, weighs in at
8.1 megapixels, and cost me just under two hundred bucks, a bargain when you consider that I never leave home without it, and always come back with at least 150 photos from the day's adventure. The L
series is even easier on the pocketbook. You can find L14s with 7.1 MP for around a hundred bucks. No one will mistake you for Ansel Adams, but you can have a lot of fun with it.
Battle of the Fenway Hoes
My friend Michael has broken his silence. He called me yesterday all the way from France to direct my attention to a recent article in Bay Windows, one about a perceived police crackdown on gay cruising in the Fens. We had a slight miscommunication, and I thought he wanted my thoughts on another one, about the recent rash of vandalism in the gardens, which is, I have to admit, a more pressing matter for me.
Now, you'll recall Michael just turned 70. As a gay man who was twenty-nine the summer of the Stonewall riots, he has a whole different take than most men my age or younger on the issue of police harassment of gays. Not that it doesn't happen these days. Look at Atlanta just last week. But not in our own back yard, right?
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Landscaping: the new homophobia?
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Maybe it's ironic that someone thirty years my senior is much more likely to see stepped-up police presence in the Fenway as a threat to gay rights than I am. But I have to admit, I'd rather have a police presence in the park than have to police it ourselves. And until I see proof of abuse, I am inclined to trust that police are doing us a favor by being there.
Nothing in the Bay Windows piece convinces me otherwise. On the charge of police harassment, Bay Windows quotes a single anonymous source:
"The police presence is unbelievable," a witness [to what is never specified], who did not wish to disclose his name, told Bay Windows. As both a gay man who has used the area for cruising and a plot owner in the Fenway’s Victory Gardens, he has noted the increase in patrols and believes that their aim is to put a stop to the gay cruising.The source names no incident of actual harassment, but let me just tell you what's going on here: this Muddy River rat is in the Fens twelve hours a day, has been for the last fifteen years. And after spending several hours a day zeroing in on his prey and finally going in for the kill, he's sick and tired of the flashing lights and sirens scaring them off just when he's about to literally taste victory. He's basically blaming the fact that he's not getting any on the cops. I mean, because it couldn't be because he's turned into Gollum, could it?
"Over the years, it’s been an incremental, systematic — it seems like to me it’s been a planned thing," the witness said of the increased police presence. "The mayor [Thomas M. Menino] couldn’t come out and just, boom, close [the gardens] — he’d get too much bad press from the gay community — so it’s been just little by little. It’s more or less a harassment, wanting to get rid of the gay cruising."
But one queen's suspicion that law enforcement is a conspiracy against her fulfilling her blowjob quota does not equal a human rights violation on the part of police. Sorry, sister.
The thing about cruising in the park after dark is: it's pretty much exclusively a gay thing. Yes, I've seen a woman or trans person or two and some straight tourists try and crash the party over the years, which may be good for a laugh or two, but they just don't have the time and stick-to-itness that the gays do when it comes to the cruising. So any police presence in a cruising spot would seem — to those who want to be left alone to pursue their favorite pastime — to target gays.
But lots of other things go on where cruising is common — like assaults and thefts and homicides. You can be sure this conspiracy queen would be the first to scream bloody murder if the police didn't show up when someone was getting gay-bashed back in the bushes. And he'd be right to. The potential for robberies, bashings, and worse were the police presence to wane is more of a concern than gays feeling unduly inconvenienced by the presence of security in the park.
And the truth is, there are people who enjoy other aspects of the park, and they, too, need protection. Scream "police state!" all you want, we have more septuagenarians gardening in the Fens than you can shake a stick at. Shouldn't they be able to take a lively part in their community without fear of violence?
So that recent wave of destruction in the gardens was of greater concern to me. City Councilor Mike Ross, who's quoted in the piece, seems to have a fairly nuanced understanding of the gay dimension. When he surveyed the damage to what by his count were "forty or fifty gardens," he said "it looked like retaliatory action for the fact that there’s people who want the park to be secure and safe, and they don’t want to have to come and clean that stuff up in the morning. I agree with those people. They shouldn’t have to. And their parks should be clean and should be safe."
You might think Ross's sense that the vandalism is "retaliatory" is merely the flipside of the anonymous queen's big blowjob conspiracy, but many of the gardeners I've talked to about it seem inclined to agree that there was a message in the mêlée.
While our section wasn't hit by that wave, anyone sort of following this blog knows that this year in the Fenway Victory Gardens has been marred by more than the usual incidence of vandalism — and of a different sort and scope, it seems to many. Rather than carelessness, there seemed all the sudden to be malice in it.
But why go after the gardens? Gay gardeners outnumber straight in my section of the Gardens. And even straight gardeners have nothing against late-night cruising in the Fens, and can happily coexist with other patrons of the park so long as everyone respects one another's boundaries.
Personally, I don't make any assumptions about the sexual orientation of vandals in the Fens. And furthermore, I firmly believe anonymous sex is one of the pillars of civilization. But while I'm no stranger to cruising out of doors, for me the Fens lost its charm as a cruising grounds about the time I got a garden there. (Interestingly, any late-night sport I'd engaged in in the Fenway up to that time never included breaking into any gardens — it honestly never entered my mind.)
Now that I'm a gardener, I accept that one of the challenges of community gardening in a city like Boston and a neighborhood like the Fenway is dealing with The Aftermath. Like Ross says, we come in in the morning and "clean stuff up." I won't inventory for you here the kinds of "stuff" we clean up, but let your imagination run wild — I'm sure eventually you'll come up with a pretty accurate list of your own.
As part of a solution, Ross has promised to eradicate the reeds (actually phragmites) where most cruising goes on.
"The banks of the Muddy River are going to look more like the Esplanade than they are going to look like what they currently look like. There will not be giant reeds, there will not be phragmites, there will not be areas where people can hide out and be obscured from public view," Ross said. "And that’s going to happen sooner rather than later. In the next couple of years, you’re going to see radical changes in that area, including the removal of the phragmites."Can you call an attack on the phragmites an assault on the gays? Can landscaping be homophobic? We'll find out soon enough if the city ever makes good on it's promise — or is it a threat?
I don't understand in this day and age, especially with people in the community fully able to live openly or use the internet to remain anonymous, why people are still resorting to public parks. Illicit activity among heterosexuals wouldn't be tolerated for very long and I don't understand why the community is taking offense to equal application of the law. That's something we've been fighting for a long time and asking for special treatment, such that a few people can get the thrill of the outdoors, is only going to breed animosity which so much effort has been spent breaking down over the years.
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Well, no need to throw the baby out with the bath water, Anon. I think cruising in the real world is still more thrilling than anything online. And I wasn't joking when I said sex with strangers is one pillar of civilization. When strangers are merely obtacles or threats, our shared spaces become no-man's lands. When the anonymity of the city has no positive applications it becomes merely a form of alienation.
A twentysomething friend of mine recently visited a city in Latin America. When he was telling me about his hook-ups he said excitedly: "it's all done by eye contact there!" It was like he'd never have thought of it himself. I miss that from less prudish and precious places I've lived and visited over the years. I found his surprise at the fact that people can communicate without iphones funny and sad at the same time.
And I wouldn't go full-prude on gays when it comes to our ancient customs. Straight people aren't as straight-laced as you might think. Straight men would cruise just like gays if women were more like men. Men are sluts. Gay, straight, bent or broke.
As for al fresco amore, in Budapest, where I lived for almost a decade spanning my mid-twenties to mid-thirties, if you took a moonlit stroll after dark on Margaret Island in the summertime, you couldn't find a free bench the length of the island -- young couples of every conceivable combination were going at it everywhere you looked.
There was a charming little cruising park not far from my flat on the grounds of the Lukacs mud spa in Buda I used to stroll through on occasion. It was a meeting place for gays, who would gather and gossip, between laps of the park to see what they could see and do what they could do. It was mostly folks from the neighborhood, on their way or back from a night out.
There was a more dangerous park in Pest I checked out only once and knew it wasn't for me. But the element of danger appeals to some men -- the gambling type -- and muggings and the occasional murder would not dissuade them.
My beef is not really with the practice. And gay rights should not be contingent on mortification of the flesh. These things can be done discretely, and without destruction of property. And when they're not, those who can't conduct themselves properly should be driven out. The gay community's pretty good at policing itself before the police have to.
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A couple months ago, before the crackdown began in earnest (police lights have been visible inside the park three or four nights a week night for most of the summer), a friend and I were walking home along the path at around 10PM. It so happens that we’re both male. A police officer was waiting with a motorcycle inside the main park entrance, near the middle of the path we were walking on. He stopped us and spent some time hassling us about where we were going and what we were doing “in” the park after it was closed. I’m sure everyone can imagine what it’s like to be stopped by the police and treated like a criminal in sight of your own house for simply walking there. It was patently absurd. There was absolutely nothing to suggest we were involved in or seeking and illicit activity.
I can’t say whether or not women received the same treatment that night, and the police activity I’ve seen since has certainly been much further in the park, where I suppose it’s possible there is some legitimate cause for police presence. But the experience did make me think that gay men were being targeted, and did have the feeling of a police state.
At night I now take the longer, less pleasant sidewalk around Boylston.
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So while I was over at the garden this morning I checked to sea if the signage with park hours was still up, and it is. Here are the signs and their locations, three at the three main entrances to the park, and one (defaced) in the interior...
The one you would see coming down the path from Boylston heading toward Park Dr. is on the fence directly to the left of the path at the entrance to the park.
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If someone isn't trustworthy or valuable to oneself to take home or to a hotel, should one really be willing to be intimate with that person? I personally don't think so.
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I wanted to reproduce here in its entirety City Councilor Mike Ross's thoughtful response to the anonymous screaming queen who was the basis for charges in Bay Windows of systematic police harrassment in the Fens...
I have to admit such a sensitive response makes me a little ashamed of those in the gay community tossing out accusations backed only by suspicions of a vast homophobic conspiracy, mostly because they feel unduly inconvenienced that the police presence is scaring off fresh prey.
Cruising is what it is, but the Fens is not a troll preserve. No one owes you a designated spot to carry on in public, especially where it's violently disruptive to the community. Some of the hardcore cruisers in the Fens are clearly in desperate need of counseling. Why waste a good wake-up call?
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