Park Cruising: What Happens When We Wander Off the Path

By Marcus McCann

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Release date: May 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9781487011796

Marcus McCann

MARCUS McCANN (he/him) is a lawyer who has been involved in a number of high-profile legal projects in the areas of sexuality and LGBTQ rights. He is a former managing editor of Xtra in Toronto and Ottawa. The author of three previous books, his writing has been shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert and Robert Kroetsch awards, and won the John Newlove Award and the EJ Pratt Medal for poetry. Born in Hamilton, Marcus now lives in Toronto.

Book preview

Cover: Park Cruising: What Happens When We Wander Off the Path by Marcus McCann. The title and author name appear in hot pink text, and the subtitle in white text, set over an image showing a narrow footpath through a wooded area.

park cruising

what happens when we wander off the path

marcus mccann

Other books by Marcus McCann

Soft Where

The Hard Return

Shut Up Slow Down Let Go Breathe

Copyright © 2023 Marcus McCann

Published in Canada in 2023 and the USA in 2023 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Park cruising : what happens when we wander off the path / Marcus McCann.

Names: McCann, Marcus, author.

Description: Essays. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20230134424 | Canadiana (ebook) 20230134610 | ISBN 9781487011789 (softcover) | ISBN 9781487011796 (EPUB)

Classification: LCC PS8625.C365 P37 2023 | DDC C814/.6—dc23

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Cover and book design: Alysia Shewchuk

Typesetting: Lucia Kim

Ebook Design: Nicole Lambe

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House of Anansi Press is grateful for the privilege to work on and create from the Traditional Territory of many Nations, including the Anishinabeg, the Wendat, and the Haudenosaunee, as well as the Treaty Lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit.

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We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.

We are leafwhelmed somewhere with the hood

Of some branchy bunchy bushybowered wood

— Gerald Manley Hopkins, Epithalamion

Here is adhesiveness, it is not previously fashion’d,

it is apropos;

Do you know what it is as you pass to be loved

by strangers?

— Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road

Introduction by Way of

a Question about Pleasure

The windows fogged up as people crowded into Glad Day Bookshop on December 13, 2016. Glad Day, a queer and trans bookstore, bar, and event space, had just moved into its street-level location at 499 Church Street that fall. The look was scrappy and unfinished. Two large bookcases on wheels — always teetering on the verge of falling over — had been rolled back from the centre of the store to make room for a few dozen chairs. The light was dim. Pop songs played in the background.

The meeting had been convened following the revelation that, in October and November, Toronto Police had raided a forest and parking lot used for cruising at Marie Curtis Park. Police had dubbed the undercover sting operation Project Marie, a moniker slyly feminizing and homophobic. All told, it netted at least seventy-two men.

The meeting was packed, standing room only. After sharing what we knew so far, people were invited to break into small circles to talk about how we could respond — whether it was through letter writing, legal challenges, or art.

Andrew Woodrow-Butcher, a bearish ginger with a sharp moustache, stood to give his report from one of these groups. In his recounting of their discussion, he asked rhetorically of the raids, Why is pleasure superfluous?

In our work opposing Project Marie, it became clear that there was a baseline problem: the popular imagination did not have language to articulate anything resembling a defence of cruising. I take Woodrow-Butcher’s question to mean: Why is there no accounting for the fact that the police crackdown was not conducted against some bad thing, some danger, or even something neutral but rather against something pleasurable, something that is lovely and affirming and has value?

The same problem exists in the legal context: cases from the last forty years rarely consider sexual expression valuable and worth protecting. Sex is only ever a problem. It is dangerous, harmful, risky. The law does not have language that accounts for park cruising as something that might contain elements of social good.

This book began as a collection of essays on legal topics, but it was drawn off course by trying to articulate some of these elements. At the risk of disappointing the spirit of José Esteban Muñoz — who wrote that books of criticism that simply glamorize the ontology of gay male cruising are more often than not simply boring — I describe some of the social goods that can come from cruising.

As Gayle Rubin wrote, A democratic morality should judge sexual acts by the way partners treat one another, the level of mutual consideration, the presence or absence of coercion, and the quantity and quality of the pleasure they provide. I take seriously Rubin’s invitation to consider non-normative sexual practices outside of the stigma they sometimes engender.

I have been thinking and writing about state regulation of sexuality for almost twenty years. I began my professional life as a journalist, working as, among other things, the managing editor of the gay and lesbian newspaper Xtra. Now that I am a lawyer, I often find myself involved in cases in which the realities of law and policing chafe against the values Rubin articulates. I have litigated cases related to sex work, sexual health education,

HIV

non-disclosure, and online activism. My involvement in opposing Project Marie as a lawyer and as an activist organizer with Queers Crash the Beat is described in greater detail in these pages.

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 safer 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 in it. It can lend distinctiveness to a place and become a source of tourism. It teaches people valuable lessons about sexual consent. And, yes, it is a source of pleasure and world-building. Conscientious park cruising can help participants grow more caring.

Of course, this book does not lose sight of the legal side of things. As a lawyer, I was trained to look at statutes and judges’ decisions to find out what the law is and what it means. Criminal Code provisions are defined when appropriate, and the law of indecency is described. But dry and brittle cases are only so much paper. They do not really tell the full story of the state’s relationship to park cruising. These essays focus not on the courtroom but on what precedes it: the habits of the cruiser; police and policing; municipal land use and zoning; and the surrounding social circumstances of cruising. As Steven Ruszczycky has pointed out, there is a symbiotic relationship between the park cruiser and the police cruiser. Looking closely at park cruising tells us not just about the former but also a surprising amount about the latter.

The logic of these essays could be applied to other non-normative sexual activities — hustling, say, or

bdsm

, or polyamory, or bathhouse culture — but this book focuses on park cruising. Returning to the cache of sex-positive writing of the 1980s and 1990s, I was struck by how much of the writing about public sex was actually about sex clubs, bathhouses, dark rooms, porn theatres, video booths,

bdsm

spaces — privately owned commercial indoor venues rather than public parks and other non-commercial outdoor spaces. I don’t think there’s anything sinister in this; sex in bathhouses or video booths is probably more interesting, from an academic point of view, in that it shows the definitional difficulties of public and private and illuminates in a direct way the concept of liminal space. Some of the central texts of the period were also created out of political necessity, a desire to save the bars and bathhouses from wave after wave of peril, first from police and organized crime, then from campaigns to shutter the clubs as a public health response to

aids

, and then in reaction to efforts to zone sexually explicit businesses out of cities.

The terms cruising 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 a 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 once described cruising as sexual sociability, which is partway there. For me at least, the defining characteristic of cruising is its 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.

Sex in a park does not have to be sex with a stranger. Two (or more) people can go to a park together, find a quiet corner, and get busy. Straight people do it all the time — on a blanket in the park after sunset, in the backseat of a car in a lot overlooking a ravine — and when they do, it’s considered a harmless lovers’ lane scenario. If found, the couple may be told to knock it off or move along, but there are rarely harsher consequences.

This variety of non-anonymous park sex — queer or straight — is performed out of necessity, sure, but also just for fun. In an episode of Audio Sex Party, a podcast that brings groups of queer and trans guys together for drinks and conversation about sex, one partygoer recounts that he and his ex would meet and hang out, but rather than have sex at his apartment, they would sometimes go to a wooded area in a nearby cruising park. There, they would have sex with each other, semi-privately but in public.

The opposite is also true, of course: strangers cruise each other in public, leading to sex in private. This frequently happens during bar cruising. Although sex can happen on site, at bars and nightclubs people of all orientations pick someone up and take them home to continue the party. Where useful, I have drawn from these overlapping activities — park sex that isn’t related to cruising and cruising that isn’t related to parks — but all with the goal of illuminating the book’s main subject.

There is no doubt that when it comes to park cruising we are living an in interesting cultural moment. Today’s park cruising takes place in the shadows of the city planning nightmares Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner and Samuel R. Delany warned about twenty-five years ago. In Toronto, where I live, the unrestricted escalation of commercial rents — created by permissive government policies — has led many queer and sex-positive establishments to shut their doors. One block at a time, quirky neighbourhoods are torn down and replaced with hastily constructed glass condo buildings. This is partly spurred by an interpretation of the term highest and best use at the Ontario Municipal Board (now replaced by the Ontario Land Tribunal), which is taken to mean solely highest economic value. Sex clubs and gay bars could never show that they generated enough economic activity to be the footprint’s most lucrative use, and no glass tower would put a bathhouse on its ground floor when it could lease the space to Starbucks or the Running Room.

With each bathhouse and nightclub closure, it was understood that the municipal government would not grant a permit to open a new one somewhere else. Freezing the availability of permits seems to be an official strategy for keeping seedy or disreputable businesses to a minimum. For example, the city has not increased the number of body-rub parlour licences since 1975, when the number was capped at twenty-five. Even ordinary bars have faced pushback from the City of Toronto since it zoned the old warehouse district south of Queen Street the Entertainment District and began refusing to issue licences to new dance clubs elsewhere.

In the face of a weakening commercial sex culture, a particular combination of technology and practice theoretically provided an answer: people could find each other online and then meet for sex in their own homes. But Grindr is not for everyone, and there have been well-documented critiques of the app as time-wasting, racist, body shaming, corporate, and cruel. This sex culture too is affected by economic realities. Residential rental prices reached truly obscene rates prior to the

covid

-19 pandemic, and house prices were just as bad. The result has been to put downtown living out of reach for many working- and middle-class folks and to force those who do live downtown to put up with cramped and crowded accommodation. The idea that people can arrange for sex in their homes is undercut when three people have to share a one bedroom plus condo where the second and third person’s bedroom is an open space that would ordinarily be a den or breakfast nook. The parks provide an alternative to all of this.

I can’t say for certain whether park cruising is gaining or losing popularity. No bouncers stand outside the bushes with a clicker, keeping track of capacity. But parks have been extraordinarily busy during the

covid

pandemic, with an uptick in all kinds of uses. I can report that, in this context, parks in Toronto continue to be sites of pleasure and exchange, including sexual pleasure and sexual exchange.

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.

Similarly, park cruising does not take place exclusively in Western Europe and North America. Academic works in the last twenty years have described cruising in parks around the world. In Joubert Park, in Johannesburg, South Africa, for example, its use by gay men was shaped by the distinctive features of South African apartheid. The city’s inability to police the bustling, working-class park and surrounding streets meant that authorities could not police racial segregation, and the area became a site of interracial and interclass sexual contact, according to Jonathan Cane. Waves of illegal activities — prostitution, drugs, violence — made Joubert Park a sometimes hospitable, sometimes inhospitable site of cruising.

In contrast to park cruising elsewhere, sexual contact is made but rarely consummated in People’s Park, in Guangzhou, China, according to a study by Junxi Qian.Long, exposed rows of formal benches make meeting people possible, but the very same architecture makes sex there impractical. Prostitution here has a different relationship to cruising, helping create an economy that supports two-hour and three-hour hotel rentals at the outskirts of the park. Cruising in People’s Park is therefore shaped by geography mediated through culture: the austere civic infrastructure of the park and the availability of rooms at surrounding hotels.

Park cruising looks very different again in South India, with significant variation in cruising practices between the cities of Mysuru, Belgaum, and Ballari, according to Robert Lorway and his fellow researchers. The way in which cruisers approach each other and interact is governed by deeply embedded gender codes among participants — codes that do not map neatly onto the gender codes of Western Europe. Park cruising can be socially sanctioned, and much of the cruising and flirting happens in groups, in contrast to the Western stereotype of the solitary cruiser. Because many queer and trans people live with their biological families, festivals are important opportunities for park cruising, periods in which people can be away from their families overnight or for days on end without moral opprobrium or interrogation upon their return.

This book is not a thesis and exposition; it is a way of looking at a phenomenon that is usually only glanced obliquely. Each of the following essays takes an aspect of park cruising as its topic: pleasure and world-building; non-participants; public health; Project Marie; municipal planning; the law of indecency; consent; shame; violence; and the possibility of legal reform. Within most of the essays, I try to answer a first-level question in the beginning of the essay, and then I try to ask "what does what it means mean?" Are there any second-order insights to be gleaned? As a result, the essays sometimes wander off the main path — a structure that bears a certain resemblance to park cruising itself.

Political writing about sexuality often assumes that those who disagree are prudish, stupid, or evil — sometimes all three. I have tried to avoid this pitfall, and to the extent I have been successful, this book is indebted to the deep currents of empathy in work by writers like Ivan Coyote, S. Bear Bergman, and Kai Cheng Thom. This trans literature of empathy has taught me that worlds open up if a writer can take a fierce and terrifying step away from mere anger and toward understanding. I have tried as much as possible to take a non-judgmental attitude toward the characters who are described and, when I can, to assume good intentions. Empathy also means introspection and self-empathy from time to time, skills I have tried to deploy — with varying degrees of success — to my own limitations as I wrote these essays.

I am grateful to Leigh Nash and House of Anansi Press for taking a chance on this collection of essays. Thank you to Paul Sutton, who listened to many of these ideas when they were only half baked. Thank you to Andrew Faulkner, who helped me escape the narrow ways lawyers are expected to write about law and foreground the human aspects of these stories. I am grateful for the support of those who were in my life as I was working on Park Cruising: Carly Boyce, Julia Sinclair-Palm, Colin Zavitz, Jose Borras, Erin Secord, Lucy Cappiello, and Angela Chiasson, in particular. Thank you to Kira-Lynn Ferderber for inspiring, and lending their careful eye, to the essay on non-participants. I am grateful for the research assistance provided by Elsa Ascencio and Nicole Dinn, and to the Queers Crash the Beat crew, including Mikiki, Lisa Amin, Anthea Black, Michael Holmes, Joshua Shaw, and especially Jonathan Valelly, who also helped fact check the book. The love I have felt while working on this project has been warm, diffuse, interwoven, and, at times, blindingly bright.

A Thousand Luminous Threads

Biking east, away from downtown, away from the touristic promenade at Queen’s Quay, where cyclists dodge families even in the bike lanes, the scenery suddenly changes. Out past the Redpath Sugar Refinery, you can bike to the spot where the Don Valley Parkway meets the elevated Gardiner, two of Toronto’s busiest highways. You slip away from the city’s tall buildings, and the sightline moves from vertical to horizontal, from portrait to landscape. It is unsettling, almost as if something has fallen over.

The dust in the air tastes like concrete powder. Giant holes are being dug behind metal fences. This in-between space, the Port Lands, will be another outpost of condos, a planned neighbourhood, soon enough. It is already changing.

But for now, if you turn away from the elbow of highway and head toward Lake Ontario, the view is still overwhelmingly horizontal. You will pass a collection of wide, low-slung, semi-industrial sites. A stench rises from the

GFL

Unwin Transfer Station — a garbage dump — but mercifully the winds carry the smell away, so it is only really overpowering directly in front of it, and then, after, it’s easy to forget.

The main road into the Port Lands dead-ends in a traffic circle. There is a parking lot, a low administrative building, a chip truck, and then, spreading out on either side, yellow sand and the lake. This is Cherry Beach.

Is there a gay end of Cherry Beach? I ask, first directing the question to acquaintances, then to strangers on Grindr. Yes and no, it turns out. Like almost every beach in the world, if you walk to the end and keep