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Jan. 27, 2007 During most of the first of my two residencies in New York City, 1982-1986, I was destitute and penniless. There was a period when I lived in a hotel in mid-Manhattan, and had money to shop at Macy's, Bloomingdale's, and Lord and Taylor, but that ended, and I found myself on the sidewalks of the city. In those circumstances, I found it necessary to have a number of places to repair to in order to kill time. One of these places was Stuyvesant Park, which is really two parks, one on each side of Second Avenue, between 15th and 17th Streets, in Manhattan. This was a beautiful little park, especially on a weekday morning in summer. I could go there with my papers and notes, or books, or soprano recorder, and just read or play or sing. The only trouble was that the restrooms were always locked. If you needed to use the facility, you would have to walk all the way to Washington Square, a mile away. Remarking on this subject to Marty, the gay male nurse that I wrote about in another article, I learned that the restrooms had been closed because they had become gay meeting places, probably replete with lewd acts, as is usually the case at such places. I can understand that gay men and women would want a place to meet, but why does it have to be a public toilet, where other people are trying to do what such places are built for? The very distastefulness of urination and defecation would make such a place undesirable for anything so tender as affection or coitus, you would think. But no, sometimes an individual will spend all the hours of the restroom's operation inside or nearby, interfering with the privacy of those who would like just to enter discreetly. Sometimes, they even make snide remarks to complete strangers. Stuyvesant Park was surrounded by a high fence of iron spears and had lockable gates. However, no one ever locked the gates, though the park was supposed to be closed at 9 PM. You could walk through at 11 PM or 2 AM, usually with no bother at all. Then one evening about 9 PM, I walked through the park, and there was a group of apparently homosexual men present. One man was seated on a bench, with his pants and underwear dropped to his ankles, so that the entire lower half of his body was naked. He was sitting way forward on the bench, leaning back so that his spine was about 45º from the horizontal. His membrum virile, perfectly erect, was standing almost vertical. A second man, about 10 feet away and fully dressed, was performing some sort of dance, like an adagio, with his fingers pointing first one way, and then another, as he advanced towards the seated man. He shimmied and wiggled, swaying to and fro. He could actually have been a dancer; he seemed lithe and skilful. Seven or eight other men were standing in two rows, one on either side of the wooing couple, watching with obvious enthusiasm and cheering the pair on, with gestures and little, salacious cries, gasps, giggles and slurps. I'm a mature, broad-minded citizen. I just walked by. But it did occur to me that children could as easily have been walking by, and I doubt that the average parent would like to have his child witness such scenes. I simply cannot accept the idea that the discrimination suffered by homosexuals is what provokes their promiscuity and exhibitionism. Actually, the average homosexual who wears ordinary clothes, as most of them do, suffers precious little discrimination in a city like New York. He can hold a job easily. Few business firms, hospitals, stores or factories will make an issue of an employee's mere homosexuality. Some individuals may do so, and that perhaps is regrettable. But many homosexuals create their own problems by behaving in such a lewd, exhibitionistic way, often deliberately to provoke and offend. This certainly does not further their cause, and surely they're intelligent enough to see that. Eventually, the authorities started locking the gates at Stuyvesant Park. Whereas previously, if you had wanted to sit out for a minute in the evening, there'd have been no problem. But that became a thing of the past. I'm just picking one incident. There are incidents all the time in almost every park in the inner city of most American cities. This kind of behaviour, repeated self-defeating acts, is the classical definition of a neurosis. The correct approach to discrimination would be to be somewhat more modest, and to try to excel in other ways. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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