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A dubious website listing several cruising spots in the Charleston area checks off almost every box. The I eastbound rest stop in Ladson, which is included in the list, was once the hottest cruising ground in the area. It was featured in Bob Damron's Address Book , a gay travel guide, along with two rest stops in Columbia, one in Gaffney, and one in Spartanburg. White Point Garden at the tip of the Charleston peninsula, surrounded by stately homes and the picturesque Battery walk, is this Southern gem's central landmark.
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With prime spots for leisure and seclusion, some say it was tailor-made for this type of use. Greene, 65, says friends would pick him up for drives near the Battery to "go see who's queer" while he was still closeted in the early '70s. He likens the body language used in cruising to ballets, and the insecure men who circled the park inside their cars to birds of prey.
The celebrated gay writer Armistead Maupin talks about cruising the Battery for drunk, married men in his autobiography Logical Family , released last year. Marion Square was another Charleston cruising ground immortalized in literature. In a poem named after the public park, Murray Bennett wrote of two men, a Northerner and a Southerner, who met before they were interrupted by a guard asking, "Where are you boys from?
Move along! It's night!
In Policing Public Sex: Queer Politics and the Future of AIDS Activism , a transcript of a discussion between two entrepreneurs highlights the importance of dedicated places for sexual expression for a group used to looking over its shoulder. The December talk took place in New York, amidst efforts by public officials to dismantle public sexual institutions.
Since then, personal ads on Craigslist, Backpage, and online gay dating pioneer Adam4Adam have birthed apps with an even quicker response rate: Meanwhile, legal, political, and social victories for the LGBTQ community, the normalization and appropriation of gay culture, and public decency campaigns have transformed once essential physical spaces into relics. Those public efforts can be seen in Charleston's decision to shutter public restrooms at White Point Garden and Marion Square.
An Aug. Brian Ambrose of the Charleston Police Department says he's only encountered public hook-ups about three times since he started as a patrol officer in , and all were straight couples. Between and , CPD only recorded five instances of "public sex" in a total of 79 sexual exposure incident reports and 35 prostitution reports. Four of those five instances were classified as prostitution. Between and , before smartphones and dating apps hijacked relationships, both types of reports were almost twice as frequent for indecent exposure and 78 for prostitution , though it is unclear which ones were written for public sex.
These spots gave rise to a sense of community for users and gawkers alike. For better or worse, they have been all but decimated.
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Charlie Smith, a real estate agent and co-founder of the Charleston-based advocacy group Alliance for Full Acceptance , says he noticed gay people consciously moving out of the public sphere after he returned to Charleston from Miami in When you could get instant gratification, why go to a bar and have to pay parking? The King Street disco had a sign welcoming all types of people, and it was the first time he remembers feeling like a business was willing to protect him should anything happen, even if he was still "very closeted" at the time.
Nowadays, younger LGBTQ crowds are less likely to venture out into the city than they are to spiral into a loop of apps. That's natural. A proviso tucked into the state budget passed last month allows publicly funded adoption agencies to refuse services that go against "sincerely-held religious belief or moral conviction. The Justice Department, headed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, filed a "friend of the court" brief on behalf of a company sued by a former employee who alleged he was fired after telling a customer he was gay.
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The fight has now gone virtual, and recent developments suggest that online spaces are just as vulnerable to fear-mongering, erasure, and violence as physical ones. In the Russian republic of Chechnya, for example, apps like Grindr are being used to bait gay men into dangerous situations, where they are then beaten, blackmailed, and sometimes raped.
Once a hub for married, closeted, and "discreet" men, Craigslist shut down its personals section on March 23, two days after the Senate passed the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act-Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act package, a controversial bipartisan law that targets some of the more inconspicuous — and raunchy — listing websites that were pivotal in the sexual awakening of LGBTQ youth. Backpage , a website long plagued by accusations of enabling child sex trafficking, was seized by federal agencies on April 6.
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Newspapers, including this one, rarely run personal ads anymore. But relationships are just one aspect of queer culture that has been affected by a rapid and uneven absorption into mainstream American culture, an issue familiar to all marginalized groups elbowing their way to equality. Smith's real estate business, once focused on helping LGBTQ customers stage their houses to avoid homophobia from potential buyers, has now grown in scope to include just about everyone looking to sell or buy a home in a nice neighborhood. Even Dudley's on Ann, Charleston's only decidedly gay club, has recently made a conscious effort to court more diverse, non-gay patronage, according to owner Daniel Brinker, who remembers at least five gay bars in town when he first moved to Charleston from Cincinnati in The new order has its own significant drawbacks.
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