Cruising in the Age of Consent
Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series about the gay-rights movement and the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising.
Hunting for answers to one of life’s great questions, the lesbian writer Rita Mae Brown pasted on a mustache in 1975 and walked into a bathhouse for gay men. “The adventure attracted me, but besides that I’ve been raised with the constantly repeated notion that women’s sexuality and men’s sexuality are absolutely different,” she wrote in her essay “Queen for a Day: A Stranger in Paradise.” The all-male zone of Manhattan’s The Club would, she hoped, teach her how male and female sexuality diverged.
A robe hiding her female form, she marveled at the sex being had around every corner, from a dimly lit “maze” of semi-blind groping to an “unbelievable orgy room” of group activities to a corridor of cubicles in which men lay waiting for partners. Quickly, she began to form theories. “Men look at each other differently than men look at women,” she observed. “The leer is gone, the thinly disguised hostility of the street vanishes … The transaction boils down to: curiosity, no connection, disconnection.”
The way people touched felt foreign, too. As a stranger reached for her groin, Brown’s “first response was to turn around and smash the offender’s face in.” Later, to one man who hugged her from behind, she whispered, “Thank you but I’ve been here for an hour and I’m tired.” The man left her alone. “The easiness of refusal is incredible,” she wrote. “If you say ‘no’ it means ‘no,’ that’s all, and that simple ‘no’ also protects fragile egos. Sex isn’t a weapon here, it’s a release.”
Read during today’s #MeToo wave, Brown’s vision of a “paradise” packed with men groping unabashedly yet respectfully may sound like a hallucination. But many gay men might not find the scene so strange. Yes, assimilation and smartphones—and, before them, legal crackdowns amid the AIDS crisis—have thinned the ranks of spots like The Club. Even so, 50 years after a police raid on the Stonewall Inn catalyzed the mainstream LGBTQ movement, gay people still maintain spheres of separation from the wider world: nightclubs, vacation spots, and dating apps where like can meet like. In those places, folks who otherwise might edit themselves for the straight world find the miraculous-seeming freedom to directly pursue their desires. This pursuit can take forms as mild as dinner and a movie. It can also involve a crossing of physical boundaries that
