Do you take recreational drugs during sex?

Cottaging, cruising, shagging in the bushes: all the sorts of things that can cause apoplexy amongst the blue-rinsed brigade and frequently provokes considerable arresting behaviour from the blue serge uniforms. Garry Otton has been pounding the beats …

On the night of 2nd June , a gang of three boys, aged between 18 and 20, and a 14-year-old girl, went on a queerbashing rampage in Glasgow’s Queen’s Park. The boys cracked one man’s skull and critically injured another before jumping on 35-year-old Michael Doran. He received 83 blows to his body. They stabbed him several times in the groin, stamped on his face until they had broken every bone in his head and left him in the bushes, choking to death in his own blood. With their clothes still bloodstained, they joined their friends at a nearby party and bragged about what they had done.

Already, in March last year shocked Scottish television viewers had witnessed an attack on a gay man leaving Bennets, Glasgow’s top gay nightclub. Two men, aged 21 and 25, were captured on video beating; kicking and stamping on him for a full twelve minutes before the police arrived.

James, a middle-aged man cruising Strathclyde Park told me: "I received 25 stitches to my head after I was beaten up there. He ran off with my watch, which was worth about £20. I was too afraid to go to the police and told my family I’d been involved in a car accident."

Late one afternoon in April, shortly before the horrific murder, I approached a well-built man in his thirties with cropped hair and torn jeans sitting near a few other gay men in Queen’s Park. Whilst we talked, watching the clouds scuttle across Glasgow’s city skyline, a tall, slim youth of about 17 years approached us from some nearby shrubbery using abusive language and making obscene gestures with a large, empty, glass bottle of Irn Bru. He was joined by two of his young friends. They had just seen off another young man whose was identified to me as a gay teenager still at school. He had fled in terror. The man I was sitting with was not going to be intimidated by this group and asked the tall youth if he had been here the previous Tuesday night. The man had recognised the youth from a vicious queerbashing he had witnessed in the park just before Easter. He had seen smash a glass bottle over the head of a young man. The youth knew about the incident and was warned by the man, with a discreet nod in the direction of the path, that the police were on the lookout for him. They walked away. I asked the man if he felt he should call the police, but he was dismissive. "I usually carry a mobile phone, but he’ll have gone by the time I get to a phone box."

Quite apart from the fact cruisers might be anxious to conceal their sexual identity, there is also a deep suspicion of the police. Alan, a guest on BBC Radio Scotland’s ‘Speakeasy’ programme had been attacked four times and said, "The attitudes and the moral backlash I got from the police was as bad as the attack itself". Stephen, a caller to the programme, explained that after being attacked in Kelvingrove Park, all the police appeared to want to know was what he was doing there. They took no action, and left him with the impression that it was his own fault.

At a talk given at the Collins Gallery in Glasgow during October’s Glasgay! Festival, gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell revealed a gay man had confided in him that he had been arrested by police whilst cruising Kelvingrove Park, thrown in the back of a van and beaten up by police whilst in custody. When he attempted to make a formal complaint, the police denied being on duty in the area and the case was dropped.

Whilst the magazine Gay Times has revealed an escalation of attacks on gay men in public, the gay lobby group Stonewall has carried out a large survey which revealed that up to 52% of teenagers and a third of all gays have been physically attacked.

Reports of attacks on gay men at Glasgow’s top four favourite cruising areas: Strathclyde Park, Kelvingrove Park, Cathkin Braes and Queen’s Park are frequent. In Edinburgh, Lothian and Borders Police work closely with the gay community to combat violence on the streets and have already secured the arrest of some queerbashers. In Glasgow, Strathclyde Police does not monitor the frequent attacks. There is no liaison officer for the burgeoning gay community, and - unlike most other police services in the country - cannot guarantee the rights of its own lesbian and gay police officers with an inclusion of sexual orientation within the force’s equal opportunities policy.

Chief Superintendent Robert Jarvis told The Herald newspaper, "... we are not aware of an identified problem of gay people being assaulted."

Since the early 18th century, married men and bisexuals have sought places to negotiate gay sex privately, away from the police, the public and the stigmata of homosexuality. This has been steadily brought about by the aggressive collusion of church and state to regulate and promote heterosexuality within marriage as the ideal. Today, as our landscape becomes increasingly congested, with fewer opportunities for privacy, men who "cruise" (or, in the gay vernacular, "troll"), are ever more likely to find themselves hounded from the darkest corners of parks, sand-dunes, walkways and buildings by increased state surveillance and progressively prohibitive laws.

To stop gay men meeting in public places, the police conduct budget-busting surveillance operations. These can involve sitting in unmarked cars; taking down car numbers; compiling dossiers; secretly filming with fibre optic cameras; dressing provocatively to bait offenders or abseiling down from the rafters of a public convenience to catch some poor wretch of a company director in stockings and suspenders! (In this case, the wealthy, married member of the Gilbey Gin family sued the Suffolk police and was awarded a hefty sum in damages once the courts were satisfied that the ‘lingerie’ was worn only for health reasons).

Such is the tyranny of heterosexualism, some gay men or women go to extraordinary lengths to assimilate into the dominant culture. Some indulge in an almost pathological denial of their own sexuality whilst denouncing others. Queerbashers are often discovered to be gay themselves. Jeffrey Dahmer, Dennis Neilson and Michael Lupo were all gay serial killers of gay men.

Nevertheless, behind the doors of many gentlemen’s public conveniences up and down the country is Britain’s last remaining portal of uncensored art and literature. Representing a veritable cornucopia of uncompromising expression, some of the graffiti left behind has served to keep homosexuality visible throughout decades of its oppression.

Outside the sexual arena of cruising and cottaging, the media agitate the nation’s armchairs, church-pews and back-benches toward a more aggressive collusion with the constructed notion of church and state: that sex should be conducted in private, (the bedroom); between two consenting adults, (male and female; married). It sets an extraordinary example of double standards, since the same public can be found on any night of the week, bonking merrily away behind the parking lot, in the haystack, or in the back of a car parked up in a lay-by. These randy couples are tidily dismissed as ‘courting’ and - unless your name is Gillian Taylforth - are likely to be reprimanded with nothing more than a polite knock on the misted windows.

Men who cruise are bisexual, married and gay men looking for drive-in, fast food sex as quickly and discreetly as they know how. They are not interested in children, who are, in any case, at much greater risk of sexual abuse within a heterosexual family. They don’t want to be seen or recognised by straight men and are certainly not getting off on the risk of being caught. For the police, eager to swell their clear-up rates, they provide easy pickings. Britain actually boasts Europe’s highest arrest rate for sex al fresco. According to Peter Tatchell, during the eighties, 20,000 gay men were convicted and around 2,000 gaoled for the consensual, victimless ‘crime’ of gay sex. The police usually say that they are acting on complaints from the public, but rarely appear in court to support police evidence.

Gross indecency, the charge police still generally use against English gay men who are caught in flagranti delicto, was helped onto the statute books by Henry Labouchere MP in 1885, and backed by a campaign by the National Vigilance Association. Heterosexual couples cannot commit an act of gross indecency. In Scotland, gay sexual behaviour is defined as lewd and libidinous.

Since policing sexuality was not always considered entirely appropriate for an all-male police force, during the First World War, the torch of Nanny Britain was shone in the faces of young soldiers by Women’s Patrols, paid by the police authorities to police "foolish, giddy and irresponsible conduct" by girls. Patrolling the streets, parks and open spaces, they "saved" drunken soldiers from "women of evil reputation" by administering black coffee laced with bicarbonate of soda, which made them violently sick. One astute patrol was so outraged by the sight of a "heaped mass of arms and legs and much stocking" on one of the benches along a towpath, she had the seats boarded up! Scotland has recently been awash with posters of an early policewoman attempting to stamp out "immoral behaviour" in one of London’s parks, chasing a gang of boys on the banks of the Serpentine in Hyde Park in 1926. The poster was used to advertise the soft drink, Irn Bru. Before the foundation of such organisations as the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene, the National Purity League, the Public Morality Council and the National Vigilance Association, it was quite usual for the public to bathe naked at ponds and beaches up and down the country. William Coote, the founder of the NVA, believed his organisation to be in an "energetic legal crusade against vice in its hydra-headed form", declaring in his book ‘A Romance in Philanthropy’, published in 1916, that it was a "hand-to-hand fight with the world, flesh and the devil".

In 1959, the Street Offences Act was introduced, ostensibly to stop women prostitutes soliciting on the street, but was also used to prosecute gay men. Numerous other laws have been used to regulate the ’public’ expression of gay sexuality, like Section 5 of the 1986 Public Order Act, originally introduced to curb rioters and football hooligans, but which has successfully been used to prosecute a man for the ‘offence’ of kissing in public. The Common Law offence of outraging public decency and even the Local Authority and Transport By-laws have been used to prosecute hundreds of gay men. In 1989, the London Borough of Richmond arrested 150 men for staying in a public convenience "longer than is necessary".

Rather than regarding cruising as a means of negotiating sexual contact, the general public has always focused on the element of vice. For most people, this has usually meant buggery, and for many years, gay men have been scapegoats for this, one of the perceived ills of heterosexual society. The Council of London first tried to legislate against the practice (never considered the exclusive realm of homosexuals) in 1102 but was defeated by the intervention of the gay Archbishop of Canterbury, Anselm, who felt it too widespread and popular with the masses to require legislation. Buggery was finally outlawed in England in 1533 and only partly repealed for gay men over the age of 21 by the 1967 Sexual Offences Act. (The practice remained illegal for straights over the age of 16 until 1994). By awarding this ‘special right’ to English and Welsh gays in 1967, to Scots gays in 1980 and finally, Northern Irish gays in 1982, the Act reinforced the public’s perception of homosexuals being largely preoccupied with anal sex. But has this been fair? In 1994, a Government-funded survey by Project SIGMA revealed that only 8% of gay men participate in anal penetration during sex. Anal penetration is, and has always been, more frequently performed by straight men on women.

From the Dutch word kruisen, cruising opens a gaping paradox in the term ‘public sex’. Can sex ever be described as ‘public’ just because it takes place outdoors, when everything about cruising is so private? Secret codes like rings on little fingers; pierced right ears; Levi 501s and coloured hankies dangling from back pockets. That discreet nod and the telltale silence of a man pressed up against a urinal without pissing. The discreet hesitation and search for confirmatory glances before buttoning-up; walking out and - since ‘home’ is usually private only in the heterosexual context - seeking out a bit of heavy shrubbery, a dark alley or driving to a quiet lay-by to shield them from prying eyes. These secret codes are designed to protect the rutting gay male from police, queerbashers, blackmailers, schoolboys and the ubiquitous straight male, whose swift, purposeful entrance into a urinal is likely to keep him blissfully unaware of the sexual negotiating that might be going on around him.

There are many cruising sites across Scotland that now trip easily off the tongue of the sexually adventurous. There are more than a dozen in and around Glasgow alone. When details of police arrests are published in newspapers, "attendance figures" can actually rise after more curious men find out where they are. In London, police now turn a blind eye to the sexual activity erupting across Hampstead Heath every night. Indeed, during the summer of 1995, top cabaret artiste, Amy Lamé staged a late night show for the benefit of cruisers on the Heath.

The popular stereotype of old men shuffling about in raincoats is a long way from reality. There may be rent-boys, students seeking to supplement their grant, or even teenagers from as young as 13 looking for sex or a stable, long-term relationship. Many cruising men don’t identify as gay at all, leading a double life, married, often with children. There can often be a disproportionate number of older men since it can take any number of years for gay or bisexual men to venture out of their heterosexual constructs. Sociologist Tim Edwards points out in his book ‘Erotics And Politics’ (Routledge 1994): "Public sex is paradoxically only public to the extent that it is not practised at home", pointing out that "local councils and police authorities deploy prison-like restrictions of these activities. The history of cottaging is, in fact, one of increasing sexual regulation whilst sexual activity has constantly widened and spread further into other areas". Quite apart from the risk of arrest and homophobic violence, there are other considerations: As Edwards explains: "Cruising sexuality as instrumental, unemotional and orgasm-oriented is male sexuality, par excellence." Divorced from any form of affection or emotional bonding, it is the pursuit of the hot-blooded male; even talk can be superfluous to requirements.

The type of sex performed in the cruising areas around Glasgow copies that performed by the former Glasgow street gangs, already documented by social historians. Frantic, urgent, stand-up sex carried out with an ever-watchful eye over the shoulder, taking place in the relative privacy of the closes of tenements, often under the noses of police. With a generally longer time needed to reach orgasm, the speed of such sex could hardly have afforded the young women many benefits. It is a sensitive subject with Glasgow men. In truth, cruising is much less about gays as it is about the hallowed cloisters of male sexuality. If so, prudery, patriarchy and censorship are providing it with the perfect camouflage.

Gay men, taking their first irresolute steps toward ‘coming out’ are likely to be confused by the persistent rebuff of their affections or expression of any emotion. The abundance of married men, gays and bisexuals they meet are only out for "a bit of sex". The expression of affection and emotion is either acted out in sexual play or is held back; reserved for what they consider to be their ‘normal’ lives outside this sexual arena.

This is a damaging contribution to oppression and self-loathing in anyone trying to meet societal expectations of a stable long-term relationship.