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Credit: Jason Lee<\/span><\/p><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n Xtra\u2019s coverage at the time was a series of hard-news stories that scrutinized police motivations and tactics about arrests that seemed unfair and based upon anti-sex hysteria. In the years since, McCann has thought more philosophically about public sex and the questions cruising culture raises \u201cabout consent, empathy, public health, municipal planning and our relationship to strangers,\u201d according to the book\u2019s publicity material.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Park Cruising weaves together personal experiences, sociological observation, legal analysis and queer history, citing examples of cruising grounds around the world. But what happened in Marie Curtis Park remains the key reference point throughout the book. In this excerpt, McCann discusses what characteristics made the park attractive to gay and bisexual men over the course of decades, and how those characteristics can be found in other cruising grounds.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Cruising in the woods at Marie Curtis Park had been going on for a long time before the police raids in 2016. The practice may have predated the site\u2019s opening as an official municipal park in 1959. Toronto Police constable Kevin Ward, the officer at the centre of the 2016 raids, described cruising culture as \u201cingrained in the area for decades.\u201d He told one news outlet, \u201cThere have been a lot of unacceptable occurrences going on down there for quite a long time.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Historian Tom Hooper agrees that men have been cruising at Marie Curtis Park for a long time. In 1982, for example, two men were solicited in the park by plainclothes police officers, Bill Loos noted in The Body Politic<\/em> at the time. These cases resulted in serious charges: one man was charged with public indecency and both were charged with indecent assault on a male. The provision of \u201cindecent assault\u201d was repealed shortly after the arrests, as part of Criminal Code amendments in 1983, but at the time it was a proto-version of what we now think of as sexual assault. The cruisers were charged with sexually assaulting the officers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Both men were ultimately acquitted. In one case, Justice V.A. Lampkin found that in the circumstances it was reasonable for the accused to have believed he was engaged in a consensual cruising encounter and not assaulting anyone. The circumstances, in this case, included the behaviour of the officer, who appeared to be encouraging the defendant, and their location at Marie Curtis Park, which, according to the judge in 1982, was already \u201ca known homosexual park.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n How did Marie Curtis Park become a \u201cknown homosexual park\u201d between its founding in 1959 and Justice Lampkin\u2019s comment in 1982? <\/p>\n\n\n\n The only truly necessary element for any cruising site is the proximity of strangers. In large cities, cruising circuits often develop around bus and train terminals, subway bathrooms, loading docks, piers, and markets. The connection between cruising and trade, travel, and inter-community contact manifested in Toronto for many years in the area around the Greyhound bus terminal between Bay and Elizabeth Streets, which the police nicknamed \u201cthe track,\u201d before being displaced first to Yonge Street and then to Church. <\/p>\n\n\n\n John Preston, author of the pornographic novel Mr. Benson<\/em>, reports that he began cruising at Boston\u2019s Park Square in 1960. The square was the former site of the Boston and Providence Railroad terminus and was surrounded by hotels. By the time Preston got there, the train station was long closed, but the hotels remained. Preston would trick with \u201ctraveling salesmen from Connecticut\u201d in not just their rented rooms but also the alleyways nearby. Ultimately, these hotels created a sexual economy. More than simply providing a place for sexual encounters, the hotels also provided a supply of strangers, men visiting the city, momentarily unattached and available for sex.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this sense, Marie Curtis Park is ideally suited for cruising. This is not because it is near any public transit hubs\u2014 although it is walkable from the Long Branch GO Transit station\u2014 and not because of nearby hotels. Rather, Marie Curtis Park lies next to three of the province\u2019s biggest highways: Highway 427, the Gardiner Expressway, and the Queen Elizabeth Way. Because of this accident of geography, the park is accessible to people on their way into and out of the city, including those who live in the exurbs and surrounding bedroom communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this sense, Marie Curtis Park resembles a common cruising site in smaller towns and rural areas: the highway rest stop. It also explains the long tradition of car cruising at Marie Curtis Park. Although car cruising these days is often assisted by hookup apps, there is still a code by which drivers can park and repark their cars, open and close their doors, or turn on and off their lights to indicate interest or availability. At Marie Curtis Park, car cruising is still practised, especially in winter months. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The other reason Marie Curtis Park has remained popular for so long is that it is a good example of an \u201cunruly site,\u201d to use geographer Matthew Gandy\u2019s term. Gandy describes the development of a cruising culture at Abney Park, a cemetery in the London borough of Hackney. The cemetery became increasingly unkempt as the owners ran out of money, abandoned the property, and eventually sold it to the municipality for one pound. According to Gandy, there is an \u201cinnate connection\u201d between public space and sex. But the apparatus of control of public displays of sexuality is never complete, and it sometimes loses its grip. This can happen at unruly sites, which Gandy defines as places \u201cthat do not play a clearly defined role, or which are characterized by ill -defined use or ownership, or that have been appropriated for uses other than those for which they were originally intended.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n The ratty triangle of trees and bushes that became a cruising ground at Regatta Road near Cherry Beach is a good example of an unruly site. It is downwind of the dump, south of various industrial sites, difficult to get to, and seemingly immune from development. The men who use it take care of it. In 2021, a little laminated sign was posted on one of the trees to advise against disturbing it, because a fragile bird\u2019s nest was high up in its branches; in 2022, someone hung quart-sized fruit baskets from the branches of another tree with condoms and gloves in them; and most years, volunteers distribute garbage bags for used condoms and coffee cups, to keep the trails tidy. But there is little sign of upkeep of the site from municipal authorities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The New York City piers of the 1970s and 1980s are described in a similar way by Jonathan Weinberg, who credits \u201cdisuse and collapse\u201d for creating circumstances in which a public sex culture was able to flourish. His book on the subject, Pier Groups<\/em>, ends with a meditation on the city\u2019s High Line, the elevated train line turned public park, which has provoked so much praise from urban planners. Weinberg calls it \u201clinear, prescribed, and curated,\u201d the antithesis of unruly spaces like the piers. \u201cThe waterfront,\u201d he writes, \u201conce a site of capitalist power, was at least for a brief time cracked open, overrun.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n To develop Marie Curtis Park, coordination and funding would have been needed across three departments: the City of Toronto parks department, the City of Mississauga parks department, and the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, which owns the Arsenal Lands. That coordination and funding never came, so parts of the park remained largely undeveloped and underused, which, combined with the park\u2019s location not far from major highways, helped keep it an ideal spot for cruising.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even the fence with holes cut into it at the entrance to the Arsenal Lands\u2014telling the uninitiated to keep away\u2014fostered the ecosystem of the park. Not that the Arsenal Lands is the only place where cruising happens, but it\u2019s remarkable that it\u2019s been undeveloped for eighty years; it is not officially part of the park, but it is right there, hidden, overgrown, semi-private yet accessible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Excerpted with permission from <\/em>Park Cruising: What Happens When We Wander Off the Path by Marcus McCann. \u00a92023 Marcus McCann Published by House of Anansi Press www.houseofanansi.com<\/a><\/em> In his new book, \u201cPark Cruising,\u201d author Marcus McCann looks at the forces that triggered a police sting of Toronto\u2019s Marie Curtis Park<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":835,"featured_media":249836,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"editorial_slug":"2054","_editorial_slug":"2054","exclude_from_latest_block":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,3,6,2863,5],"contributors":[265],"topic":[78,86,122,131],"clients":[],"series":[],"timeliness":[58],"editorial_format":[2054],"type-of-work":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249826"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/835"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249826"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249826\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":249889,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249826\/revisions\/249889"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/249836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249826"},{"taxonomy":"contributors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributors?post=249826"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=249826"},{"taxonomy":"clients","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/clients?post=249826"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=249826"},{"taxonomy":"timeliness","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/timeliness?post=249826"},{"taxonomy":"editorial_format","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/editorial_format?post=249826"},{"taxonomy":"type-of-work","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type-of-work?post=249826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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