Gay in park

My journey of self-exploration began in , when I was 14 years former. It was a moment just after I’d experienced extreme discrimination in college for being gay. I was beginning to get and dive deeper into my queerness in India, a country where LGBTQ people do not own the same rights as straight people. As I looked for safe spaces to explore my individuality, I stumbled upon one I found surprising endorse then: a neighbourhood universal park.

A friend who I’d met through PlanetRomeo – one of the earliest queer dating platforms – told me about a park in my town in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, which doubled up as a gay hotspot. Out of curiosity, I set up my way to the said park, which was just an enclosed patch of unkempt grass next to a noisy thoroughfare. I first watched from a distance how around sundown, a group of a dozen or so men I’d later contact “queens,” would gather. As I gathered confidence to approach them over the next few days, I realised that this is where they’d meet to offload their daily press, talk about their lives, or just hook up.

For a teenager who’d recently th

Brian Gerald Murphy

These days lots of gay guys are using Grindr for hooking up. But we didn&#;t always have sex on hand at our fingertips. For centuries (or longer!) gay and bi guys possess found ways to connect with each other, even when doing so was illegal. Most of us don&#;t approach from queer families and so we don&#;t learn our LGBTQ history at home. So, I set out to uncover the ways that gay and bisexual guys possess met each other for friendship and sex. Here&#;s a brief history of gay cruising

These days lots of gay guys are using Grindr for hooking up. But we didn&#;t always have sex accessible at our fingertips. From bathhouses to bars, sex parties to saunas, even to parks and bathrooms. Gay guys have found a way to locate each other, even before Grindr.

For the past 11 years, up until this past January, I lived in New York Urban area. It&#;s one of the centers of gay life in the United States. It&#;s a port city and after the sailors

TAIPEI — Under a moonlit canopy of bare tree branches, two men in black leather jackets lean against a brick wall. Their exchange is wordless, with only slow movements forward: A lingering gaze, twice over the right shoulder. A hand, stretching over the tense distance between them. One’s fingertips meet the other’s thigh, gradually wrapping around as a claim over the other’s body for the bedtime. But just as a breeze rustles the canopy above, the other clicks his tongue almost inaudibly. He pushes himself off the wall and away from the grips of this shadowy park corner, emerging into the streetlamp-lit expanse of Taipei’s streets. 

I think of this scene, from the Taiwanese film “Where is the Love?” by the woman loving woman director Chen Jo-fei, whenever I walk through Peace Park, formerly known as New Park, in central Taipei. In the latter half of the 20th century, it was one of the city’s most well-known gay cruising districts, where men picked up other men through a social code of gazes and grazes.

The news media painted the park as a den of iniquity. As early as , Unite

In the dark, tightly packed urban villages of a South China industrial zone, Garden Park is an oasis for rural migrant gay men like Meilan. They come to loosen, chat, or cruise for sex in nearby trees or public toilets.

One of the best nights Meilan ever spent at Garden Park was an plain evening in the middle of autumn. Around one hundred gay men — many of them migrant workers who lived nearby — were sitting on the handrails of a rock bridge, looking down at the artificial lake below; some had brought traditional mooncakes and other snacks to share with friends in the moonlight. One brought along a Bluetooth speaker and played music for people to dance to. “It was my favorite time in the park,” he recalled. “It was so lively. Hundreds of our people were laughing and chatting under the moon until midnight.”

Meilan first started visiting Garden Park seven years ago, not long after he migrated to the city from the countryside. He was drawn in by the dance team performing by the park’s front gate. “Back then, the first two lines of the park move team were ‘sissy’ (niang) young