Yes, it's nearly May and me and my homies decided to go on an anthropological investigation to see if Central Park and The Ramble are still as merry and as gay as can be. We are happy to report that all is well with the world, the long winter is over and the park and the boys are ready for the birds and the bees.

New York City's most enduring gay tradition is not Fire Island, not Christopher Street and not the rumors about Ed Koch but rather the Central Park Ramble. For those of you who have mysteriously and miraculously gone through life without knowledge of The Ramble: it is a densely wooded and hilly area of Central Park that is at almost any time of the day or night--particularly in warm weather--ground zero for outdoor gay sex. In this day and age, it has an almost retro feel. Between the Internet and living in a very out and open world, sneaking around bushes and behind trees to steal a few minutes of forbidden sex seems...well, downright retro. And yet as soon as the temperature rises above "shrinkage" the men and boys are out in force. I'm told by badly behaved friends that the best hours for a choice of many somethings to suit everyone's tastes are between late afternoon and sunset.



Each generation imagines The Ramble to be a contemporary or at least post-Stonewall invention. This is simply not true. In fact, Central Park had been a gathering place for gay men since the late 19th Century. In the 1920s they called the open lawn at the northern end of The Ramble the "Fruited Plain." During the 1930s Cole Porter entertained friends at parties with song lyrics alluding to gay men in the park: "Picture Central Park -- without a sailor, Picture Mister Lord, minus Mister Taylor."

According to an official history of Central Park, "During and after World War II, gay men cruising became much more open. But the important change was not so much in the way gay men acted as in how they were perceived. A panic over sex crimes in the late 1940s and early 1950s helped displace the earlier stereotype of the effeminate "queer," as an object of ridicule with a new stereotype of the homosexual as a dangerous psychopath, a menace to young boys. In that atmosphere, gays faced increased surveillance and persecution, and arrests of men for homosexual activity skyrocketed in the late 1940s. In these postwar years, some of the local and national press prominently featured gays -- invariably described as "perverts" or "misfits" -- in their catalogs of the "dangers" of Central Park. "The Park has become not only a stalking ground for young predators and rapists," wrote Central Park West resident Marya Mannes in the Reporter in 1960. "It is a point of assignation for homosexuals, and I need go no further than my own window to see the figure of a man waiting behind a tree and later joined by another man, who walks with him under the heavy shadows of leaves and out of sight."



"For Mannes, as for others, such casual park meetings were another sign that "more violence and more perversity" were entering the park. In 1955 New York City uber-developer Robert Moses proposed transforming The Ramble into a recreational center for senior citizens, in part, apparently, because The Ramble was considered a gathering place for "anti-social persons." Joseph Lyford, who lived on the Upper West Side in the early 1960s, found that many black and Puerto Rican mothers lumped gays together with addicts, prostitutes and alcoholics in discussing their concerns about their children's safety: "One hears frequent stories about children being accosted in washrooms of movie theaters or in Central Park." Actually, gay park users were much more likely to be crime victims than victimizers; thugs, who knew that gay men frequented the park at night and that they were reluctant to go to the police because of a fear of public exposure, preyed on them in The Ramble."

Todays' Central Park and The Ramble are both pretty much crime-free and as gay open and as gay friendly as any place could be. And these days if you find a cop in The Ramble, he's likely enjoying himself. The expanse of half-naked gay eye candy sunbathing on the Great Lawn on any given summer afternoon would be enough to satisfy the combined appetites of George Michael, Lance Bass and Michael Lucas. However, if you want to do more than window shop, I suggest you head to The Ramble's northern most meadow where you can shop and then quickly run into a dressing room bush and try it on for size.

Feel free to ramble on over to my latest photo gallery for more reasons why Central Park and The Ramble are top destinations for this year's fashionable bear, twink or mocca chocolata ya ya's. Invite me along and I'll show you my favorite ravine.


View Gallery: Springtime In Central Park

Springtime in Central Park ...Springtime In Central Park Test