze of muddy trails about half a kilometre is The Oasis (alternatively called Attitude Point), a former Salish camp site called Humlusum meaning "bending down to drink."

The spring is still there but it has been heavily polluted from the UBC campus above. It is at The Oasis where private and public, body and landscape, and sex and communality come together for me. People are mostly naked. They often talk. A few people come primarily for sex in the stream bed in the forest behind. Others come more for space and nature. The Oasis has a rich set of scenes. It is a sort of interchange of desires, erotic sensibilities, and ways and places to make contact. More often, there is a lot of playing, socializing, and jockeying for partners. Mostly, the scene is exceptionally good natured.

The Oasis is a bit of [a] laboratory: one of the homoerotic hothouses for the city. It is a place for constructing new modes of fun -- and some caring and sharing along the way.

By better mapping and valuing each of our personal sets of queer sites, we can recognize our continued vulnerability in a time of still largely dysfunctional human rights protections, gay consumerism with higher and higher price tags, and with often greater job, housing and relationship instability with the perpetual risk of isolation.

As Henry David Thoreau once said, "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation." If imperfect and fragmentary sexual acts, in only slightly appropriate places, can help people remember how to play and to bust out of the constraints on our everyday lives, to make new contact and to learn how to better give and live, they are worth finding a place for and defending.

Can promiscuity ever replace the benefits of dependable, ongoing bonds of which most people only have time for a few? Not really. But it is through taking some of our feelings slightly more public, to go from imagining to reality, that we can reinvent terms like "relationship," "boy/girlfriend," and certainly "marriage" -- and when those particular ideas are appropriate, to make them work. In the coming years, many more of us will benefit from more space for public sex: on our own terms, based on our own desires, in the places that are part of our emotional and cultural "neighbourhoods," and with people we can call friends.

By continuing to accept homophobic stereotypes from the Right around the brutishness and social insignificance of our sexualities, and by not demanding full sets of options for contact and expression, we weaken our own positions to survive, prosper, and to love.

This is likely to be the summer when the local gay community is called on to preserve Wreck Beach for outdoor sex. Acting on requests from the Wreck Beach Preservation Society, a group of mainly straight nudists, the university RCMP say they will be clamping down on booze and drugs -- and sex on the trails. Our history of sex on the beach is worthy of organizing to continue.

Vancouver is not alone. A new wave of hysteria against same-sex affection is emerging in Canada and the United States. And it is a bit more sophisticated this time around -- bringing with it startling headlines and video coverage and dividing the gay and lesbian community wherever it goes. Riding the crest of an unprecedented expansion of our civil rights and visibility in the 1990s, many of us are oblivious to the threat on the horizon.

This particular sex panic targets some of the groups least acknowledged by and claimed as part of our various queer communities. People who have sex outside of private homes and hotel rooms, in "public" rather than "private," are increasingly being made again into the last perverts and the newest queer menace to the stability of state and family.

In recent months, the Christian Right and ratings-seeking television news shows in the US have fuelled a multi-city spree of public sex arrests that have been used to portray queers as crazed perverts. The panic has reached north in recent weeks. The May 28 issue of The Ottawa Sun was headlined "City tangled in Web of sex: Ottawa malls, hotels, parks listed in online gay sex tour guide."

Europe, by way of contrast, is responding to recent court rulings by casting off the last laws that target and discriminate against the consensual sexual expression by gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered people.

The British Labour government recently put a stop to police monitoring of, and arrests for, "cottaging" -- sex in public toilets. This was in part a recognition of the century's worth of wasted effort devoted to controlling a little bit of sex.

There are even cruising parks in Spain, with sighs erected in 1998, indicating discrete and consensual erotic contact between adults is a right that will be protected.

But in British Columbia, areas of outdoor sex -- along with toilets -- may well become the new battlegrounds for the extreme Right and its foil in Christian fundamentalism.

When the Right attacks men for having a bit of furtive sex in toilets and parks, it is really attacking all consensual sexuality, homo and hetero. Everything outside of a narrow definition of heterosexual procreation is being repainted as "dirty" -- if only because it has been soiled by hatred and self-hatred. Lesbians and gay men who think that they can finally get full social acceptance through being "married" should look again. No act of same-sex affection, indoor or outdoor, will be safe from hostility if the onslaught of the current sex panic builds steam.

Public sex is an easy way to get at queers. Our various communities are still divided about group and anonymous sex and the role of home. If there was ever an easy way to divide and conquer sexual minorities it is by playing on public sex.

Yet public sex has a long and honourable history in our society, and societies throughout history and around the world. Vancouver's history and geography of public sex is rich -- from hundreds of sailors cruising Ceperley Wharf in the late 1800s to the furtive affection found in the washrooms of the women's military hostel at 901 Dunsmuir in the 1940s.

What exactly is public sex? The term suggests "doing it in public" but effectively means a range of largely private erotic activities that are carried out beyond the bounds of good taste, manners, and legal questions around ownership and use of public and private space are constantly being renegotiated. For example, well into the Thatcher era in Britain, homosexuality (but not heterosexuality) in hotel rooms was effectively considered public sex and was illegal because fo the possibility of hotel workers with keys inadvertently witnessing supposedly disturbing activities.

Group sex, even in private residences, is still considered public, and illegal in much of North America. Today, sex in a tent in a wilderness park is now considered private while unobserved sex outside of those thin nylon sheets and aluminum tubing is "public" and illegal. In another example, the debates about what is public and private in clubs throughout the world are endless and often lead to complex licensing to effectively put a lid on the action. What might be considered "private" and legal after a middle class dinner party is "public" when conducted by less economically privileged people out of doors.

It is time to confront some myths about public sex. The first is that only men engage in casual sex. The brief lesbian beachhead at Lions Bay showed that girls indeed could have such fun together -- until the RCMP, pressured by wealthy neighbours, started hauling women. The second myth is that public sex is always anonymous even though time and time again we hear of friends and neighbours getting off together. The third myth is that public sex never involves talking or exchange of feelings. This might have been true when men were working at hiding their feelings and indications from speech were a turn-off in class-bound and Anglocentric Vancouver. Today, people engaged in the majority of public sex often get more than ample information about their partners some of whom are or may become their friends.

The fourth myth, the most spurious, is that people engaged in public sex are necessarily "cheap," "sluttish," irresponsible, and, worst of all, not into extended foreplay. The myth of public sex just being about "slam, bam, etc etc ..." was probably never that true. For many of us, the public aspect of the sex is the foreplay with the potential for deeper connecting afterwards, whether or not it leads to (more) orgasms or even "marriage," the delicious mystery of queer life.

Brent Ingram is the coeditor of Queers in Space: Communities, Public Places, Sites of Resistance. The book won the Lambda Literary Foundation's 1998 award for a lesbian and Gay Non-fiction Anthology.

SIDEBAR

A long and honourable history

The city you see around you -- the streets and parks you walk everyday [sic] and the buildings you visit -- are layered with gay and lesbian history, including more than a century of public sex.

Take Chinatown, for example. Once referred to as "Celestialland" for its night life, Chinatown saw a huge amount of casual sex between males within a decade of the city's founding. The railroad right-of-ways and wharves at the back of False Creek were favourite spaces for trysts and groups -- until they became too polluted and action moved to less fetid locations further west.

Hotel lobbies and washrooms, especially around train stations, were major places to meet. Many of the all-male hotels had communal baths and saw the sharing of more than just bars of soap. More elaborate bathhouses, such as the one that occupied a now derelict shell on Hastings' across from the old Woodwards Department Store, saw many a homosexual encounter.

By the early 20th century, a range of puritanical forces allied with middle class women's "anti-white slavery" groups, racists, and the police (hoping to justify money for an expansion of the force) came to attack "immorality and perversity" in Celestialland.

Many of the resulting arrests and a great portion of the convictions around public homosexuality were race-based with particular scrutiny for the proclivities of Canadian males of Chinese, South Asian, and French backgrounds--especially when found with Anglo-Saxon males who often could buy their way out of arrests. As the bare majority of Vancouver's Anglo-Saxon population faltered around the First World War, there were a series of show trials of Sikh males, some of whom were early political activists, for arranging and having group sex with white men.

In British Columbia, hundreds of men found having public sex endured years of prison, lashings and death in squalid conditions and in work camps. It was this repression that pushed men into the wilds of Stanley and Central parks especially after the construction of streetcar lines along Robson and towards Burnaby. As early as the 1890s, the Ceperley Wharf on the edge of Stanley Park at English Bay, saw literally hundreds of sailors cruising on a given night. The action soon moved into the "Enchanted Forest" which had been recently depopulated of native people and logged selectively.

In some other examples, we will probably never know the amount of affection shared in the washrooms of the Womens Building on Thurlow near Robson, where Margaret Sanger sparked the Canadian reproductive rights and women's sexuality movements in 1923. Less than two decades later the washrooms of the women's military hostel at 901 Dunsmuir saw considerable furtive affection.

If homophobia and hostility to public sexual expression was nasty before the Second World War, it was vicious in the Cold War. The brief criminalization of lesbianism, from 1954 to 1969, focussed on public presence and the monitoring of any form of erotic affection between women. The hysteria around homosexual, mixed-race, and bilingual Leo manta, one of the last people executed by the Government of Canada, unleashed a wave of police repression of bars and cruising areas in Victoria and Vancouver well into the mid-1960s.

In Vancouver, the federal government's appetite for arresting communists was never sated, prompting police, under pressure to arrest enemies of the state, to target homosexuals in cruising areas.

It was not until the organizing of Vancouver's Gay Alliance Towards Equality, in the 1970s, that there was any resistance to the regular entrapment of men in that apogee of "tearooms" the public toilets at English Bay. By then there were a few awesome back room sex clubs, such as the Playpen South (also referred to by many a feminist-allied fag as the "Pig Pen") at 1369 Richards Street -- that reincarnated as the after hours club, The World, until the building was recently torn down.

But as late as 1989 the chair of the Vancouver Park Board, Malcolm Ashford, argued that gay men had no right to ask for greater protection from bashing if they engaged in public sex.

Yet a substantial portion, if not the majority, of the arrests and convictions for public sex, outside of the tearooms in Stanley Park over the last century, have been for affection such as kissing and groping, that was supposedly legal anyway, rather than exhibitionistic genital contact.

It was the movement against anti-entrapment that helped unify the lesbian and gay communities in preparation for fighting for civil rights and later against Social Credit Party hostility around AIDS. But these are merely the highlights of the continuing saga of "homocouverites" taking their affections out to where they can best express them.