I was wondering, are gay sex-in-public scandals treated the same way as hetero ones, by the law enforcement, the media, the public?
I am also interested in getting people’s opinions on this message board. I know what gay people would say to this question. But what about the people on this presumably, largely hetero message board?
:):)
I can only think of a handful of sex in public scandals offhand. Eddie Murphy , Hugh Grant and a few other celebrities were caught engaging in the act with prostitutes. George Michael got caught a couple of times propositioning strangers in public toilets. That’s not a very big sample, but of those, two were caught because of prostitution, not the sex in public aspect. Only one of them was gay, although the Eddie Murphy event was with a transgender/transvestite prostitute so might be included.
So really that leaves the sole example of a sex in public scandal as George Michael. And the scandal, and crime, was not that he was having sex in public but that he was propositioning random strangers in a public toilet. There is no evidence that if he was caught having sex with is boyfriend he would have been charged, much less the subject of a scandal.
So I have to ask which events you are referring to as sex in public scandals? I don’t keep up with the tabloids so I’m sure there are others that I missed, but these are the only ones I know of that featured A-list celebrities and that made the regular newspapers, rather than TMZ.
Based on that I can’t see much evidence of gay sex being treated any differently. We have examples of straight and gay people caught engaging in the illegal act of prostitution. And we have a single example of a gay man being caught soliciting sex in a public place.
My intuition says that that if George Michael had multiple convictions for following *women *into toilets, exposing his erect penis and asking them to fellate/sodoimise him he would be a social pariah and almost certainly behind bars. So based on the single sample to hand, I am inclined to say that gay acts are actually treated more leniently.
Do you actually have other examples of anyone other celbrities engaging in public sex and being arrested or subject to scandal?
Do you have any evidence that gay people are subjected to scandal out of proportion to their actual rate of public sex? This is an important point. Anonymous sex in public is a fairly big thing in the gay community. It is almost unheard of in the straight community. I don’t have any hard figures, but intuition tells me that there are thousands of acts of anonymous public sex by gay men for every straight act. That alone would skew sex in public scandals heavily towards gay men.
Actually, I should have specified, I am not referring to celebrity scandals. I am also not referring to prostitution take downs. I am talking about sex in public, also called lewdness, in some jurisdictions.
I guess I could give a little more background. Gay sex in public makes news every now and again, where I live (Metro-Detroit). And much as you, the media is of the opinion that is largely a gay phenomenon. But a gay activist once questioned if that is really the case, or just the perception. I don’t have a cite to this news story, which is why I didn’t include it.
Anyways, sex in public, and people’s perception of it (like yours, as you just alluded to). That is my question:).
Ahh, well, if its just an average Joe it’s not a scandal. you might want to ask for the thread to be retitled.
As for the real rates, I doubt if anyone could say for sure.
But my perception is that almost nobody, straight or gay, ever gets done for sex in public* per se*. If I get caught having sex with my wife in the back seat or behind the dunes I would expect the cop to tell us to get a room and little else. And as far as I can tell this is equally true of gay sex.
The charges, at least where I live, are all for George Michael type activities. Men hanging around in public toilets propositioning other men, drilling glory holes and so forth. I have never seen anything to suggest that this is a common practice for heterosexual couples (or lesbians). I have seen a lot of published evidence, anecdotes and personal observations that it is a common practice in a certain segment of the male homosexual population. George Michael has become the public face of this, but the fact that every major town has toilets where gay men know they can go and meet other gay men who engage in this practice speaks to how widespread this is. There simply are not any public toilets where a straight women go for anonymous sex with random men or* vice versa*. It’s not a culture that exists anywhere as far as anyone can tell. But it is a culture found in the gay community of every town in the western world.
It’s not the public sex that is treated as a crime here. It is the fact that these men are making public facilities unusable by children, they are engaging in sexual harassment of strangers and the practice is clearly dangerous in terms of rape, retaliatory/defensive assault and so forth. As I already noted, if men were doing this to women in women’s toilets, the charges would be much more serious, the penalties would be much harsher and the scandal much greater. To that extent, it seems pretty clear that the homosexual act is treated as a much lesser crime. Even though a man being propositioned in a public toilet by a semi-naked gay man is likely just as intimidated and threatened as a woman propositioned by a semi-naked straight man, the stigma for the criminal is much, much less.
If this gay activist is implying that propositioning random strangers for anonymous sex in public toilets is anywhere near as common amongst straights as gays, then he really needs to produce some evidence. It seems like an extraordinary claim. It’s not that this practice is common in the gay community, it’s that it appears to be orders of magnitude *more *common.
And if he is implying that the vast majority of sex in pubic convictions do not result from this activity, then he also needs t provide some evidence.
My position at this stage:
My intuition and the evidence I have seen tells me that gay indecency cases almost all spring from acts where a gay man sexually propositions men in toilets. That is sexual harassment and should be a crime when a man does it to a man, just as much if a man did it to a woman. This practice of anonymous sex in public toilets is overwhelmingly practiced by gay men. Since it is this practice that accounts for most indecency charges, we would *expect *indecency charges to be overwhelmingly filed against gay men.
Do you disagree with any part of this argument?
Or is you position simply that we lack hard evidence? I agree with that, and hard evidence will be impossible to obtain. But I would say that, given the amount of soft evidence, it is up to this gay activist to present some actual evidence to support his position. He needs to either show that straight men propositioning straight women ins toilet blocks in as common as the gay equivalent *and *treated more leniently, or else show that most gay indecency charges stem from having sex in the dunes or on the back seat rather than in toilets.
OK, I’ll bite. What would gay people say to this question?
I think they’d at least partly agree with the activist, that it is overrated and people’s perception that it is a gay phenomenon is misplaced.
If you mean “propositioning people in a public restroom”, then Blake is right - AFAICT this is disproportionately a gay thing. I would be open to correction, but hard figures may not be available.
The last case I can remember of (sort of) this kind of thing for heterosexuals was some actress dry humping her boyfriend in the parking lot in Beverly Hills. There was a long Pit thread about it. Contrast that to George Michael or Larry Craig (or even Walter Jenkins, if you want to go back that far).
Regards,
Shodan
Aside from a rather few people who are clinging to the “homosexuality is a licentious lifestyle” belief, I really can’t think of anyone who has expressed the idea that public sex is limited to or mainly the act of homosexuals.
Are the news reports focusing on two people caught with their pants on or skirts up in a public place? (Parks? Parking lots? Theaters?). Or are the reports focusing on prostitution/solicitation in restrooms?
I remember that years ago the Michigan State Police used to get in the news for busting gay hookups at rest stops on the Interstates, but I don’t know whether the police were particularly going after gay activity or whether the news outlets were picking gay reports out of the police blotters and ignoring the routine hetero prostitution arrests. (I’ve been out of Michigan for years, so I don’t know which stories prompted your question.)
I suspect there’d be more cops wearing rubber gloves during a gay male sex arrest than if it was an arrest of a straight couple.
Do you mean Daniele Watts, of Django Unchained?
It’s not a gay phenomenon, it’s a male phenomenon. If more women were down to have sex with anonymous strangers, you’d probably be seeing a lot more rest-stop heterosexual hookups. (I’m sure they exist, just not as common).
Also, it’s somewhat tougher for men and women to hook up with each other in public restrooms since they tend to be unisex.
Anyone who thinks public sex is a gay-only thing has never been to college.
The stories I used to hear in the news about public sex were pretty exclusively related to gay males. There is a local park called Olin Turville that was apparently known as a hookup place for gay men, and the police swept through there pretty regularly. When they busted people, it made the local news.
Another interstate restroom story – some years back the state bulldozed a rest stop on 1-90 to the ground because of repeated complaints about gay sex there. I stopped there often while driving back from Chicago to Madison and never saw any such thing, and I was pretty pissed that it got destroyed – it was a good location.
… for gay sex?
That too, I suppose.
???
My question was in regard to what sort of stories the OP was talking about. Public sex? Prostitution? Some different event?
As to it being a male phenomenon, it is rather difficult for a hetero male to engage in either public sex or prostitution without some sort of female cooperation. If the issue is masturbation, then my question remains: what are we exactly talking about?
There have been a few close calls with homosexual celebrities and public sex, or public “dodginess”. The ones im thinking of continued to be very successful in their respective careers( though im sure others have been less fortunate). Wilfred Brambell being one of the celebrities who did manage to maintain his career.
… wouldn’t that make it easier?
Which instances of gay sex in public do they feel are not a gay phenomenon?