A cool wind was breezing up Yonge Street from Lake Ontario, relieving me from the urban heat still trapped between the buildings. It was after midnight and I was looking for public sex in Toronto, resolved not to use the Internet to find the cruising park I've been told exists downtown. At the time I had been thinking a lot about how online hook up sites like Manhunt were changing the geography of desire. Had everyone abandoned the physical for the virtual? Was the thrill of happenstance encounters being replaced by online browsing and choosing?
I called a bathhouse listed in the free queer paper, worried the person on the other end wouldn't want to give me directions to the park lest it take away from his business. Instead he responded wistfully, as if he too would rather be outside playing.
The bathhouse I had called was off the beaten path, and what was interesting about the directions he gave me was that they weren't based on where he was, nor did he ask where I was; rather he oriented me as if I was standing at ground zero in Toronto's gay ghetto. He, in a way, assimilated my location or my knowledge of geography with my desires.
As I entered the park I started to have second thoughts, worried about getting arrested, that there would be no action or that the action would be more than I was prepared to see. For all my thinking about queerness and sex I still find myself easily shocked, jarred and sometimes under-experienced, fumbling in an attempt to look like I know what I'm seeing or doing.
At first I felt disappointedly vindicated. The park looked empty save for the men who had found benches and picnic tables and converted them into homes, shopping carts parked where a garage would be. I had been thinking that maybe cruising parks—historically important places for men who want to have sex with men to meet—were becoming less relevant, a place only for those who did not have or chose not to use the Internet. As my eyes adjusted to the dark it was older bodies that began to surface. I felt for a moment like a pompous anthropologist who just had his life's work validated. My phone vibrated. It was a friend. I began speaking with her as I walked around the park, thinking that my adventure was over.
The park, which is basically a large traffic circle perimetered with streetlights and trees, is divided into quadrants by a big heroic statue in the middle. As I left the quadrant I began in and enter on to the other side, the population of the park began to change. Soon a plethora of bodies were emerging from the trees and the shadows. I cut my friend short, put my phone away and joined them.
At first it was comical, yet unnerving. All these men cruising around loaded with curiosity and sex but no one doing anything. Some guys leaned against the trees, waiting for someone they liked to approach them; avoiding eye contact with those they weren't interest in. Other guys just hovered near the trees, hoping, I think, to live vicariously through whatever happened to others. Some guys just sauntered around as if they weren't in a cruising park, as if they had somehow found themselves in the park and were trying to figure out what was going on.
In between the trees are benches. It seemed to me this was were the cool and collected guys sat to watch the action, and then acted accordingly. I wanted to be in this crowd so I sat down. It was from this vantage point that I began to see how beautiful the physical space of the park was. We were basically in a grove of trees that created a frame of the night sky, ablaze with stars. The ground was lush with grass and the occasional texture of roots. The guy beside me started telling me that every few years the city cuts down some trees or puts up more lights in an effort to curb the use of the park as an outdoor sex space. He laughed as he said this and then with a boastful grin said, "They are wasting their time, the queens just smash the bulbs."
Sometimes the lights from cars that circled the park cut through the trees and illuminated details and faces. I could see for a flash that the guy beside me was in his early 30s. The movement of his face and his voice younger than how his face looked.
He tells me how he has been coming to the park since he was 16, since before he lived his life as a gay man. It was in the park where he learned to give hand jobs, blow jobs and talk with other guys who liked to have sex with men. He calls it Emerald Island, and it is his favourite place in the city. Sitting there with him, the white noise of the city muffled by the rustling of trees, breathing and sighs of anxiety and ecstasy, I realized that the Internet and all that it offers for dudes who want to hook up poses no threat to the lure of nature. It's just another plain on which men can find each other and explore. There is no either/or, there is just more.
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