When it comes to gay pickup spots, I'm pretty ignorant. Until Sen. Larry Craig was arrested, I didn't
realize airport bathrooms were a prime spot. And now I'm learning that birdwatching areas are also quite popular.
Birders and cruisers have found value in the same patches of land because not only do they attract scores of birds, but they also allow for partial privacy and chance encounters in a public setting.
In cruiser communities, birding areas are known to be prime hook-up spots.
"It's bad, dude, real bad," said Munoz, 47, a Chicago police homicide detective who began birdwatching during a trip to Yellowstone National Park. "I've been confronted a couple times, and I've seen a few things happening. Like guys in the middle of some things." [Link]
Surely there are better places to hook up, places where you don't have to worry about birdwatchers dropping in on you -- or birds dropping on you.
At best, birders said, the cruisers are tasteless; at worst, birders said they feel uneasy amid occasional leers and advances.
Birders said the cruisers are generally easy to spot: men without birding gear, such as binoculars, sketch books or birding books, who wander the less populated trails with deliberate gaits and searching eyes.[Link]
Cop: "Look at that guy. He has no binoculars and he's looking around intently."
Second cop: "Yeah, he's either a gay man seeking sex or a poor birdwatcher."
Yasmin Nair, a freelance writer who has defended cruising in the Windy City Times, a Chicago gay newspaper, said public sex allows "one to negotiate sexuality outside the domestic and restrictive normative ideas of sex."
Offended birders should simply look the other way, she said.
"I would say just move your binoculars -- look for the red-breasted robin," she said. "It's not as if they do it in the open where someone has to step over them." [Link]
It's hard to look away, especially when you hear someone screaming, "Oh, Robin! Oh, Robin!"
Munoz said that while birding in a Chicago police T-shirt, he once was propositioned.
"This guy walks up to me and says, 'How's it going?' I'm thinking the guy's a birder," Munoz said. "Then he goes, 'Want to get lucky?' I said, 'Excuse me? Can you read my shirt?' He says, 'Yeah, but do you want to get lucky?'" [Link]
Munoz was a little smarter than I would have been.
Man: "Hey, how's it going? Do you want to get lucky?"
Me: "Sure."
Man: "Great!"
Me: "Hey, why are you taking your pants of?"
Man: "I thought you wanted to get lucky."
Me: "Yeah, I did. But I don't think you have a red-breasted robin in your pants."
Comments