Ler os Outros: George Michael, Hampstead Heath, Engates Gay e a Tradição

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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.