I just believed that anonymous public encounters were what we, my fellow deviants and I, naturally deserved, and I learned to fetishize the thrill. I couldn’t fully contemplate the factors that had pushed me into those spaces or how my participation in them had formed my sexual psychology. Living in a heteronormative society where monogamy was the law of the land, the fundamental pursuit of satisfying my libido defined me as a sexual outlaw, a status that came with equal pride and shame. I didn’t know how or why, but even at 15, I understood those places were for sex. I almost instinctively learned that the I-95 highway rest stop, the Emerald Square Mall bathrooms, and the steam room at Gold’s Gym were where I could connect with my kind. Like most of those living outside cities in those pre-Internet days, the only way I could experience the encounters I longed for was to choose high-risk public sex. There was no public space officially designated for us to meet each other. Gay men in the small Massachusetts suburban town where I lived were exclusively closeted. Courtesy of Cruising PavilionĪs a Catholic teen in the mid 90s, my gay coming of age started in the aftermath of the AIDS crisis, which cast a terrifying shadow on a sexuality that was already considered socially unacceptable. Cruising Pavilion visual essay by Rasmus Myrup (2019).
