The Temple of Love, Versailles.

Before I get started, you should know I am an enthusiastic believer that gardens are for lovers.  Not only that.  I unapologetically endorse al fresco fucking.  I have reminisced elsewhere, I'm sure, about how in my whoring twenties, at the height of summer St. Margaret Island on the Danube in Budapest, two stops on the 4/6 tram from my old place at the foot of Castle Hill, was so thick with young lovers after dark you could not find a free bench — or hardly a free patch of grass.  Gardens, as lovers know, also bloom at night.



There was a well-traveled cruising park in my old neighborhood in Buda, too — outside the Lukacs Mud Baths, right across Margaret Bridge.  This complex of gardens and grounds constituted a huge Midnight playground for men and women from all walks of life (Margaret Island was a free-for-all, but mostly a straight playground, whereas my little park on the Buda side of the river was more exclusive, if you know what I mean).  I never heard of any violence going down — this was a place for lovers, not fighters.  Those who knew about it also knew the rules — established at the dawn of time — and followed the international protocols of cruising.

It seems strange to have to "discover" what comes naturally.  But it can be incredibly liberating to find in our wired world that nature actually provides us with gaydar.  We don't need an app for that.  It's good to know that there are things that technology can't improve on, and animal attraction is one of them. 

For many gays the discovery of cruising is coincident with the revelation that they belong to an ancient diaspora — that they are dual citizens of parallel nations.  They instantly recognize the peculiar customs, the gestures and the language, which are, like the coming-out story every gay man tells, the same everywhere.* 

This is probably why, in communities where gays are out and striving for respectability, there is still such a hue and cry whenever there's a crackdown on cruising.  Cruising is not just a casual pastime, it's part of an ancient culture.  Straight culture views sex (after an adolescent grace period of slutting around) as sacred and strictly intimate, whereas for gays it can be both intimate and unabashed sport at the very same time.  

All men are sluts, if only in their heads (and, um, hands).  It's an undeniable facet of the male psyche that gains free expression in gay culture.  And despite the many possible pratfalls of sex as pure sport, the spirit of sexual play, which powerfully transcends the threat and fear of contamination (not least, social contamination), is one of the great strengths of that culture.  Make no mistake, gay sexuality is a fundamentally different orientation — towards strangers.  And in an age of constant anxiety, suspicion and fear of strangers, it's a rare refuge from a nativist, xenophobic, scapegoating, stranger-hating mainstream.

That public parks and gardens, by daylight and after dark, have been — for ages — portals to urbanity should surprise no one.  They are in every way the perfect setting in the hurly-burly of city life for stress-free social  and sexual intercourse among strangers.  Cities need a place to enact the positive rituals of the Id among strangers from urban tribes who would otherwise be totally alienated from one another by race and class.

It is neither a conspiracy of The Gay Agenda nor an accident of urban planning that every city has a cruising park.  The anonymity of the city can be crushing, but it's also the source of cohesion.  Cities have always welcomed strangers.  And gays have long flocked to the nearest big city to find acceptance among them. And cruising has played a role.  The combination of high custom (and yes, even decorum of a sort), ruthless candor, and sheer seediness in gay cruising is not so far from the cultivated state of nature gardens themselves represent.

I gave up cruising altogether for the years I was stranded in Davis Square (if there was somewhere in the neighborhood it was going on, I didn't know about it), but now that I'm back in the Fenway, when the weather permits and I have no other pressing plans, I take the occasional midnight stroll through the gardens, careful to follow the "leave no trace" policy of all parks I wish other visitors would take care to follow as well. 

Whatever happens along the way, you can really never lose.  It's like a Spanish picaresque in miniature.  Or, if you prefer more medieval fare, you'll surely witness vignettes worthy of Chaucer or Rabelais.  I have seen things in the dark of a public park that would make Brueghel flinch. 

Ah, life's rich pageant! 

So, there are two parks, two gardens outside my door.  One thrives in the day, the other writhes all night. Of course, they don't exist in utter isolation from one another, these two realms.  In fact, they overlap, often uncomfortably.  But while there is a sense that things that happen in the dark are shameful, they may simply be unsightly. 

True enough, the immoral and the unsightly have often been confused.  Cruising in a park like ours in the daytime is not a sin, but it is all too often unsightly, and so could easily be mistaken for one.  Best to hold off until dark, when the witching moon makes us all handsome strangers and no unwitting passerby is forced to witness our Dionysian rites.

But some just can't stay away.  Or — more likely — they have nowhere else to go.  Those who gather openly under the willow on the edge of the Muddy River to cruise during the day are referred to as The Regulars.  And this is their Cheers, where they loiter for hours, months, years, and decades.  They smoke, gossip, relive old blowjobs.  Permanent strangers, they never leave their limbo. Their hobby is waiting. 

And while their presence is a little strange and unsettling (in an "I see dead people" kind of way) I have to admit I am constantly amazed at the ingenuity of The Regulars who so brazenly claim the park as their round-the-clock personal playground, presiding over it with a gardener's pride. 

One recent example.  We've been replacing the rotting posts of our perimeter fence over the last couple of weeks:


... and flotillas bridging their mudhuts and man-nests among the reeds ...