Hyde Park is another of the great public spaces with a night-time scene. Day and night you'll find leather queens, randy teenagers, local husbands, young and old, black and white - a real cross-section of London. Men chat with friends some of the time, and have sex in the bushes the rest of the time. There can be hundreds of men up there - enjoying summer nights or gathered around bonfires in winter. Its visitors come from far and wide, though there's a whiff of the suburban about the cars in the parking lot. Have you ever tried getting a taxi at Jack Straw's Castle at 4am? At least the walk back into town is all downhill. It's one of the most renowned in the world, though tourists in want of a nocturnal ramble are irked to learn how far it is from the centre. George Michael's choice, Hampstead Heath, remains the daddy of all cruising grounds.
Where there is public space, there will be diverse appropriations of it, and so it should be.Īs befits a metropolis, London is a cruisey city, with lots of places to choose from, each with its own personality and niche market. Gilbert condemns this behaviour - 'for hanging is too mild a punishment' - but such queer encounters in parks, on embankments, in toilets, streets and back alleys are an integral part of the way our cities - and sexualities - express themselves. In one of the cruising poems I like best, Thomas Gilbert's 'A View of the Town' from the 18th century, a man leaves his wife in their bridal bed, sneaks off to St James's Park, 'roams in search of some vile ingle prize' and 'courts the foul pathick in the fair one's place'. These encounters are embedded in our cultural history. By night, teenagers hop fences to snog, hookers and rent boys ply their trade, lovers admire the moon, addicts shoot up, and gay men fuck. By day, children play, families picnic, tourists take respite, neighbours walk their dogs, joggers jog.
Parks have always been places where strangers meet for overlapping and divergent reasons. As cities grew and populations became more anonymous, new opportunities for chance encounters arose, for straight and queer people alike, and the figure of the stranger took on an erotic allure. It's been going on for hundreds of years, and its history is a part of the history of our cities and public spaces. If the reporter is to be believed, George Michael rather triumphantly said 'Fuck off! This is my culture,' and right he is, too.Ĭruising is nothing new. What is significant is not the way the singer's actions are interpreted through age-old homophobic stereotypes but the way he so emphatically embraces cruising as part of his queer heritage. In some media reports, all of these are linked, in a predictably moralising narrative of shame and depravity. I don't care about his pending 'wedding'. I don't care if he's a well-adjusted homosexual. I also don't care if he takes drugs ('Shock! Horror! Pop Star Smokes Dope!'). Whether he was careless, reckless or foolish, as some have claimed, really isn't very interesting. As with his cruising in a park toilet in LA in 1998, this episode shows him to be far more honest and honourable than the reporters sneaking about in bushes trying to photograph him. After the News of the World revelations last week - 'Shock! Horror! Gay Man Goes Cruising!' - his open discussion (on Richard and Judy, no less) about having sex with men on Hampstead Heath in the wee hours made the moral panic brigade look even meaner than usual. Once again, George Michael has got away with it. G etting caught once with your pants down is bad luck.