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From St James's Park in the 18th century to Hampstead Heath today, gay men have always gone cruising in search of sex. So why has George Michael been singled out for censure?
Whether he was careless, reckless or foolish, as some have claimed, really isn't very interesting. I also don't care if he takes drugs ('Shock! Horror! Pop Star Smokes Dope!'). I don't care if he's a well-adjusted homosexual. I don't care about his pending 'wedding'. In some media reports, all of these are linked, in a predictably moralising narrative of shame and depravity. What is significant is not the way the singer's actions are interpreted through age-old homophobic stereotypes but the way he so emphatically embraces cruising as part of his queer heritage. If the reporter is to be believed, George Michael rather triumphantly said 'Fuck off! This is my culture,' and right he is, too.
Cruising is nothing new. It's been going on for hundreds of years, and its history is a part of the history of our cities and public spaces. As cities grew and populations became more anonymous, new opportunities for chance encounters arose, for straight and queer people alike, and the figure of the stranger took on an erotic allure. Parks have always been places where strangers meet for overlapping and divergent reasons. By day, children play, families picnic, tourists take respite, neighbours walk their dogs, joggers jog. By night, teenagers hop fences to snog, hookers and rent boys ply their trade, lovers admire the moon, addicts shoot up, and gay men fuck.
These encounters are embedded in our cultural history. In one of the cruising poems I like best, Thomas Gilbert's 'A View of the Town' from the 18th century, a man leaves his wife in their bridal bed, sneaks off to St James's Park, 'roams in search of some vile ingle prize' and 'courts the foul pathick in the fair one's place'. Gilbert condemns this behaviour - 'for hanging is too mild a punishment' - but such queer encounters in parks, on embankments, in toilets, streets and back alleys are an integral part of the way our cities - and sexualities - express themselves. Where there is public space, there will be diverse appropriations of it, and so it should be.
As befits a metropolis, London is a cruisey city, with lots of places to choose from, each with its own personality and niche market. George Michael's choice, Hampstead Heath, remains the daddy of all cruising grounds. It's one of the most renowned in the world, though tourists in want of a nocturnal ramble are irked to learn how far it is from the centre. Have you ever tried getting a taxi at Jack Straw's Castle at 4am? At least the walk back into town is all downhill. Its visitors come from far and wide, though there's a whiff of the suburban about the cars in the parking lot. There can be hundreds of men up there - enjoying summer nights or gathered around bonfires in winter. Men chat with friends some of the time, and have sex in the bushes the rest of the time. Day and night you'll find leather queens, randy teenagers, local husbands, young and old, black and white - a real cross-section of London.
Hyde Park is another of the great public spaces with a night-time scene. If cruising the west heath is wonderful for its deep, cool, sylvan glades, then it's the sweet smell of roses one takes away from Hyde Park on a summer evening. So near to the hotels and restaurants of Park Lane and the West End, Hyde Park offers an international gathering - lots of migrant workers from the service industries happy to offer their services, mixed with tourists from abroad and the occasional posh, naughty managing director from Knightsbridge.
The tendency, however, has been to clamp down on cruising in London. Russell Square, the queerest patch until they began locking it up at night several years ago, also attracted a diverse, though mostly youngish, set - students and lecturers from nearby colleges; merry office workers out on the town; gay guys from the bars and clubs in Soho; and, of course, pickpockets and muggers (it isn't risk-free). It peaked between 10.30pm and half past midnight, from the time the pubs shut until the last Tube home. When they closed it the action swiftly moved south to Bloomsbury Square, creating a more intimate, even bijou cruising ground that was policed heavily at first and eventually closed at night. Where the locals now walk their dogs at night is anyone's guess.
London's outdoor cruising scene remains varied and vibrant, but it isn't unique to the capital. Whether Kelvingrove in Glasgow, Gosforth Park in Newcastle, Bute Park in Cardiff or the Common in Southampton, almost all towns and cities have their own long-standing cruising grounds. These cruising spaces endure in part because they exist outside the gay scene.
They are beyond the grip of the commercial, corporate gay world that trades so heavily on those ancient Grecian virtues: youth and beauty. The cruising ground is a more democratic space. Beyond the bar and the bathhouse, your body size matters less, thinning hair isn't noticed so much, and you don't have to wear the right trainers (you might be better off wearing wellies, depending on the weather). You can be your plain, unremarkable self and still be attractive to other men.
The man George Michael was supposed to have had sex with on the Heath was brutally denigrated as old, ugly and poor. Society has little tolerance for the old, the ugly or the poor - the gay scene even less.
Whether the great outdoors will remain so vibrant is open to debate. I sense a generation gap forming. There's a difference - a political difference - emerging between those young men who have grown up in a more assimilationist, tolerant but highly normalising world and those of a certain age for whom cruising still represents resistance, a welcome departure from the rules of everyday life.
It is also difficult to know what the impact of internet cruising and cybersex will be. The internet experience is more remote, interior, and hidden from the straight world, which almost certainly makes it more acceptable in the long run. I don't know what the future of cruising will be, but it certainly has a rich and ribald past. George Michael is right to drop his pants and lay claim to his queer culture - to a history of urban sexual adventure and misadventure that is as old and perverse as the parks themselves.
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