Queer's Park

T

here was once a bandstand in Queen’s Park. One August night, a thunderstorm erupted across the city. As everyone in the park drove away, Phil Conron sought refuge in the bandstand. Rain crashed against its roof, and steam rose from the concrete walkways. Lightning illuminated the midnight sky.

Amid the deluge, a car pulled up on Queen’s Park Crescent. A man with a raincoat thrown over his shoulders sprinted up into the bandstand and sat next to Phil. Their eyes met. The man said that he loved storms. His eyes roamed over Phil’s damp shirt and settled onto his crotch before gazing back at him. Phil said that he also loved storms. The man moved closer. As lightning gathered above, Phil leaned in and pulled off his raincoat, and then his shirt, and then his pants. The thunder and downpour enveloped their moans and laughter as they rolled around the rain-swept bandstand, precipitation and perspiration clinging onto their bodies.

Queen’s Park was a popular cruising area in the '50s and '60s. Centred in downtown Toronto, the park attracted university students and bar patrons seeking a change in scenery. Cruisers followed desire lines to their next nocturnal encounter in the bushes. Through word-of-mouth, the washroom underneath the decrepit Victorian bandstand became a local favourite.

The city demolished the bandstand in 1961 and planned to replace it with a combined public washroom and storage building. Instead, the equestrian statue of Edward VII was built in its place in 1969, the same year gay sex was partially decriminalized in Canada: the federal government added an exception clause to the Criminal Code, allowing “gross indecency” for consenting adults over 21 in private spaces. Nonetheless, police continued to charge men with gross indecency in public spaces, such as bathhouses, washrooms, and parks.

'Cruising is a way of looking, a way of making yourself available to meeting people,' writes cruising advocate Marcus McCann in Park Cruising.

In the late '60s, the city removed bushes and added fluorescent lighting in Queen’s Park to deter cruisers. “Sex aberrationists seem to be drawn to parks like magnets,” an article in The Globe and Mail opined at the time, “particularly those with many trees and a large acreage.” However, cruisers continued to meet among its maples and oaks. In 1971, gossip columnist Duke Gaylord proclaimed, “Well, summer is here and as usual the gay tribe are pulsating … One need only take a trip to Allen Gardens or to Queen's Park to realize that they are in the midst of the mating season.” In 1977, Bob Damron’s Address Book, a travel guide for gay tourists, listed Queen’s Park as a cruising area in Toronto. Although later editions omitted Queen’s Park, Damron continued to publish cruising spots in North America throughout the AIDS crisis, supplementing the book with safe sex guidelines. In the early 2000s, the city tore out bushes from the park again, and then again in 2019 and 2020. Still, every few months, someone will post about their experience discovering the park's cruising scene on Reddit. “It’s a rite of passage for you to walk across the park at night thinking you’re being clever with your shortcut,” u/heteroerotic writes, “and stumble upon some activity.”

In late February, I was heading towards Museum station when I noticed that someone had spray painted an "r" over the “Welcome to Queen’s Park” sign to read “Welcome to Queer’s Park.”

Huh, I thought. Someone said the quiet part out loud.

“Cruising is a way of looking, a way of making yourself available to meeting people,” writes cruising advocate Marcus McCann in Park Cruising. “The natural corollary is that cruising is also a way of being seen.” Cruisers signal their interest through repeated and prolonged eye contact. “Our culture prescribes a very limited time during which one stranger may hold the eyes of another,” sociologist John Alan Lee writes. “The ancient Greeks believed that it was through the eyes that Cupid caused people to fall in love. We still consider eye encounters proper only in intimate settings.” Other signals include caressing your stomach, lifting your shirt to display your abs, or subtly grabbing your crotch—touching your body to say, “Don’t you want to do this to me?”

The earliest record of cruising comes from 15th century Florence, but people around the world have likely been cruising for longer than its documented history. Stories of cruising in Toronto survive in the ArQuives’ Foolscap Oral History Project, which produced nearly 100 interviews with gay Canadian men born in the first half of the 20th century. In addition to Queen’s Park, the interviewees cruised David Balfour Park, High Park, and Hanlan’s Point—places where people cruise today.

Patrick Marano was born before dating apps existed, and he tells me that he enjoys how park cruising provides the thrill of a spontaneous connection without the pretenses or complications of the modern hookup scene. Online dating is rife with catfishing. Bars are not always welcoming, especially for queer folk of colour and trans people, and drinks are expensive. Parks are accessible, and as a self-proclaimed adventurer, Marano enjoys the outdoor excitement. “Cruising allows for an openness,” he says, “to new experiences and other people.”

As a queer and nonbinary-trans individual who often gets understood as a “man” in the world, the number of positive experiences Sly Sarkisova has had while cruising surprises them. He has experienced transphobia while cruising, especially during the early stages of his transition. “I was trying to experiment more in gay men's indoor cruising spaces, but they were dominated by cisgender men who were expecting a certain anatomy,” he tells me. “It was very psychologically unsafe and risky to cruise, even on the apps … There’s this weird power dynamic where people think that they're more valuable and desirable than you.” However, Sarkisova actively challenges such assumptions as a practice of their selective embodiment in these spaces. “My body can inhabit you with a desire you never knew to question, and I no longer have to question my body,” they write in their essay, “Under A Queer Blue Sky.” Cruising during various stages of his transition has empowered him to understand and experience his body on his own terms. While their body might hold meanings and stories others perceive incorrectly, he rewrites these scripts by choosing interactions he controls. “In these not-so-secret spaces,” he says. “I achieve desire for myself in ways that would not otherwise be possible.”

Cruising and public sex are mistaken as synonymous. While they overlap, Marano explains that cruising enables people to meet before heading to a second location. Cruising is also misunderstood as exhibitionism. Cruisers conceal their encounters out of respect for other park users and self-preservation. The Criminal Code prohibits public indecency, and Toronto’s park bylaws forbid nudity and engagement in “any form of sexual behaviour.” Moreover, non-participants can endanger cruisers. “You don't know what kind of podcast or propaganda they have dripped in their ear,” Marano says. In 2001, four young men killed Aaron Webster in Stanley Park’s cruising area. The men, who had beaten Webster to death with baseball bats and a pool cue, called him a “peeping tom” and a “fucking voyeur.”

Municipal authorities have attempted to eliminate cruising by brightening parks, clearing vegetation, and building pathways near cruising areas; however, Toronto’s cruising culture remains active, with participants of all ages and races. Instead, efforts to design away cruising increase the risk of exposing cruisers, jeopardizing participants and non-participants alike. These park redesigns are often framed as public safety measures. Without adequate lighting, parks are places where police officers in the 1960s said that “no sensible woman would walk alone at night.”

Marano argues that cruising-hostile topography makes Queen’s Park less enjoyable for everyone. Without the bushes that once encircled the park, the surrounding traffic becomes more noticeable. The glaring lights disturb the park’s nocturnal inhabitants.

However, as public space policy and planning consultant Jake Tobin Garrett explains to me, safety is subjective. Someone walking through the park at night might feel safer because they can see better and don’t feel like anyone is going to attack them from the bushes. But for a homeless person living in the park, the removal of natural cover denies them privacy, and the lighting may cause them difficulty sleeping. Furthermore, people in the vicinity can provide a sense of safety. While doing outreach, McCann, along with other members of advocacy group Queers Crash the Beat, met an older woman who felt safe walking her dog at night through Marie Curtis Park because she knew the cruisers would hear her call for help.

Marano argues that cruising-hostile topography makes Queen’s Park less enjoyable for everyone. Without the bushes that once encircled the park, the surrounding traffic becomes more noticeable. The glaring lights disturb the park’s nocturnal inhabitants. For example, little brown bats avoid artificial lighting, limiting their space for foraging and roosting. Over 90 percent of these bats have already been killed by white-nose syndrome, and their shrinking numbers affect the park’s ecosystem, from its insect population to the dispersal of pollen and seeds.

Parks are mixed-use spaces, and people clash over their “appropriate” uses. For instance, playing badminton across a row of benches is perfectly legal, but it would irritate readers sitting there. “As much as parks are governed by formal rules,” Garrett argues, “there are also informal understandings about how public spaces can be used.” And as Garrett reminds me, sanctioned usage changes over time. In 2008, Amsterdam legalized public sex in Vondelpark, provided that patrons neither littered nor engaged in sexual activities near the playground, and also limited public sex to nighttime.

In Sarkisova’s opinion, queerness challenges a space’s normative uses. “There’s an element,” he says, “of fucking shit up.” The queer community has claimed Queen’s Park in times of celebration and protest. In 1975, the Coalition for Gay Rights in Ontario marched from the north end of Queen’s Park to Toronto City Hall. During the 1978 Gaydays, a two-day festival for queer people and allies, attendees attached rainbow balloons to a lamppost and hung an upside-down pink triangle with the words “Out of the Closet” on Edward VII’s high horse. The 1993 and 1996 AIDS Walk, a parade and HIV-research fundraiser, cut through Queen’s Park. In 2023, counter-protestors waved trans flags in defiance of the anti-2SLGBTQ+ demonstrators. “If you get enough of us together, we can queer any space,” says McCann.

Openly queer spaces facilitate connection among the community, but visibility can be dangerous. In response to the Pulse nightclub shooting, queer artist Katie Sly writes, 'By inhabiting known, recognizable and enclosed queer establishments, from a certain perspective, I was making it very easy for a bigot with a gun to know where to find me.'

In Marano’s and Garrett’s opinion, queer spaces are places where queer people feel safe to be themselves. These include commercial venues, like gay bars, and locations acknowledged as historically queer, like Hanlan’s Point. Openly queer spaces facilitate connection among the community, but visibility can be dangerous. In response to the Pulse nightclub shooting, queer artist Katie Sly writes, “By inhabiting known, recognizable and enclosed queer establishments, from a certain perspective, I was making it very easy for a bigot with a gun to know where to find me.” Desire lines become roadmaps when cruising areas are publicized. The 1977 Bob Damron’s Address Book jokes about how the danger of cruising is hot, but the 1997 copy cautions: “MOST POLICE DEPTS. IN THE USA HAVE COPIES OF THE ADDRESS BOOK, BEWARE.”

The formal recognition of Queen’s Park as a queer space is unlikely but also unnecessary. The fluidity of mixed-use spaces enables Queen’s Park to be queered depending on when and how it is being used. Sarkisova describes the demographic shifts of a cruising spot as a “sea change,” with one demographic dominating a space one night, another group the next. Cruisers come and go in waves, and so too do the people of Queen’s Park: the commuters hustling towards Museum station, the children playing soccer among the trees, the seniors practicing tai chi while blasting music from their iPhones, the tourists taking selfies with Edward VII, the homeless population living in tents, the old man strumming his guitar on sunny afternoons, the Canadian geese shitting in the middle of a pathway, the students returning to their dorms after a late night at Robarts, and yes, the cruisers lingering in the shadows.

Although the graffiti has been erased, I still think about the “Welcome to Queer’s Park” sign. I don’t know whether it was an act of queerphobia or queer ownership, but here’s what I do know:

Little brown bats live in southern Ontario and weigh equivalent to a loonie or toonie. They are most active two or three hours after sunset. Researchers have found that during mating season, male bats mount males and females, with approximately 35 percent of matings occurring between two males. I have never seen little brown bats in Queen’s Park, but I know they seek refuge from the light.