Bob Van Burkleo: Sorry, I've with the guys in Denver and Florida -- parks and public restrooms are for other purposes than "looking for dates". Keep it zipped, and find some other venue -- there are scads of "adult arcades" where you can be assured that you are among similarly minded people. The idea that just because we share a sexual orientation we have to maintain solidarity over everything that relates to it is what's "historical".
Er, adult arcades and the like aren't places where you look for someone to go home with you (casual sex); they're places where you look for on-the-spot quickies (anonymous sex). The original post wasn't about men looking for sex in the bushes in the park; it was about men looking for men to go home with them.
It's important not to set up a false dichotomy between committed-relationship sex and anonymous sex; there are intermediate arrangements, and the last thing we need are social mores that would encourage people to try to start committed relationships simply because that's the only non-hand-based way to relieve their horniness; most relationships started for that reason are unlikely to be successful. At the same time, we also don't want a set of social mores that say that anyone who wants to be in a committed relationship is a het-wannabe. And one can recognize these intermediate arrangements while still maintaining that the use of public space for anonymous quickies is a practice best consigned to the past.
And it is also important to realize that we still haven't gotten to
the point where gay men in their twenties are going to be as
"relationship-mature" as straight men in their twenties. We'll
reach that point when gay junior-high and high-school kids have the
same dating opportunities as straight kids of the same
age; until then, we have to accept that there are going to be
plenty of adult gay men who have to learn the adolescent mating
rituals before they can move on to the adult mating rituals and
that this process is not infinitely time-compressible, just as we
have to accept that an immigrant who's fully committed to learning
English isn't going to be a fluent English speaker for quite some
time yet.
