cover photo/Chris Busby
When the porn theater that bought the bones of the once-grand movie palace downtown also falls to ruin, you know it’s actually your city that’s really getting screwed here. That was Portland on a February day 34 years ago, as a young gay man walked by the State Theatre at the corner of Congress and High, accompanied by a couple straight friends.
“They go, ‘Oh, guys hook up in there,’” the now middle-aged man recalled last month while sitting at the bar at Blackstones, the legendary gay nightspot on Portland’s West End, where the regulars call him RobBob.
“I go, ‘What do you mean?’”
“And they’re closing tomorrow,” his friends said.
“I’m like: Oh…”
“So the next day I went — with my bushy red hair, my acne and my sunglasses — and basically I looked both ways nervously and ran in. I figured it was now or never…
“Well, the actual theater itself was plywooded off, but you could see through,” RobBob said. “It was all decrepid and decayed and really cool. But they had little sub-theaters, little movie booths that you go in, much like The Treasure Chest that used to be here [next to Blackstones]. … I was in there for five minutes, I got nervous and ran out. But I went in. I had to experience it and see what it was about.
“And then I discovered the cruising areas…”
•••
Cruising, in gay culture, means the same thing it means in straight culture: driving, riding, walking or hanging around a public place looking for a sexual partner. As human activities go, it’s as ancient as it gets, and surely precedes our species. There are arks’ worth of other earthly creatures that cruise, too, albeit with less bling.
The difference between gay and straight cruising is simple: there’s a lot of bigotry against gay people, so while straight cruising is considered harmless and charming, gay cruising is considered criminal. Even in a supposedly gay-friendly city like Portland, where an ordinance prohibiting cruising has been on the books since 1996, scores of men (gay and otherwise) have been sent warning letters and cited by police for cruising, uncountable thousands have been bullied by surly beat cops not to cruise, and traffic signs downtown and in surrounding neighborhoods warn residents and visitors by the million not to try it.
In his 2019 book Cruising: An intimate history of a radical pastime, novelist and University of California professor Alex Espinoza traces evidence of gay cruising back to Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, to homosexual hot spots of the Renaissance like Florence, into the backrooms and boulevards of 18th century London and Paris, through to the crumbling cities of our modern United States. Historically, the response of church and state has been to threaten, harass, humiliate, imprison and kill gay men seeking sex in public places.
“It is thus a testament to the act of survival that sodomy, cottaging, hooking up, or cruising continues now,” Espinoza wrote, “that it has evolved from the public baths of antiquity to the molly houses of London to parks and public restrooms across college campuses and major department stores, adult bookstores and porno theaters, rest stops and freeway underpasses. It happens, it continues to happen, because it simply can’t not happen. So urgent, so necessary is our desire to connect, to engage in this act of intimacy, that we would do almost anything for it, even risk exposure, arrest, our very lives in some parts of the world.”
•••
Gay cruising’s been a noticeable phenomenon in Portland since at least the 1960s, when it was common in Deering Oaks — “affectionately known as Pickle Park,” RobBob remarked. An old-timer there once told him fascinating stories about the Oaks’ cruising glory days.
“A lot of shrubbery would occasionally get taken down [by city parks workers],” RobBob said the guy told him decades ago, “because I guess that park used to be loaded with more trees, more shrubbery. And if one has to do something outside, you want shrubbery. You don’t want to do it out on the lawn where the kids are playing in a baseball field or on the playground. Nobody wants kids to be subjected to any outside entertainment of an adult theme. It’s not fun.”
The courageous gay porn author John Preston moved from Manhattan’s East Village to Portland in 1979 and discovered, to his delight, that “Gay life was much better than I’d remembered” during his forays into the Forest City in the ’60s. In an essay included in the collection Hometowns: Gay Men Write About Where They Belong, which he also edited, Preston continued:
“There used to be a bar on Cumberland Avenue with a dance floor in the rear. Whenever a policeman or an unknown visitor came into the front, the bartender would press a silent button that would make the lights in the back room flicker, a warning for all the same-sex couples to stop touching one another and sit down, so they wouldn’t be arrested.
“Now [at the dawn of the ’80s] there were more bars, much less circumspect. I found a Maine gay newspaper stacked in the entrance to one of the pubs. It wasn’t sophisticated, but it gave some hope that there was real political and cultural gay life in the city.”
Gay culture was taking its first tentative steps out of the shadows in this corner of the country, where waves of social change born in big cities always arrived a decade or two late. About 50 people participated in Portland’s first Gay Pride march and public celebration in 1987. “People were afraid,” Pride Portland! organizer James Melanson recalled during an interview with Maine Public in 2019. “One person who participated asked if he could cover his face because he was scared…”
The following year, Portland hired a tough-talking former drug cop and homicide detective from Philadelphia named Mike Chitwood to be its chief of police. “Media Mike,” as the pugnacious press-hound was nicknamed, soon embarked on what the Portland Press Herald characterized as a “moral crusade” against anyone he deemed to be having sex in the wrong ways, in the wrong places, or with the wrong people.
In the early and mid 1990s, Chief Chitwood sent undercover officers into sex shops and bookstores to buy dirty magazines and skin flicks, then turned over “evidence” deemed criminally offensive (such as movies depicting women in bondage or orgies) to the city’s attorney, resulting in fines and long legal battles. Undercover cops also busted Portland bars for hosting nude dancing (by women), while other plainclothes officers (also women) posed as prostitutes in Parkside to lure unsuspecting johns into handcuffs. In 1996 alone, the Portland police conducted 18 undercover prostitution stings, resulting in 24 arrests of alleged johns and eight arrests of alleged “real” prostitutes, the Herald reported the following year (data on convictions was not included in the article).
Chitwood also sent undercover cops into local businesses like Video Expo and the Fine Arts Theatre — two porno joints on Congress Street that outlasted the scene at the State — where patrons were reportedly exposing themselves, masturbating and hooking up, and made numerous arrests. Meanwhile, he cracked down on cruising in Deering Oaks and the Western Promenade, sending his armed officers to arrest gay men there for “indecent conduct.”
To Chitwood, the victimless gay crimes threatening to ruin Portland weren’t limited to activities gay men may engage in when they meet in a dark theater or a park. He wanted a law to intimidate and outlaw gay men desperately looking to meet someone.
Thus, in ’96, Portland criminalized “cruising,” vaguely defined in statute and on signs posted on the peninsula as driving — or allowing a vehicle under one’s “care, custody, or control” to be driven — “past a traffic control point three times within a two-hour period in this area.” The fine for a first offense is $100, it’s $300 for a second citation, and $500 for a third and any thereafter, plus the cost of “attorneys’ fees and all costs of prosecution” incurred by the city. The publication in the local paper of one’s name and arrest for cruising constituted an additional, unofficial punishment that for most “offenders” was way worse than any fine.
In an interview with the Press Herald in 1997, Chitwood blamed cruisers, strippers and prostitutes for the city’s decline, warning that their activities posed more of a threat than the most violent and destructive criminals among us. “It’s not the murderer, the rapist or the arsonist who destroys a neighborhood or a city,” Chitwood told the paper. “It’s the people who violate laws they feel there will be no consequences for. And then it snowballs out of control.”
•••
The anti-gay panic that gripped Portland in the ’90s did have a snowball effect, but the only people it crushed were gay men. Whether they cruised or not, their everyday activities — driving, taking a walk, taking a leak — became suspect, resulting in a pervasive feeling of repression in all sorts of public places.
A gay man in Portland we’ll call Adam, who commented on condition of anonymity for fear his small business may suffer if he speaks out, described his experiences back then.
“It was 93/94,” he wrote in a text to The Bollard. “New to the city and first time on my own. With not having many places to hang out during the day, especially in the winter months, I found that the library was a safe and warm place to be. The employees were less than kind and I had to either have my face in a book or on a computer. This became a nightmare after a while as I felt constantly monitored. It was when I occasionally used the men’s restroom that things got really weird.
“Almost every time I used the restroom I was followed in by security,” Adam continued. “Even more cringe-worthy, they would stand behind me while I stood at the urinal. I once turned and asked what the problem was and they replied, ‘We have every right to monitor the suspicious activities that go on in here!’ I felt as if just being a young gay man I automatically didn’t have basic human rights.
“This also happened in the warmer months whilst enjoying the views on both promenades,” Adam added. “Never mind walking through Deering Oaks.”
“I have been arrested [twice] for being up on the Western Promenade in the past and had to pay a $139.00 [fine] for both ‘offenses,’ as the USM Law School told me, ‘We don’t know if the judge will throw you in jail or not [if you don’t pay],’” wrote Ashley Lenartson, an outsider- pop music producer and singer-songwriter in Portland.
“So, I’m being thrown in jail for being myself,” Lenartson continued in an e-mail to The Bollard. “Did the Police bother to ask me what my sexuality is??? Not a chance, as then they’d risk being sued. Do heterosexuals get arrested when they get caught after 10 p.m. by the Police? No, the Police just warn them and let them go.”
Chitwood’s crusade did succeed in reducing cruising in the Oaks and along the Western Prom, where most of the homes are historic mansions. But, by his own admission, this only pushed the activity to other parts of Portland, including the Eastern Promenade and outer Congress Street, where it was less noticeable to blue bloods but more dangerous for those involved. “Chitwood said there have been few complaints from residents, most likely because no one lives close to the [new] cruising areas,” the Press Herald reported in 1997.
The chief’s dozens of prostitution stings had the same effect. Noting that Portland had been trying to eradicate hooking in the Oaks and Parkside since the 1970s, Chitwood told the paper in ’97, “it’s been going on here on the streets for at least 20 years, and in 20 years we have managed to move it six blocks.”
“Despite the mixed results, Chitwood said the efforts are worthwhile and will continue,” the paper wrote in reference to both the cruising and prostitution crackdowns. “He says the police involvement helps prevent the behavior from expanding” — despite the fact that, again by Chitwood’s admission, cruising spread, expanding into more neighborhoods, in response to police involvement.
The obvious absurdity and futility of these Keystone Kop operations suggests their real purpose was less about apprehending sex criminals and more about causing apprehension in the minds of lonely and repressed people compelled by homophobia to seek sex in the streets and toilet stalls.
•••
It seemed harmless to most straights at the time, but Portland’s anti-cruising crackdown may have shattered lives even before the law was passed. For several years preceding the 1996 ordinance, undercover cops and residents of Parkside and the Western Prom surveilled “suspicious cars” being driven around those neighborhoods, recording their license plate numbers. The police department then sent letters, signed by Chitwood, to the registered owners of those vehicles [see sidebar, “Honey, you’ve got mail!” at the end of this post for the full text].
“The letters from police don’t mention cruising,” the Press Herald falsely reported in 1995 (in fact, it’s mentioned twice). About 50 letters were sent in late 1993, and nine more had recently been mailed when that 1995 article was published. Tellingly, only one of those nine letters was sent to a Portland address. The rest were mailed to vehicle owners in Biddeford, Gorham, Old Orchard Beach (which had its own anti-cruising law), Westbrook, Falmouth and Augusta.
One politely worded letter — no big deal, right? Until you consider why someone from another town may have been driving around Portland looking an intimate partner on the sly.
Most of the cruisers behind the wheels were closeted gay men, typically older and wealthier than the objects of their desire. Unless they just so happened to be the one who took the envelope from the Portland Police Department out of the mailbox that day, the secret of their sexuality could have been exposed to their spouse or partner or parents or siblings or kids or whomever, with terrible consequences for their life, work and reputation. If they weren’t driving their own vehicle, the warning letter wouldn’t even be addressed to them.
Shaming and intimidating gay men was, and still is, the intent and result of Portland’s anti-cruising ordinance. Although citations have been rare this century, the signs remain, like artifacts from a benighted civilization left lying around for moderns to ponder. To gay men in the know, however, the message remains clear: Your kind are not welcome to look for love around here. Police are on the lookout for you, and you will be arrested and exposed if you dare drive by this sign one too many times within two hours. You are hereby officially warned.
•••
After the last porno screened at the State, RobBob and his young gay friends explored the cruising scene at the Oaks, which was already dying out due to police harassment. “We caught the last two years of it, basically,” he said.
The action had moved to the Western Prom, as had the cops. RobBob said he was parked on the Prom eating lunch in his car one afternoon when police confronted him: “What are you doing here? You know cruising goes on in this area?”
“I’m like, ‘Eating my Burger King.’ Whatever. I knew what went on there,” he told me.
Eventually, said RobBob, “I got my bravery up to go up there” and actually cruise. He made sure to tell a friend where he was going, in case he didn’t come back.
“I was twenty-two,” he recalled. “I parked like two streets over in my Fort Escort, because I had heard [it was risky to park closer]. … I walked down there. I knew where the trail was, because my friend told me it’s right across from the cemetery, right where the opening opens up. … And you’d walk and you would see a shadow in the distance. … It was dusk, when the sun went down. I had a strict rule: I’m not going up there too late in the night, because occasionally you would have people getting attacked up there, getting gay-bashed.
“Anyway, I was nervous. I was always looking around,” he continued. “And even that first time, when I hooked up with this gentleman — I’m not gonna say what activities we did. It was very brief. But I was too nervous. I kept hearing, ‘Relax, relax.’ I’m like, ‘Can we go somewhere? … Let’s just rent a room and we can do this.’ We went elsewhere.”
RobBob didn’t cruise the Prom often, and when he did, he’d typically meet a stranger there and then go behind closed doors to continue the encounter. There were some dangerous and repulsive cruisers, and details about them were shared through the gay grapevine in bars like Blackstones, The Underground and Somewhere. But most of the men driving around looking for sex were harmless, older and closeted, said RobBob. They cruised because pervasive and legal anti-gay discrimination prevented them from being their true selves everywhere else.
One day RobBob was walking a friend’s dog on the Western Prom when a man caught his eye and they struck up a conversation that led to a hook-up. “Of course, he didn’t give me his real name, nor did I care,” said RobBob. Some days or weeks later, “I saw him walking with a stroller and what looked like his wife down Congress Street. I recognized him immediately. I wasn’t about to go, ‘Oh, hi! How are you?’ So I just walked by, and you saw the look of dread in his face. And he’s looking at his wife. I just said, ‘Hi, folks. How are you doing?’ I was twenty-three, twenty-four, so I was all nervous anyway. He was about forty.”
“It’s something that you don’t forget,” RobBob said of his cruising days. “And it was fun and exciting for younger people. … With me, it was a meeting place, more or less, like a bar or anything else.”
Back then, both parties had good reasons to remain anonymous. “For a lot of my friends in the gay bar, you would never hook up in front of your friends or anybody, because everybody would talk about this and who you were,” RobBob said. “But for a lot of the older guys that were cruising younger guys, anonymity was so important. We were in our twenties. We were like, ‘It’s great to be gay!’ They didn’t want that. They gave you a fake name, more of less. And they had a wife or even another boyfriend at home. Who knows? The situations were so varied.”
Although he was already out in his early 20s, RobBob didn’t want to be known as a cruiser. “You don’t want a scandal like that,” he said. “You know, ‘Oh, where’d you meet?’ Not the grocery store. ‘We met up on the Promenade.’”
Plus, he had the same gut-level fear any “civilized” human has of being caught in flagrante delicto, and he didn’t want to freak anyone out. “I was careful when I went up there,” he said. “I was nervous because I didn’t want to get caught by some old lady walking her dog and seeing two guys having a fun time in the bushes.”
Not all his gay friends were so circumspect. “A lot of the younger ones that were friends of mine were just sluts,” RobBob said. “I had some brave friends that would just do it willy-nilly all over the [Western] Cemetery, in the bushes. … Those bushes were rustling!” None of his close friends got busted, “but you’d always hear of somebody that got busted,” he said. “And when they got busted, they were busted because they were literally parading around and doing it right on the lawn.”
Cruising, by definition, is neither prostitution nor soliciting the same, because no money is exchanged, but RobBob said a few of the frequent flyers on the Prom were out trying to make a buck.
When the signs went up in ’96, RobBob said he and his friends didn’t feel any more threatened or targeted than they had before. One buddy, a gay man named Larry who was offended by the signs, “adopted” one and hung it in his bathroom for laughs. But the warnings did dissuade most of them from cruising the Western Prom — at least for awhile.
The rise of The Internet, with its vast oceans of free porn, chat rooms, webcams, dating sites and apps, changed the practice of cruising in significant ways. Gay cruising still thrives in Portland and many, many other places in Maine, but these days it’s less necessary as a means to meet men, and if one does cruise, it’s much less necessary to drive around neighborhoods for hours looking for action — the activity that prompted Portland’s ban.
Search the Web for, say, “gay cruising portland maine” and you’ll get an eyeful of the sprawling underground network operating beneath the notice of mainstream society. Numerous websites and apps offer free lists and databases of cruising locations, with updates by users (sometimes posted in real time) regarding what days and times of day or night the spots are most active, what the police or private security situation is like, and other helpful tips.
The site sniffies.com lists dozens of spots in and around Portland: walking trails and parks (including the Western Prom, still fairly active as of this winter), rest stops and park-and-rides, restrooms in hotels, department stores, fitness clubs, the Jetport, the University of Southern Maine, and on and on. Another site lists 69 Maine towns and cities (Buxton, Calais, China … Lisbon Falls, Millinocket, Newcastle … Wells, West Bath, West Paris…), and details about specific spots are just a click away.
A people’s history of law enforcement against cruisers can also be read in these posts. From August of 2005, on a page for the Western Prom: “Be really careful along the promenade. The cops are cracking down on cruising.” From the day after Christmas, 2001: “Be discreet, particularly on the Western Prom. The prude police chief often causes trouble there, sending his officers over to hassle gay boys.”
On the site CRUISING for SEX, there’s this post from the summer of 2009: “There is no more cruising on the Western Prom but the Eastern Prom is cruisey at night. Go to the park at the very end of the Eastern Prom. Cars park at night there and during good weather the guys leave the cars and go down the hill towards the highway to fuck in the tall grass. I have been here several times and always left satisfied. Not a large crowd and be mindful of cops and straight couples who come up here to fool around, too.”
Chitwood left Portland in 2005 to run the police chiefdom in Upper Darby, a big township west of Philly. “Chitwood was a favorite figure of the media and often controversial,” the feel-good community news site DELCO Today reported when he retired in 2019, “known for his tough talk and his references to suspects as ‘scumbags’ and ‘bums.’”
•••
Is this a law that still reflects the City of Portland’s values? If not, can we finally take it off the books?
The short answers are, respectively, no and hell yes! The Bollard’s questioning of the law in the course of our reporting for this story seems likely to result in its repeal this year. The forces behind the anti-cruising campaign of the Clinton Era — neighbors, law enforcers and city councilors — not only no longer support it; they recognize it was a product of fears and prejudices that are neither valid nor defensible in 2024, assuming they ever were (they were not).
As deputy chief of police under Chitwood in the 1990s, Mark Dion helped craft, implement, enforce and defend Portland’s anti-cruising law against critics and in the press. He went on to become the sheriff of Cumberland County, then a state lawmaker and Portland city councilor. He was elected Mayor of Portland last fall.
“Time heals all fears,” Dion said during an interview last month over breakfast at Other Side Diner in East Deering. “We were afraid, collectively, of what that activity meant. And so the ordinance may appear to have been rational and reasonable to many at the time, but I think our understanding of community has shifted in terms of who makes up Portland, what’s in play.”
Dion rationalized the law back then in part because cruising was dangerous for gay men. He would know: he was “gay-bashed” on the Western Prom himself.
“I was a decoy one night and got assaulted by a couple young men,” Dion recalled, “because they thought — well, I looked gay. I was wearing khakis and a golf shirt, walking about. Then I sat on a bench, and during the assault one of them said, ‘Oh fuck, this is Dion!’ So it was very confusing for them.”
“I assume that ended badly for them,” I remarked of his attackers.
“It ended badly for them,” Mayor Dion replied. “I mean, I wasn’t hurt, but I was jostled around. It was definitely supposed to be a transaction of intimidation. I placed myself in that space. Other men don’t choose to be placed in that kind of context. So I can see, you know, the threat that it posed to them.”
I asked Dion whether, in hindsight, he can also see how damaging his department’s letter-writing campaign may have been to closeted cruisers. “Looking back, it probably should have been more fully considered,” he acknowledged. “Because I know in my household, it’s just as likely that my wife will open a piece of mail for me.”
“Twenty-six years later, it looks like the law, and the problem it was intended to address, has evaporated,” said Dion. He intends to ask the Council’s Health & Human Services & Public Safety Committee to consider the ordinance’s repeal this year, a process that would provide opportunities for public comment. Once it reaches the Council for a final vote, Dion thinks he knows what his decision will be.
Cruising control is “not an issue that lines up with what we would expect from law enforcement,” he said. “I’m a firm believer that if you want citizens to respect the law, then have laws that respect the reality of being a citizen. … So, should the [anti-cruising] law continue to exist? I don’t think so.”
City Councilor Victoria Pelletier is a member of the Public Safety Committee and her Council district includes the West End and Parkside, where most of the anti-cruising signs are posted (they subsequently went up in the East End, too, when once dangerous and malodorous Munjoy Hill gentrified).
“As a Black and queer woman this law is offensive and is also intertwined with redlining here in Portland, where we have the highest number of people of color concentrated into specific areas of the peninsula,” Pelletier wrote in an e-mail to The Bollard. “It’s all by design, and parts of this city remain segregated, so the placement of the ‘no cruising’ signs are also particularly specific.”
Last December, the new Council “again” made racial equality a top goal of their work this year, “so I would *hope* that this would include getting rid of the ordinance and the signs in addition to a multitude of other things we can and should be doing to support and protect our LGBTQIA+ community,” she added.
Some elected officials elsewhere have already repealed their cruising bans, many of which were both homophobic and racist in intent. In Cruising, Espinoza reports that the Los Angeles City Council unanimously voted to remove anti-cruising signs in 2011, “claiming them to be pointless and offensive,” he wrote. In L.A. and other parts of California, the bans were also used to suppress Latino lowrider cruising culture. No más. A state law that took effect last month repeals all anti-cruising ordinances in California and bars municipalities from enacting such laws in the future.
Gia Drew, Executive Director of EqualityMaine, expressed concern about Portland’s anti-cruising ordinance during an interview last month, questioning whether it’s been enforced “fairly,” but was not prepared to call for its repeal, pending more information about its enforcement and discussions with community members affected by the law.
The ongoing need to cruise for sex, however, is apparent to Drew. “There just isn’t a lot of safe places to go,” she said. “There’s still a lot of bias and discrimination in many communities about being in a relationship with a man if you’re a man. … I think people still don’t like to see men in love with men or being intimate with other men. There’s a lot of conservative energy and anti-gayness out there. It drives people to go to other places to seek intimacy.”
Neighborhood groups on the peninsula were instrumental in getting Portland’s anti-cruising law passed. Leaders of the neighborhood associations in Parkside and Munjoy Hill did not respond to requests for comment.
Former Portland Mayor Anne Pringle, a longtime leader of the Western Promenade Neighborhood Association and Friends of Deering Oaks, was heavily involved in efforts to reduce cruising back in the day. “I just noticed cruising signs a couple of weeks ago,” Pringle said during a phone interview last month. “I said, ‘Oh my god, those are still up?’”
“Personally, I don’t think there would be a problem now if it were eliminated,” Pringle said of the cruising ban. “It was a different time,” she said of the ’90s.
Back then, Pringle said, she reached out privately to leaders in the gay community to assure them the anti-cruising campaign wasn’t hateful or homophobic, but rather a matter of public safety and peaceful neighborhoods. While that behind-the-scenes diplomacy was progressing, Chief Chitwood conducted another big, showy cruising sweep. The high-profile busts certainly didn’t help build trust, Pringle recalled. But neither did they spark any significant opposition to the law.
Bruce Balboni, then an editor with the Community Pride Reporter, was one of the few people in 1990s Maine willing to defend cruising. In a 1996 Casco Bay Weekly cover story about the crackdown, Al Diamon (now a Bollard columnist) quoted a commentary Balboni penned titled “Reopen Deering Oaks to gay cruising.”
“Gay cruising is a part of our community, a part of who we are, whether you engage in it or not,” Balboni wrote at the time. “Cruising should be accommodated and protected … and, I believe, celebrated.”
Reached for comment last month, Balboni wrote via social media, “this type of declaring certain behavior as indecent has no place in a modern, gay-friendly city like Portland, Maine. Enforcement of this ordinance is equal to targeted, homophobic conduct similar to that which ignited the Stonewall riots in 1969, giving birth to the LGBTQ movement for equality before the law. … The ordinance reeks of subjective enforcement and the targeting of specific individuals and should be repealed ASAP.”
“The Anti-Cruising Ordinance needs to be repealed, as it makes Portland, Maine look like a homophobic city,” wrote Lenartson, who launched a since-aborted online petition campaign to repeal the law years ago. “Who wants to visit a city that is homophobic?”
“If I were a Portland resident, I’d be advocating that it’s long past time for the City to repeal it,” wrote Cumberland County District Attorney Jackie Sartoris via e-mail. Sartoris has only been D.A. since last year, and her office enforces state law, not local ordinances, so her involvement and influence over anti-cruising enforcement is minimal.
That said, she wrote, “in my view [the cruising ban] clearly reflects prejudices which I hope we have outgrown. I say ‘hope’ because I experience, as I know do many concerned Mainers, that the current political climate is again targeting those identified as the ‘other’ by the far right. But while the voices are very loud, these are a small number of people. The vast majority of Mainers believe in community, tolerance, and minding our own business.”
Steven Scharf, President of the West End Neighborhood Association, worked for years back in the day promoting gay tourism through mailing lists and printed guides to gay-friendly businesses, called Fun Maps, that he distributed in bars and cafes.
“I’ve never been one to do cruising; it’s just not my thing,” Scharf said. When he moved back to Maine in 2000, the signs were already all over town. “I know I saw the signs at one point and I said to myself, If I’m driving around the block looking for a parking space, could somebody report me?”
But Scharf doesn’t see the law as a problem anymore. “Quite frankly, I don’t see it as being used to target gay men at this point,” he said. “I think at this point the law is probably anachronistic, in that … gay men don’t cruise the streets to the extent that I would have thought it would happen in the past.” But he added, “I don’t see the point in bothering to repeal it. We’ve got lots of laws on the books that don’t make sense anymore. Just repealing this on its own makes no sense. There are more important things to do in the city than worry about this.”
The only “real problem” Scharf is aware of regarding cruising in his neighborhood happens at the crooked confluence of Congress, Mellen and Walker streets, where sex workers have stood around for over half a century, and “I don’t think the cruising law is being used to enforce that,” he said.
In fact, it has been used by Portland police to try to reduce prostitution there and elsewhere on the peninsula, as well as to prosecute crimes unrelated to sex. The Portland Police Department searched its records and found 10 “unlawful cruising citations.” “All of these violations are the result of solicitation of prostitution enforcement,” new Chief Mark Dubois reported in a memo Dion provided to The Bollard.
“Discussing the history of enforcement with Acting Assistant Chief [Robert] Martin,” Dubois wrote, “he recalled the original intent was to address prostitution from males soliciting. It was not specifically designed to target homosexual males.” (A modest mountain of contemporaneous press coverage suggests otherwise, as does the blunt fact that soliciting was already illegal.)
“This ordinance has also been useful for officers in our Crime Reduction Unit (CRU) in investigating illegal drug sales,” the chief’s memo noted, but it contained no other details regarding the law’s deployment in the Drug War by this CRU.
Anti-cruising laws are a prime example of compounded oppression: forced by discrimination to seek intimate contact in marginal spaces, cruisers are then hounded and harassed when they’re caught in those spaces. Small wonder, then, that this rat trap is resisted. Celebration is in order — after all, the resistance is winning this war.
At the beginning of his book, Espinoza — himself a cruiser in his younger days, as was Preston, who passed in ’94 — includes a quote from John Rechy’s book documenting cruising in L.A., The Sexual Outlaw: “The promiscuous homosexual is a sexual revolutionary. Each movement of his outlaw existence he confronts repressive laws, repressive ‘morality.’ Parks, alleys, subway tunnels, garages, streets — these are the battlefields.”
“We are doing something we know is illegal and subversive,” Espinoza wrote to conclude Cruising, which is also part memoir. “The act itself is a protest, an uprising. Cruisers are renegade outlaws. And like all revolutionaries, we move between the light and dark, our lives forever tethered to one another.
“As it always has been.
“As it always will be.”
Honey, you’ve got mail!
Here’s the full text of the letter the Portland Police Department mailed to the registered owners of vehicles seen driving in the West End in the 1990s, first published in the Portland Press Herald.
I am writing to ask for your support and understanding. The residential neighborhood surrounding the Western Promenade has become saturated with motor vehicles at night, the drivers of which cruise area streets for hours at a time. This activity leaves the neighbors feeling unsafe.
On selected nights, plainclothes officers patrol these streets in an effort to identify those vehicles that constantly cruise the area of the Western Promenade with no apparent destination.
On (DAY AND TIME), a (TYPE OF CAR), with license plate (STATE AND NUMBER) was observed by officers at (TIME). Bureau of Motor Vehicles records indicate the vehicle is registered to you. The vehicle was seen repeatedly driving through the area of the Western Promenade. I hope that your vehicle was not seen spending an extended period of time in this neighborhood for reasons that impinge on the safety and security of residents.
By bringing this matter to your attention, my hope is that you will take whatever steps are necessary to help the people of the Western Promenade recapture the tranquility of their neighborhood.
Thank you again for your support and understanding.
Sincerely,
Michael J. Chitwood
Chief of Police
