PARK CRUISING: What Happens When We Wander Off the Path, where "We" = adult gay men

PARK CRUISING: What Happens When We Wander Off the Path
MARCUS McCANN
House of Anansi Press
$17.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: An intimate look at one of culture’s most enduring taboos: public sex.

Park Cruising takes a long look at the men who cruise for sex in urban parks. Human rights lawyer Marcus McCann uses park cruising as a point of departure for discussions of consent, empathy, public health, municipal planning, and our relationship to strangers.

Prompted by his work opposing a police sting in a suburban park, McCann’s ruminations go beyond targeted enforcement and police indifference to violence to examine cruising as a type of world-building. The result is a series of insightful and poetic walks through history, law, literature, and popular representations of cruising in search of the social value of sex. What McCann ultimately reveals is a world of connection, care, and unexpected lessons about the value of pleasure.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The book takes a "pro" position on this fraught topic, and uses rgetorical flourishes to distract from the difficulty of the central issue having no easy solution. Had he made his argument solely about entrapment I'd be all over it; but I do not, in the most intense possible terms, want to encounter straight people or lesbians in the throes of passion.

No.

YEEECCCHHH

So why should they want to see what I'll avidly watch? The book's strength is its weakness; complaining that they do it, why shouldn't we, is very much an adolescent attitude. Confine yourself to the cruising, and I'm supportive; but the minute someone's genitals come into public view for sexual use, and that's a hard (!) no from me.

Nudity doesn't seem to me to be shocking, so public nudity, while *I* ain't doin' it...sunburned balls sound horrifying to me, and the peeling process is too grisly to contemplate...I agree that the laws around it are clearly designed to make purseylipped prudes safe from the vapors, and should be repealed. Body shame is a major source of social control. Best to jettison it, and the case for this bit is a good one. Unlikely to succeed, though, because the Vaporous Vanguard will screech about their little no-neck monsters being corrupted and that ends any and all discussion. Otherwise you who oppose them are A Pedophile, and once those screeches start, you are toast. Does not matter in the slightest if they are true or not, these screeches are stickier than blood, and utterly indelible.

The book is an interesting read but not a how-to manual or even an advocacy guide. It will shift no one's position. It's good for starting conversations about how society enforces a standard of conduct that is inherently judgmental, and unfairlt enforced, and clearly the laws are written to give gay men nightmares about their sex lives being judged and punished in a way y'all straight people's are not.

Useful, then; just not effective as a tool for short-term attitude change.