On this issue Andy, you're wrong.
I don't think anyone, whether gay or straight, should be fucking in the bathrooms of public parks. And show me two gay men who were arrested for "making out" in public, please.

The whole idea that homos have the right to fuck wherever and whenever we want is a nasty remnant of the septic-tank subculture of the 70's that gave us HIV and AIDS. I don't care if you wanna have anonymous sex or not, but if you have the desire then use AOL or other Internet services and stop expecting that everyone else has to honor your choice to suck dick in a public bathroom!

Oh, and I'm not saying "you" as in you Andy, cause you know I love you.

Shane I have to disagree...if you read the article the first thing that happens...is someone is arrested for just getting in a car and saying what he wants. there wasn't any sex involved. i think that's scary. i'm not a supporter of public sex, but i do think there are more important issues for the police to be cracking down on.

I have to agree with Shane on this one. Why should we have to tolerate some person who can't contol themseleves sexually? I mean i don't care what you do in your bedroom, but when you are taking it out of the confines of that space and putting it in the public sphere you deserve to be punished if caught. If anything else at least it would deter some future person from doing it. Plus, if you want random sex, just meet online or by phone chat, at least the rest of us don't have to see it.

I'm trying to make a few points in this post: 1. St. Paul prosecutes cruisers much more harchly than other Twin Cities municipalities. 2. Gay sex crimes are punished far more harshly than straight sex crimes of the same nature. 3. The overaching institutions in the GLBT community (read:media) are very silent about addressing any negative aspects of the community, including cruising.

I'll post a follow-up to this from my perspective as an outreach worker in public sex areas, as well as a criminal justice student. I work all night though, so no one hold your breath :)

I am surprised by the rather conservative responses found here--and I would suggest a few books: Martha Nussbaum's book: Hiding From Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law, and Policing Public Sex, eds., Dangerous Bedfellows. Quite frankly, I think much more discussion should happen around the notions of constructed harm and actual harm--what harm do people having sex in public actually inflict? In my view, none. And what is actually occurring? As far as I can tell, folks are not having sex on exposed park benches--they are having sex in relatively secluded places, being spotted, and then being arrested. In my view, as long as folks are doing their best to respect others, they ought to be permitted public sex. My evaluation of the comments above: well, I think they resemble the same kind of statements the Christians who are in Andy's town these days would make. Andy, I think you should defend public sex. And I think you should think more about lumping all of Christians into that title Christian: “Has Christianity gotten such a bad reputation that it must resort to deceptive marketing in order to draw people in?” Some parts of the Christian faith, yes, yes indeed.

PS: Shane: this statement: "The whole idea that homos have the right to fuck wherever and whenever we want is a nasty remnant of the septic-tank subculture of the 70's that gave us HIV and AIDS" is (and this is my profound evaluation) dumb.

As someone who goes cruising in public now and then, and who finds nothing wrong with it, I found the Rake article a bit of a let-down. It was the same old narrative of the intrepid reporter gritting his teeth and going 'undercover' to witness for himself the depravity, only to find mainly harmless old men just kinda standing there in the woods looking at him.

A more interesting angle to have spent more time on is the debate on whether cracking down on this sort of behavior is a good use of police funds. With the city budgets shrinking due to Pawlenty's tight purse strings, and the police forces of both twin cities dwindling (in a few years, we'll have only around 650 police officers in Minneapolis, approaching levels not seen since the 70s), it's valid to ask whether this sort of activity is worth policing (in London, for example, cops have much more important things to police). Cruising is a victimless crime--in Minneapolis, it usually happens waaay out of the way (I have never come across guys cruising unless I wanted to find them--and then I had to look, hard. It's laughable to think that "homos" want "the right to fuck and suck wherever they want"). The quality of life issues (such as used condoms being left behind) are those that are attached to lots of society's vices--puke on the streets downtown, for example, after a Saturday night. Cruising among some gay people becomes a lightning rod because it frightens homophobic straight people and it makes the "respectable" part of the "community" look "bad." Give me a break.

Tony - If you can find nothing more profound to say on the subject than my statement was "dumb" then you're either willfully ignorant or just plain stupid. Either way I'm confident that I'm right.

Again - No one has the right to go and have sex in public, and certainly not in public spaces. To defend gay men's right to fuck in parks is to cast gay sex as something dirty and shameful that should take place in dark dirty corners of bathrooms or nasty areas of public parks.

It is defending an outmoded, tired and discredited way of thinking and that is that to be truly gay means to have as much sex, in as many places, and with as many people as one can. I stand by waht I said earlier. That attitude led us right down the path to hell in the 70's. We willingly ignored the warning sides of HIV and stood by bathhouse owners over our own people, and we're still paying the price. Randy Shilts said as much in "As The Band Played On."

This whole issue is so stale and tired it turns my stomach to even have to argue it. As a gay man I'm ashamed that we waste our time arguing about a homo's right to buttfuck in a public bathroom instead of our right to define ourselves by something other than rampant, desensualized sex. Call it conservative if you want but I call it self-respect.

Shane, your argument is a valid one (a lot of cruising is done by guys who aren't comfortable with their sexuality and who aren't out, and I think that's too bad--I'd like to see a society where they can be free to express their desires in a more socially accepted way, which would probably make cruising as a practice disappear altogether), but your argument suffers from the hyperbole I usually associate with out-of-touch firebranders on the right: gay men are sex crazed, men who cruise are sex crazed, sex is dirty, and anonymous sex spreads disease and despair. And they're making the "rest of us" look bad. Oh. I'm so sorry.

I call it moralizing. And anyone who relies on "As the Band Played On" to help them form opinions on public morality shouldn't be trusted to pontificate on the subject.

The truth is, cruising in public isn't really that "public"... Have you ever stumbled across two guys going at it in public? No, you have to seek these places out, actively look for them. A lot of guys who cruise aren't sex addicts. And on the issue of public health, it isn't a question of who you have sex with, but what you do with them. I'd argue that getting handjobs from a hundred anonymous men in some park is safer than getting fucked in the ass once without a condom by your boyfriend of three months whom you love and who assures you he's 'clean'.

Shane:

Thanks for the response to my comments, and I think it obvious that your comment: “The whole idea that homos have the right to fuck wherever and whenever we want is a nasty remnant of the septic-tank subculture of the 70's that gave us HIV and AIDS” is, let me say, off.

1. It is not an argument, Shane, when one lambastes the sexual practices of others out of a sense of disgust, Bruce Bawerian paranoia about what others will think about gay sex.
2. You have not even begun to touch upon why sex in public space is disgusting—that is, rationally: you say it disgusting, contaminating, desensitized—but make no argument as to why you think that nor why your way is better….
3. And to suggest that it was the sexual practices of the septic-subculture of the 70s that gave us HIV and AIDS—is, well, simply crazy. For three reasons: 1) it suggests HIV/AIDS was created by those who had sex in public space—and they gifted the rest of the population with it; 2) it is to suggest, from the get go, folks who have sex in public spaces have unprotected sex [and it is possible to contract HIV/AIDS via protected sex]; and 3) it is to suggest a direct correlation between gay sex (protected or otherwise) and HIV/AIDs—which, of course, cannot be established.

Leaving the statement behind (so to speak), no one is arguing (as far as I can tell) that gay men should have sex whenever and wherever they want…that is your construction. What I am arguing is that there is no reason (disgust is certainly not a reason) to uphold laws or create them—that ban sex in public space.

And we are in the realm of rights—in the realm of law, which is to protect people from actual harm—harm they cannot escape—not the constructed harm of disgust. And it is not a waste of time to combat homophobia and/or erotophobia, which is what laws past and current are based upon (re: this matter)

In my view (and I am waiting to be shown wrong) there are no non-homophobic arguments that can uphold the argument that gay men should not be allowed sex in public space….And who is more closeted? Those who want to confine sex to so-called private space, or those who wish, in the open, to celebrate one of the few good things humanity as going for it: sex.

It is my opinion that people should be allowed to choose when and where they wish to have sex—so long as no harm is done to those involved or to third parties (speaking here of actual harm—rape, etc.). The State should not interfere. Furthermore, the paranoia about HIV/AIDS is unfounded—people are no more likely to get HIV/AIDS from having sex in public than in their bedrooms. It is not WHERE you do it--but HOW (an old slogan from those disgusting fags of the 70s).

You're reading way too much Foucault, spending FAR too much time deconstructing and less actually constructing statements with any defensible rationality.

Law doesn't exist just to "protect people from harm" but also to enforce society's ethical and moral code. Sex has, at least since recorded history, always practiced in private. Indeed the Supreme Court's ruling striking down sodomy laws was based on private sexual practices having a protected space. By moving those practices into the public realm you're forfeiting the right to privacy the court recognized.

I don't care where you have sex, but you have no right to intrude on my right to not watch you have sex in a public space. It's not sex negative to think this way, rather it's honoring sex as a private, wonderful thing. If any person is devaluing sex it's those that insist that homos have a right to fuck and suck wherever they want.

And as for the whole bathhouse issue. Gabriel Rotello's Book Sexual Ecology laid out in a clear, epidemiological manner how gay men created the environment in the 70's that allowed AIDS to take root in our community and flourish. This is indisputable science and there's no morality attached to the issue.

There is a tiny, immoral minority amongst gay men, a "core group" you may call them, who are responsible for the vast majority of new HIV infections, and more than 80% of these men picked up their partners in bathhouses and toilets (at least according to studies done on HIV infections in Seattle.) And the vast majority of these men had more than 250 partners a year. Now tell me again that sex in bathhouses and parks doesn't encourage disease?

Gay men seem absolutely incapable of controlling and extinguishing a very easy to control disease in their midst. And when I read long, windy passages by my fellow gay men condoning the practices that led us into the HIV epidemic in the first place I understand why.

Oh, and here in San Francisco there is clear science which shows that when the City ordered bathhouses closed in 1984 the rates of HIV infection declined dramatically. As sex clubs re-opened in the 90's there was a corresponding increase in HIV infections, and they've been climbing ever since. The argument you're using is tired, stale and indefensible. It's the same one bathhouse owners used in the early 80's to keep bathhouses open, thusly condemning tens of thousands of gay men to a grisly death.

S: "You're reading way too much Foucault, spending FAR too much time deconstructing and less actually constructing statements with any defensible rationality."

T:: Actually, I have not read too much Foucault—and I had no idea I was deconstructing anything—I thought I was responding to a weak argument?

S: "Law doesn't exist just to "protect people from harm" but also to enforce society's ethical and moral code. Sex has, at least since recorded history, always practiced in private. Indeed the Supreme Court's ruling striking down sodomy laws was based on private sexual practices having a protected space. By moving those practices into the public realm you're forfeiting the right to privacy the court recognized."

T:: Really. The Court found that there was no State interest to intrude. Why? The acts are not HARMFUL to society. I do not grant the second statement—it does not follow that because people have sex in public, rights to privacy will be forfeited—just as it does not follow that because homo marriage is allowed, pedophilia will become normative.

S: "I don't care where you have sex [thanks!!], but you have no right to intrude on my right to not watch you have sex in a public space. It's not sex negative to think this way, rather it's honoring sex as a private, wonderful thing. If any person is devaluing sex it's those that insist that homos have a right to fuck and suck wherever they want."

T:: You seem to disregard what Jason and I have both said time and again: most of public sex encounters are not happening out in the open…Secondly, no one is forcing you to sit down and watch men have sex. I am not sure you are aware of the following case: Two lesbian women were camping. They were having sex, at their secluded campsite, when a hiker, on a trail near-by, happened to catch a glimpse. He killed both of them—arguing that he was forced to watch what disgusted him and he panicked. Why could he not have moved on? The court ruled that a “reasonable person” would have stopped looking and moved on.

No one, to state it again, is arguing that homos have a right to “suck and fuck wherever they want.”

S: "And as for the whole bathhouse issue. Gabriel Rotello's Book Sexual Ecology laid out in a clear, epidemiological manner how gay men created the environment in the 70's that allowed AIDS to take root in our community and flourish. This is indisputable science and there's no morality attached to the issue."

T:: This is a strange statement, in my view. Why would gay men be stingy about their sexual practices in the 70s—especially early 70s—when HIV/AIDS was largely unknown. I look to gay fiction and literature of this period to remind me of the beauty of sex—of generous sexual practices.

S: "There is a tiny, immoral minority amongst gay men, a "core group" you may call them, who are responsible for the vast majority of new HIV infections, and more than 80% of these men picked up their partners in bathhouses and toilets (at least according to studies done on HIV infections in Seattle.) And the vast majority of these men had more than 250 partners a year. Now tell me again that sex in bathhouses and parks doesn't encourage disease?"

T:: I have no idea who these “immoral minority amongst gay men” are—but it hardly seem right to basis your argument upon this tiny minority—who, I would argue, are not solely to blame. It is my argument, from the get go, that when we scapegoat bathhouses, etc for certain sexual practices, we take the responsibility from where it should be placed: upon individuals. HIV/AIDS will be irradiated if individuals, wherever they have sex, would take the proper precautions.

S: "Gay men seem absolutely incapable of controlling and extinguishing a very easy to control disease in their midst. And when I read long, windy passages by my fellow gay men condoning the practices that led us into the HIV epidemic in the first place I understand why."

T:: Again, I want to suggest Odet’s book—he lives in SF—and he sheds light on a great many issues surrounding what you are saying, in such a mean spirit, here. And you are not hearing my argument—the problem is not where, but how…..

S: "Oh, and here in San Francisco there is clear science which shows that when the City ordered bathhouses closed in 1984 the rates of HIV infection declined dramatically. As sex clubs re-opened in the 90's there was a corresponding increase in HIV infections, and they've been climbing ever since. The argument you're using is tired, stale and indefensible. It's the same one bathhouse owners used in the early 80's to keep bathhouses open, thusly condemning tens of thousands of gay men to a grisly death"

T:: There is a correlation between the number of sex partners one has and the likelihood of infection. No doubt. Again, what I am arguing—individuals must choose how they will have sex. And actually, HIV/AIDS infections are being combated, now a days, most prominently by bathhouses.

I would argue it is the kind of scapegoating, and fearing, that you are for that is responsible for the problem—when individuals are left off the hook, or simply scared, for their sexual choices, we should expect an increase in infections.

In my view, to get back to the main argument--sex, whether public or private, is a wonderful reality. So long as your not forced to stay and watch or do what you find so disgusting, there is no basis for a law, etc....

It is terribly Republican of you to wish to enforce a narrow ideology and moral position upon a population that may see matters differently. I am for freedom of choice.

Atleast its not San Francisco. SF had a huge problem with bathhouses. (But then they sport the largest gay population per capita) I really could care less what gay or lesbians do for fun. Hell, if two gay guys want to watch the super bowl and then dress up like football players and have some kind of weird football fantasy, I really dont care. As long as its not someplace where children are exposed to it, I dont see a problem.