¶ Opening Thoughts and Podcast Introduction
🎵 Music
Sex is fun. You know, it's great when you have that connection and and the love that goes along with it. Animal sex is a little bit.
And who would
Yeah.
All day, every day.
My sex life has always been like trial and error. You know, like you you try something, do you like it, yes or no?
For me, bad sex is when you allowed something to happen when you should have said no.
First you have the sex and then you have the sexy world.
🎵 Music
🔊 Chant
Yeah, yeah, but like when
Hi, welcome to the ADIO Sex Party. For many men, there's not a lot of opportunity to explore our sex lives or our sexuality with other gay by queer men. Despite the fact that we have sex, we don't always talk about it, at least not in ways that help us to figure out the sex we want. So we invited some guys to come together for a bunch of audio sex parties to talk about sex.
And then we've recorded it. In this podcast, you'll hear the voices of real men talking about real sex at a real party. On season one, we're asking how do queer men find the sex they want? And what better way to begin than by talking about cruising? So come on in and join the party.
Yeah, like if you're like sure that you want to go.
Okay.
It's been yeah.
¶ Personal Experiences with Public Cruising
Before I showed up, I did not know what to expect at the party, in all honesty. I knew it was going to be men talking about sex. My name's Peter and I was at the audio sex party. I grew up here and um managed to s I'm so gay, I managed to surround myself with all gay boys even in high school and one of them was doing the ads in the back of now magazine and that's how he he was getting laid all through high school.
Oh my god.
You didn't tell this to me? Uh it was pretty full when I arrived. There was lots of uh noise. You could smell the pot smoke. There was people in the kitchen, there was people sitting on couches, there were people in the other room. It felt crowded.
It's actually the question if I'm actually
I just went to Hyde Park for the first time and apparently it's like it wasn't still as like
Oh yeah. It's very busy. Yeah.
Thank you.
It's little.
My man really likes going.
Yeah no.
Yeah,'cause we're running off the street and he comes home with stories. We were out at brunch one day and he goes like that guy behind you, he was eating brunch like breakfast with this woman and he's like, he likes getting dressed up in women's clothing and getting fucked in the park. And he's I like.
Okay.
That is amazing. I love that you know that about our neighbors. And we go over there and have sex too. He likes cruising strangers. I do too. I get a little scared sometimes, to be honest. Yeah. When I was younger, I've by myself. About doing it with him, weird to me out. But we go over and have sex with each other in the park too. Because it's fun having sex outside.
Yeah, outside.
Oh yeah.
What's up, man?
I remember distinctly the first time I hooked up in Park and this was in Stanley Park. And just just being like Stricken by how like primal it felt. I'm Noah Adams. I'm uh thirty seven. I live in Toronto. I'm from Vancouver originally. I'm a social worker. I also do research on trans health and in the past trans suicidality. And I'm an activist.
I mean this sounds like, you know, men beating on drums kind of. Maybe I'm romanticizing it, but I guess, you know. So what? Uh but yeah, it just felt very like primal and very like bodies passing in the night and groping each other on the way past. And and very like freeing in that way. And and very like, you know, no no strings attached and no guilt or anything like that.
I wasn't at the party, but if I was there I guess I would have wanted to talk about um I think I would have just followed the conversation and seen where it went. Get a couple beers in me and I'm I'm a talker. But I gotta warm up.
It is a d I am gonna have a more organic.
Yeah.
Well speaking about public sex, do you find that
Uh
French.
Yeah.
Yeah. You know, doing it in nature feels really nice being outside. I do like that element. Being watched rather than getting caught. Upon me and my man having sex and you're into watching, that's kind of like what I'm hoping for. Sure. You know what I mean? And I'm hoping you're pretty hot and I want to be watched by you. All sorts of
Negative attention.
¶ Cruising: Definition, History, and Global Encounters
Uh when we think about cruising we tend to think of it as um something that happens uh that's related to public sex, but it's not necessarily. My name is Marcus McCann. I'm a former journalist and a lawyer. Um I practice in the areas of employment and human rights. and have a particular interest in civil liberties when it comes to uh public expressions of sexuality.
Cruising is uh kind of a code, a set of glances, a way of looking at people to identify each other as potential um partners for a sexual encounter. And that cruising can happen in in a park, obviously, but it can happen at a party, it can happen uh indoors, it can happen even in a bar, at a beach, where have you.
Yeah the parks are amazing. I fucking love having sex on the beach and I don't mean the shots you know.
Or if it doesn't like a hand lens.
Субтитры сделал DimaTorzok
There you go.
I bet any beats anywhere in the world you'll find that. Are we supposed to make it?
I keep just thinking about like getting sand in my dick.
And there's may don't there's certain types of sex that you're not gonna have if it's that's gonna happen, you know. One of my favorite stories, I'm backpacking through Asia. Uh I have my first email address, but it's a pain to get online. to check things. So I literally emailed a friend back in the US and said, I will be in Singapore on these dates. Where does public cruising happen? Search it out on the internet and tell me.
And he was like the second floor of some mall in Singapore and I was like, I'm on it. I will go visit that mall and check out the scene and um picking up on the cues and reading the scene and eventually strolling the mall with this young like A South Asian Burmese man with broken English, but communicating, flirting, talking, it was amazing. And then he just turned to me and said, I want to do the sex with you and I was like, I want to do the sex with you too.
So I was up for the adventure and took me to some like empty bathroom in an office building where we proceeded to have sex. I was like, this rocks, man. I like Singapore.
Yeah.
I also remember seeing a lot of older kind of expatriate gay men walking the mall and carrying big shopping bags and somebody explaining to me that like they'd stand in them so you couldn't see their feet in the stall and so two people could be in the stall. I was like, Wow, trick.
Apparently there's a lot of bathrooms in the financial district apparently that like all the bankers just like go in and like jerk each other off like
Yep.
Like it things.
That's why the economy crashed.
A cruising is actually I think a f quite fundamental component. of the emergence of erotic cultures between men who want to have sex with other men. And I think historically why it emerges is because initially people didn't have a lot of their own private space. My name's Gary Kinsman. I came out in a long time ago, in nineteen seventy two.
Since then I've been involved in the Gay Liberation Movement and in the AIDS activist movement and I've done an awful lot of research and writing about the history of the regulation of sexuality in the Canadian context.
When I was
coming out and sort of growing up a bit in Toronto, it was really important for me to know that places like Philosopher's Walk or Queen's Park or Hanlon's Point, various other places in the city existed that I knew men would actually go to to meet other men. It was really important to know communally and collectively that we were seizing social space, even if in the state's mind
This was supposedly public space, it's not supposed to be used for these purposes. I think we were able to establish relations of privacy and intimacy in those contexts that didn't bother other people, but allowed us to actually have moments of pleasure and eroticism that were really crucial to our lives.
Yeah, public sex, like that kind of cruising, like I don't even know. I would be like that would throw me like for a fucking loot.
Like if I Yeah.
Misinterpreting.
Like what it's like.
That's the thing too, it's like there was such a like and there still is, right? Like those sorts of
¶ Navigating Cruising in Restrictive Environments
So I would spend my summers in Barbados growing up and as I got older there was me being the Canadian visiting where I would kind of go on grinder and then whenever I was on grinder it would just be like a sea of torsos or you know like A picture of like the ocean, just there were no face picks at all. The way that Barbados is kind of situated is
a lot of or culturally it's a lot of folks live with their parents until they buy land and then they move out and then start their own kind of house or family. So it was a lot of people meeting up in their car and then driving to something called the gully, which would kind of be like these big spaces of like o open, like overgrown grass that kind of were trails from like one street to another.
Or people would just get in their cars and drive to like the cliffs or the beaches and then that's where everyone met up.
Spring out there, sex on like anything in a car, not my thing. You can't make it a thing, it's never gonna be comfortable, it's never gonna be like what you want, like every time.
Because like I lived in the suburbs so like one thing was like no one could host'cause everyone lived in the Yeah, so like you had to get one GM car and like I I drive like a
That's so good. Suburbs. Number seven.
Excel.
Like for me it was okay because like once you put the back seat down and you got the trunk, like there's some space.
You were like in a suburban. And I was in like a compound.
Yeah, yeah.
I think it's really interesting to to talk about the development of the automobile as a new site for people to actually have sexual encounters. Oftentimes rather awkward ones, not always the most comfortable. And clearly sometimes we really need to shift our positions a bit. But the police and the state have tried to claim that the inside of a vehicle is actually a public space.
because people have the ability to have public view into it. It's not a private space. And clearly when people have engaged in sexual interaction in cars, they often park cars in places that are not very accessible that
other people aren't around and they try to construct relationships of privacy and intimacy for themselves. So again, this raises questions for me of how these notions of public and private are socially made, and therefore this attempt by police agencies and state agencies to claim that everything that happens in the supposed public realm, as they define it,
is illegal has a lot of problems with it because it's actually an infringement on on our ability to be able to establish our our own rights of privacy, our own rights of intimacy in places like the interior of a car.
Luckily I had a couple of friends who were originally from Barbados who were gay. So when I was going back when I was a little older they were like, Oh, you should meet up with so and so and then in going and meeting the local gays then I was kind of like exposed to this kind of underground network of gays.
So my question for the younger gays was, how does the secrecy or like the getting into that network How does that make the sex more exciting and is that being lost through the technological ability to hook up?
I think for me as an outsider, um, my views on it is very much like, Oh, this is so hot that I get to like experience this, right? But I think also on the flip side of that, it's very important to recognize that like this is kind of like a sacred invitation, right? Mm-hmm. And it's not something that I can go about um just like throwing out their I like I like the idea of like having open sex and cruising and the idea of being caught.
But I recognize that I can very much like hop on a plane back to Canada and face very few persecutions compared to like some of the guys that are really like risking their life because, you know, like the anti buggery law is still in effect so
I know, I feel terrible now because I feel like I'm asking for like a fine line between like threats to my life and um just enough hatred that we have to be secret about it and make it kinda sexy. And like, you know, underground.
¶ Police Actions Against Queer Cruising
I am definitely uh fearful of being arrested. I touch wood have not had many close encounters. Um, the older I get, I become more I have become more fe fearful of uh, you know, getting arrested.
Police take a periodic interest in cruising. I mean the first thing I would say is that there are hundreds or probably thousands of cruising events that take place encounters that take place across the province and most of them go as p as planned, without any intervention from the police. There's nothing illegal about long lingering glances or uh stopping somebody and asking them for a cigarette with some ulterior motive.
So like that sort of whole basket of activities that we think of as cruising is it's just simply not a criminal activity. When I was involved with arranging the legal defenses for the for the folks who were caught up in Murray Curtis Park, what we found is that the police were not using the criminal code at all. They were using bylaw infractions. Um the two most common um uh tickets that you would get was either a sexual activity in the park, which is extremely vague. What is sexual activity?
or the um a trespassing ticket. Marie Curtis Park is at the southwest corner of Toronto. It's been a working class neighborhood for many, many years and it's turning into a gentrifying white neighborhood. And so the cruising that's been going on there has been going on for a very long time, for fifty years or more. But Uh given the changing democ demographics there was a set of complaints and the police seized on the w community complaints in order to exer exercise the sting.
The staying itself took place over about three weeks. Like I say there was a police officer undercover in plain clothes who would wait to be solicited and then give people tickets. But what I also discovered through this having these relentless updates on my phone over the course of the winter of twenty seventeen was that these men continued to cruise in the face of police action. And in the dead of winter, like when it was minus thirty out.
I think it it's really important for us to understand that when we've achieved right
Um they've often tried to constrain them and to define them in very narrow ways. The nineteen sixty nine criminal code reform can actually be seen as an attempt uh to say that if you are doing this only in private behind closed bedroom doors with one other individual who's twenty one years of age or older and only one other person, not two people, because then it would be public in character, we're willing to allow that to be tolerated.
but we're not willing to allow a sort of more public um culture of queer eroticism uh to be tolerated. The point is simply that we need to remember that we are an erotic culture that our central aspect of our oppression is around our sexuality and we cannot forget that and we need to constantly come back to And remember that history of of erotic resistance. And and cruising's part of that. It's not the only part of it, but it is part of that.
twenty and twenty two and
Or like
कर दो कर दो कर दो कर दो
fun. Yeah, like part of me is like I've never done like the like wandering the parking, but I'm sure like I mean like I feel like half of what is so great about it is like
Yeah, yeah. You're almost like ordering in and it's becoming sold.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Whenever like my group of friends like we go out to a bar, we're only going to stay
Gracias.
Yeah, yeah. And then like if I'm looking at you and I'm interested, I'll like there'd be times I'll go on grind.
the bottom. ¡Hasta la próxima!
¶ The Evolution of Cruising: Online vs. Offline
thinking about the difference between cruising organically and cruising online. One of the sticking points for me is the notion of telling stories, because I do believe we are the stories we tell. We're constructed of narrative. This is how we understand our lives and who we are as people. And I worry about the next generation, where do the stories exist when you pick up online?
I remember meeting having sex with this man on at Land's End, which is like You can get there by bus from downtown San Francisco, it'll take you like an hour out to the very end, and then you go down cliffs and scrub, down to the beach, and then men cruise the scrubby forest that's on an incline.
And I met this man who is probably my age now and I was much younger. We had sex, had a great time, and then sat in the sunshine and chatted and he was telling me about how his life was in complete upheaval at that moment because for the last Thirty years or some stretch. He had been a caretaker to a very, very, very wealthy San Francisco socialite, and her life was changing and she no longer needed him.
And so he had no clue what he was going to do next. For the last thirty years he'd been her housekeeper, caretaker, gardener, friend, but no real resume. What do you do when you're fifty and that's being taken away from you? Where you live. And he seemed quite resigned to it. He didn't seem panicked at that moment. He wasn't packing boxes. He was sucking my dick. And he later invited me over to his house and gave me his TV and a T-set because he couldn't move it.
I mean I don't think trans guys or gay or queer by trans guys necessarily have different desires, but we have different things we need to navigate in that relationship or in that interaction. I've hooked up a lot even before I had surgery I hooked up a lot where I didn't tell people and I just kind of, you know I got I got very comfortable with being very like firm about pushing hands away.
I was at a bathhouse in Winnipeg and this guy was super handsy. I mean It's a bathhouse, guys are handsy, and I kept having to push his hands away when he's trying to grab my crotch. No, no. And and finally I mean I looked I was I would I would have been like twenty two or twenty three at the time and I looked very young. And finally he like grabs my ha my head and he looks at me. He's like, How old are you? I'm like haha I'm I'm twenty three or whatever it was.
He's like, Are you really? I guess he thought like my pushing his hands away meant that I was like really like underage and he was gonna get in trouble or something. I'm like, No, that's funny, but yeah, I'm I'm actually twenty three. It was very you know, in in retrospect it was very sweet. Like that he that he cared enough to to to check. And he was a very nice guy and I had a lot of fun giving him heads.
I know exactly.
and I'm like,
I got a game guys by myself all over the world. That's झाल झाल झाल
E aí vai, e aí vai.
You're not doing it at home! in Oaxaca, Mexico. That went back two days in a row.
Right. Yeah, and I think also like when you're on vacation, like it gives you the opportunity to be a different version of yourself. Like I feel like there are times when like I'm like either cruising or just on any of these like sexual networking apps where I'm like You know, I have to be my most reserved self because like I know the Toronto gays like they love a screenshot, so like, you know, maybe let me tell you.
That's Romano Gay's love of screen child.
Like Like if I were to say something like too like
I don't know
if it was coming off as like too vulgar or like something that was against the norm, like someone might take a screenshot and then send it to like a bunch of other folk. So like when you're on vacation at least, like you can be yourself but a much more uninhibited Well yeah, I like I think yeah vacation.
That's your name.
She's a
Yeah.
Uh
But also I think some people on especially online aren't nice people when they're online. So rather than saying a quick, Oh, I'm not interested or I don't think we're a match It's like, no, you fucking fat piece of shit. I'm not into you. And then block. Like I think there are a lot of spaces or a lot of times where people are just they take that opportunity to be mean to or take out take it out on someone else. Yeah.
I've had guys where like right away like they'll just be like oh not into blacks or like even worse like no n words or you're just and then a quick block.
I definitely saw that a lot as a trans guy where people are like, Oh, I'm not into girls, sorry. I'm not telling you who to be attracted to or how to be attracted, but like fuck you. I have a kind of a love hate relationship with hookup apps because of that because it's like I mean not to generalize, but to generalize there's so many cis white gay men who
Who
Yeah, think they can pick and choose attributes of a person like candy. Like, oh well, you know, I like I like candy corn, so you know, I would never ha I would never eat gummy bears. And and in the most offensive stereotyped ways. And they're just not at all interested in having that challenged. And it's it's maddening.
¶ Cruising for Self-Discovery and Future of Sex
Sometimes cruising teaches me what the sex I want is. I don't necessarily go out there with the idea of what I want. I know I'm horny and I'm open to experience. And so sometimes that's the beauty of cruising. You actually end up having encounters with people that you normally wouldn't, but there's this animalistic attraction, this primal Impulse that you allow yourself to act on, right? With no guilt, with no shame. And you end up learning something about yourself. Like,
Oh, I didn't realize I could get into that. I didn't realize that was enjoyable. I never would have looked twice at that person in the daytime, but I had an amazing time. What is that about? Why? And that kind of challenge to who you think you are is, I think it's made me a better person, honestly. Having sex with
🎵 Music
Thanks for joining the Audio Sex Party. In this episode, you heard
Peter.
Noah Adams.
Marcus McCann.
Gary Kinsman.
But we also heard lots of other voices too, and we want to thank them for coming to the party and sharing their stories. In upcoming episodes, we'll get a chance to hear more, not just from them, but others too. Join us next time where we'll listen to guys talk about how the internet has changed the ways we find the sex we want.
Grinder really has changed like
The world.
I never even
No, it's not that.
Yeah.
But compared to like you know what's available now, it was like only a matter of time before
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