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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (July 21, 2000)
inly?1. ?flnn f t — f|25 Strangers in the Stonewall sexual liberation. Nowhere is that philosophy more evident than in the Sex Panic movement. T he organization was formed on the notion that gay liberation began with sexual lib eration as well as with civil disobedience. Activist Rex Wockner recently criticized the gay lobby group Equality Colorado for helping the police discourage cruising and public sex in Denvers Cheeseman Park. He writes: “Equality Colorado may not be happy till we are all living monogamously in the suburbs raising hard-to- place adopted babies— till we are exactly like our straight neighbors except for what we do in bed (which is distasteful to discuss anyway).” For some gay men, the separation of love and sex is as sacred as the separation of church and state. Take Mike and Lex, for instance, a Port land couple who cruise together: “W e’re men,” they say. “We like to hunt.” Or Adam, a twenty-something who tells me, “It’s like that song. ‘You and me ain’t nothin’ but mammals / So let’s do it like they do on the Dis covery Channel.’” Josh, a graduate student, adds: “Public sex is just so convenient. I go to the beach, I read my book, 1 get a blow job, I go home.” He calls it the peeing-in-the-woods syn drome. “Men have sex outdoors for the same reason we pee outdoors: because we can.” T he Sex Panic philosophy is perhaps best summed up by pom actor and writer Scott O ’Hara. In his essay “Wholesome and Natural,” he writes: “Sharing my body with another per son was an affirmation of everything positive in life; and making a public display of that sexuali ty was one of the most basic ways in which I could improve the world. So I had sex in all the places we’re not supposed to do it: parks, beach es, bathhouses, bars, back alleys.” O ’Hara died from A ID S complications in 1998. Night Cimtrmu'd from P age 2 3 A youthful-looking 48— “I stay overweight because it stretches the wrinkles,” he says— David stumbled upon “fuck bookstores” after 15 years of marriage when a business colleague invited him along while they should have been on a sales call. W ithin weeks, he was reorganiz ing his workday around his libido, going to the bookstores in the morning, then hitting the parks in the afternoon, sometimes racking up as many as 10 sexual encounters a day. “I thought that sucking dick in the park was gay life,” David says ruefully. One bonus, how ever, was that the constant action honed his sexual skills. “Practice makes perfect,” he says. “Now, I’m a hellcat between the sheets.” . “But if anything is too good to be true,” he continues, “it probably is.... I just got tired of the empty feelings.” moved to Oregon to join the Living Enrichment Center in Wilsonville and, as part of his sex- addict recovery, won’t even go into a restroom with a glory hole. Although certainly “no saint,” his attitude toward sex has changed. “Now, I want to set up house,” he says. “And that’s just not in the cards when it’s a sport fuck.” Or, as Kramer wrote in his controversial novel Faggots, “Having so much sex made find ing love impossible.” A rresting B ehavior N ot finding love might not be the worst thing that happens to someone engaging in public sex. Public sex acts involving the gen itals are illegal, and the law always has taken a dim view of them. The 1917 Legislature enacted the law anyway. In the next four years, until the statute was repealed, 127 Oregon men were castrated. Since then, police forces everywhere have not been above entrapment of the sort that involves sending out hunky undercover cops who not only make passes but actually enjoy a blow job first. A joke of the 1930s went, “It’s been wonderful, but you’re under arrest.” For every George Michael who is able to put his life back together, countless others’ lives reg ularly are ruined by aggressive police crackdowns. And although gay men might make distinctions between sex in public parks and restrooms— as opposed to private commercial venues, such as adult video stores— the police do not. Recently, at the Adult Superstore &. Theater in Las Vegas, plainclothes officers sat in arcades with the doors ajar, invited men to join them, then arrested them on the spot. And last January, a man in Arkansas committed suicide after the Arkansas Democrat'Gazette in Little Rock pub lished his name among those arrested in a sex raid. (The newspaper then failed to report his sui cide and ignored requests from five major gay organizations to discuss its policy of selective pub lication of the names of men arrested for misde meanors.) During the debate about police brutality in the 1993 Laurelhurst Park scandal, Ariel Water- woman wrote in Just Out: “Though only some of these men are self-identified as gay, they are all perceived to be gay by the public and the police.” Point well taken. The plight of men, gay or straight, unjustly entrapped by the police in gay sex raids is our problem as a community. But the public opinion of men who engage in unlawful or unsafe public sex is our problem, too. “Why do gay men have sex in the bushes?” my exasperated lesbian friend asked me. I suppose we do because we can. And also because we can’t. But the more important question we gay men must ask ourselves is: “Should we?” During the same month David came out and After Portland’s YMCA “vice” scandal of separated from his wife, he also was arrested in 1912, public outcry was so great that the maxi ooking for ove in an Omaha, Neb., park restroom. He got off with mum sentence for a sodomy charge was tripled ll the rong laces the following year to 15 years imprisonment. a $175 fine, but it served as a wake-up call, and Note: Most of the names of the men inter That same year, Oregon voters rejected by a nar he began attending Sex and Love Addicts viewed for this article have been changed to ongtime A ID S activist Larry Kramer writes: row margin a statute to require sterilization of protect their privacy. ..¿“O nce again, this has become a battle over Anonymous. He swore off the parks and "those who are addicted to the practice of restrooms, instead developing a social life civil rights rather than an issue of public sodomy or the crime against nature, or to other through gay bars and what he calls the “Elec ■ MARC A cito wonders whether he and his part' health.... Why is public sex a civil right.7” gross, bestial and perverted sexual habits and ner are committed to fidelity for moral reasons or tronic Park,” America Online. Kramer, along with writers Michelangelo practices prohibited by statute.” simply because nobody cute has hit on them. Today, David’s spiritual life takes priority. He Signorile, Gabriel Rotello and Andrew Sulli van, has been doing battle since 1997 with Sex Panic’s advocacy of unrestricted, promiscuous free love. The price for that free love, they say, M seems to be increasing rates of HIV, gonorrhea >1 * and syphilis infections. I spoke with several men who engage in pub PARK lic sex regularly (more than 25 times a year), CLOSURE and each one has at least one chilling story of HOURS ortland police again are asking for help after city o f Portland, Multnomah County, the Portland Police Bureau and high-risk activity he’s observed. W hat’s more, of 10.30 PM being alerted by officials about public sex the Sexual Minorities Roundtable to initiate a solution. the 240 men surveyed, 35 percent said they TO acts in North Portland’s Kelly Point Park. Costa thinks the issue should be reported in T he O regonian, because I think men having sex in public places is not an 5.00 AM On July 11, officer Liz Caruthers briefed the many of those having public sex are not in mainstream gay culture but acceptable part of gay culture. Interestingly, 71 Sexual Minorities Roundtable about the problem. are closeted bisexual men. He says previous coverage in Just O ut about ■mm percent of the men who never have had sex in a ■ f other problem areas has had limited results. She says several complaints from elderly citizens have ™ü public space approve of the practice, but only 61 been made about public sexual activity between men. He also approached officials about naming violators in the newspa percent of the men who have had sex in public She says pornography and paper towels with human per and setting up a diversion program that would require those arrest TV places approve of it. feces have been found in the area, as well. ed to learn about sexually transmitted diseases and blood-borne I asked David, who by his own estimation pathogens. Caruthers says most license plate numbers she has engaged in 2,000 to 3,000 public sex acts with checked have been registered to two people with the But after speaking with city officials, Costa found out those ideas men during his marriage, why that might be. same last name— presumably married couples. aren’t viable— partially because of funding issues. Instead, the round “It’s just my opinion, but I think that those Portland Police Cmdr. Greg Clark says the depart table and police will work with the Port of Portland, which owns the who have done it know how emotionally unsat •vT ment is looking for ideas about how to curb the prob land where Kelly Point Park is located, and work on a poster campaign isfying it is," he says. “W hen two people come > :5'V Ä to discourage public sex acts. lem. “We’ll do anything you ask,” he says. together, it’s like making a cake— one person m I But if the problem persists, police will take on a Costa says arrests likely will occur as well. H e’s hoping interviews brings the flour and the butter, the other brings higher profile and strict enforcement action will be can be conducted with those arrested to learn more about the problem the milk and sugar— and they work together. * and how to solve it. planned, Clark adds. a. Sex is just the frosting on the cake. But most Roundtable co-chair Norm Costa says he has people, gay and straight, just go ahead and open Ä ■ Reported by J onathan KlPP already taken action. He’s looking for support from the up the can of frosting and eat it first.” L A L W P I A rrest A rea to A void P a a , i®
