Gay cruising los angeles
Tracing L.A.’s Cruising Culture
Alex Espinoza
In Queer Space: Architecture and Similar Sex Desire, Aaron Betsky writes, “The queerest space of all is the void, and AIDS has made us live in that emptiness, that absence, that loss…. It is not a queer space any of us would want to inhabit, but many possess been forced to make it their own.”[1] In many ways, Danny Jauregui’s work goes beyond just inhabiting the void, that gender non-conforming space separate from society. It is about identifying it, reclaiming it, and giving it a permanent spatial location in the decades following the crisis. People cruised within communities, within neighborhoods, at local parks, bars, and shops. A single location can be so many places at once.
“I wanted to show that these locations once existed here,” he says.
The photos used in the artist Danny Jauregui’s project document a history that generations of childish gay men might not be familiar with. Chronicling these sites then became a way for Jauregui to recover and graft the memory of homosexual cruising into the larger sphere of American identity and assemblage. The images are a stark reminder of the transient nature of cruising, allowing for a uniquely gender non-conforming identit
The park was one of L.A.’s most notorious spots for men to go and cruise for sex. John Rechy put Griffith Park on the cultural chart as a cruising hotspot after his 1967 novel “Numbers” detailed a chance encounter at the famous sprawling enclave between Los Feliz and the Santa Monica Mountains. Rechy himself had been arrested in Griffith Park and faced a five-year prison sentence for soliciting sex, as he told the Los Angeles Review of Books. “The vice cops, the court, the lawyers, the judge, the unbelievable moving of the trial into the sex arena of Griffith Park so that the judge could ‘see for himself,’” all actually took place for Rechy in the days when Griffith Park was a site of anonymous sex, accompanied by the threat of a criminal charge.
Edmund Colorless mentions that "Griffith Park is cruisy" in his 1980 novel “States of Desire: Travels in Gay America.” Gay L.A. states that "wild orgies involving scores of men were common. The orgies even took place in daylight because Griffith Park had vast areas where the overgrown scrub provided a venue that was like a veritable outdoor gay bathhouse."
On Memorial Day of 1968, men and wo
Whether you're in the market for drills and thrills (hello, Home Depot!) or just want to saunter on the wild side (of the alley), West Hollywood offers plenty of gay-friendly bars, hangouts and other places to see men and hook up. Time Out scopes out LA's 10 best same-sex attracted cruising spots.
Been there, done that? Think again, my friend.
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Constructed in 1866 as La Plaza Abaja, Pershing Square is the largest park in Downtown Los Angeles. It was a meeting ground for gay men for much of the 20th century.
Pershing Square was the center of "The Run," a circuit of gay-friendly establishments and cruising spots that served in the 1920s through the 1960s as what the book Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians calls "the premier gay spot." But it was also a centralized place where people could encounter and socialize in the absence of a strong out gay community. The Run included the Central Library, the bar at the Biltmore Hotel, and the Subway Terminal Building's bathrooms.
Social disapproval of The Race, along with the general perception that downtown was “blighted,” might have been a factor in the decision to prescribe the open-heart surgery of urban renewal for Pershing Square and Bunker Hill.
In 1951, the park was ripped out to form way for a three-level, subterranean parking garage. Access ramps and stairwells replaced the greenery, but for a skinny layer of turf atop the concrete. Some of the palms that were dug up were move