E-Mail This Article to a Friend Sex in the city In pre-AIDS, post-Stonewall Boston, June was when gay men’s minds turned to thoughts of outdoor cruising BY MICHAEL BRONSKI

JUNE HAS TRADITIONALLY been the month of marriages: June brides, weddings under bowers of flowers, early-summer honeymoons. And with the creeping onslaught of same-sex marriage — sure, it’s only Massachusetts now, but there’s no doubt that with lots of struggle, legal battles, and time, gay marriage is a done deal — this wedding-laden month will be hosting connubial celebrations for happy gay couples as well.

But for me the month of June has very different memories, less connubial and more concupiscent. Since I moved to Boston, in 1971, the month of June (maybe even late May) has been the time when outdoor cruising spots frequented by gay men open for business. Well, let’s be clear: "cruising" is only part of the game. With the flourishing of dense, verdant vegetation, large bushes, reeds, and leafing trees, these outdoor cruising places — the Fenway’s Victory Gardens, the Esplanade, the banks of the Charles in Cambridge, close to the Larz Anderson Bridge in Harvard Square — became riotous sex clubs, open to all, relatively safe, and endlessly active. They were, in the world of pre-AIDS, post-Stonewall gay-liberation politics, unblemished gardens of Eden, bastions of sexual liberation, and the best free night out in town.

I had moved to Cambridge to go to graduate school. I made friends there and in gay-liberation political groups I joined, but I wanted more and more involvement with gay-male social life. Bars were okay, but you were expected to buy drinks (I was a poor graduate student), and aside from hating the smoke, I was often put off by the petty game-playing that so often occurred. It was then that I discovered outdoor cruising and the thrill of spending endless hours — you could begin at deep dusk and keep going until early dawn — meeting men, having casual sexual encounters, hanging out, having more sex, and being part of what felt like then, and still does as I remember it, a friendly, convivial, and in some very profound way, loving — if fleeting — community.

When I think back on those summers — all of the ’70s and into the early ’80s — my mind becomes flush with memories: spending several hours fooling around in a patch of wild peppermint with a man I had just met and coming home at 4 a.m. smelling like an oversexed julep or a box of candy canes; sharing a joint on the steps of the Anderson Bridge with two men from out of town who were in Cambridge for a Harvard-alumni event; standing under a massive elm tree in the Victory Gardens during a refreshing 3 a.m. summer shower, savoring the smell of night air and moist soil.

I don’t want to give the impression that these Edenic nights were chaste. The amount of sex going on was prodigious and endless. Let’s face it — that’s what people were there for, and everyone found as much or as little as he wanted. It wasn’t so much a free candy shop with kids grabbing all they could as an endless floating party, a moveable feast, that grew or shrank depending on who was present at the moment and who wanted to do what. Men would have sex in pairs, trios, or larger groups; watching on your own was perfectly okay as well. For the most part, people who wanted privacy — such as it was — were left alone, and those whose tastes for the moment ran more inclusive were also accommodated. While there were always the dangers of queer-bashing and police interference, these happened far less frequently than one would imagine. In fact, there was a glorious moment in the mid ’70s when the MDC police began to patrol the Victory Gardens not to stop the gay men, but to protect them against thugs and muggers.

But for all the sex I had on these summer nights — and there was a lot of it, more than I ever thought possible growing up Catholic in suburban New Jersey, and probably more than I even remember now — what I remember most clearly are other moments. The man who just wanted to be held as we lay in the grass. The friends I made who are still in my life. The walks back to my rent-controlled apartment in Harvard Square after a full night of escapades on the Esplanade, feeling completely alive, content, and happy. In many ways those evenings out — with hundreds of men engaging in sex all around me — became deeply emblematic of what the very concept of gay community meant to me. The world of gay politics and writing and culture was, and still is, vital to me, but the idea of men from a multitude of backgrounds, comprising an endless array of body types and expressing all manner of desire, coming together, if only for a few hours, in physical bliss was, and is, perfection.

Michael Bronski can be reached at mabronski@aol.com