Yes U-Turn

One of the weirder stories of this year’s slightly more muted Pride Month was the proud announcement that two “No U-Turn” signs in the posh, artsy, gentrified Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles had been taken down to fight historical homophobia.

NBC News in Los Angeles has a fuller story, although it might be even funnier:

Why Silver Lake took down a couple of No U-turn signs from 1990s

Officials said the traffic signs were the remnants of anti-LGBTQ policies from the past.

By Helen Jeong • Published June 10, 2024

Street signs that officials said previously targeted LGBTQ community members were taken down from a Silver Lake neighborhood Monday.

The signs that read “No Cruising” and prohibited U-turns were installed in 1997 when neighbors complained about gay men hanging out and looking for dates in certain residential areas close to popular gay bars.

While the “No Cruising” signs were removed after the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council voted to dismantle them in 2011, some of the no U-turn signs remained. …

“The podcast mentioned that there had been “No Cruising” signs along Hyperion that had been removed in 2011, but that nine signs still remained on Griffith Park Boulevard,” [L.A. city councilwoman Nithya] Raman explained. …

After months of “bureaucratic process,” Raman said she collaborated with the office of Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez, who oversees other parts of Silver Lake, to remove the final signs.

“For me, growing up in South Central Los Angeles, cruising had a very different meaning. It usually meant folks in their lowriders or their cars, a lot of hip-hop music, just going up down Crenshaw Boulevard,” Soto-Martinez said.

In other words, “Fellow Latino voters, as your city city councilman, trust me, I didn’t have a clue what ‘cruising’ meant. I thought it was when Mexican dudes in lowriders checked out la chicas on Saturday nights on Hollywood Boulevard in the 1980s. After all, I’m totally straight.”

“But here in Silver Lake, cruising, of course, meant something very different. It meant an opportunity for the LGBT community to try to find human connection and intimacy and to be able to express themselves in a society at the time that was not very welcoming to the LGBT community.”

Try to imagine how unprogressive Silver Lake was in 1997!

Soto-Martinez explained that eliminating the remnants of discrimination was the right step forward when there are escalated attacks against LGBTQ community.

“The last two no U-Turn signs remind us of that troubled past that we have here in this neighborhood,” he said.

In reality, Silver Lake, which has the most celebrated modernist architecture in Los Angeles (lots of Schindlers, Neutras, and Lautners), has been a gay center since the 1930s. But even Silver Lake homeowners, often gay themselves, got sick of all the gay cruising. Wikipedia reports:

Beginning in the 1970s, the neighborhood became the nexus of Los Angeles' gay leather subculture, similar to the SoMA neighborhood in San Francisco. Since the late 1990s, gentrification has changed the area by pushing out public sex and "gay cruising" and facilitating the opening of many independent upscale boutiques, coffee shops, fitness studios, and restaurants.

I recall driving Griffith Park Boulevard over the top of the mountain in Griffith Park on a Saturday morning in April 1996 to get to the Harding golf course (I shot an 87). To my astonishment, at around 9:30 am, the entire winding mountain road for a couple of miles was lined by bumper-to-bumper parked cars with one visible man sitting in each while other men slowly drove past eyeballing them.

The colossal scale of this anonymous gay sex meet-up nuisance was staggering to naive me, even almost a decade and a half into the AIDS crisis that gays had inflicted upon themselves.

While the mainstream media coverage in 2024 of the horrors of local citizens back then trying to organize to escape living in a giant outdoor bathhouse was triumphant, the Los Angeles Times’ reporting back when it was happening before Grindr was more measured:

Neighbors Tackle Gay Cruising

By BETTINA BOXALL

AUG. 27, 1997 12 AM

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Soon after moving to Silver Lake last year, Keith Farr realized the daytime serenity of his neighborhood was deceptive. Once he awoke to the sounds of police making an arrest in his yard. Another night, he came home to find two men engaged in sex on the stairs to his second-floor duplex.

At 2 or 3 a.m. on the weekend his street was as noisy as an airport terminal during the holidays, rowdy with men driving back and forth, hanging out on the sidewalks. They were there to meet and flirt, to party and take drugs, and to have sex--in cars and sideyards, and, as Farr discovered, occasionally even on a front stoop.

In the enduring subculture of men cruising for sex with other men, a few pleasant residential blocks of Griffith Park Boulevard had become hot. A nearby sex club had drawn crowds, as did the boulevard’s mention in gay guides.

“In no way am I a moralist, but it would be embarrassing,” said one exasperated condo owner who regularly got an eyeful from his third floor balcony. “I’d have guests over and guys would be having sex” in the bushes below.

Weary of seeing more than they cared to in the shrubbery, of being propositioned on the street, of having to clean up used condoms, residents demanded that something be done. A police crackdown ensued, largely quieting the scene--but also stirring dissension and complaints that authorities overreacted. …

Others, like the gay condo owner, groused that the matter was unfairly being turned into a gay-rights rallying cry. “It’s not a gay issue. It’s a quality of life issue,” he stressed. “The gay activists are saying our rights are being trampled. Eh, eh. The police did it in a gay-friendly manner.” Reflecting just how sensitive the matter became, he did not want his full name printed out of fear he would be harassed.

The cruisers have all but disappeared, but controversy lingers over “No cruising” and “No U-turn” signs placed on the boulevard at the beginning of the year. Many in the neighborhood say they have been effective. Others contend that the signs, which forbid more than two trips past the same spot in six hours, are illegal because the city’s anti-cruising ordinance was designed to control a quite different situation: that of teenage low-riders rumbling down the boulevards.

For a long time, Silver Lake was the front between the Mexican barrio on the flats south of Sunset Blvd., home to gay-bashing juvenile delinquents, and the upscale white and very gay hills. Even in the early 2000s, trendy restaurants were only found on the north side of Sunset. Since then, though, gentrification has pushed well south of Sunset.

Gay men, of course, tend to be the shock troops of gentrification. They are attracted to neighborhoods with fine old-time architecture where they fix up the homes and flip them to families for a lot of money, driving out the nonwhite residents.

It doesn’t matter to Farr any more. Disenchanted with community bickering as well as the police, he moved to the Bay Area in June.

The flare-up in gay-friendly Silver Lake raised delicate questions about community values. But it also has broader dimensions: Once again, complaints were voiced about enforcement of lewd conduct laws, an issue with a long history. And beyond that, the controversy spotlighted the centuries-old culture--disgusting to some, thrilling to others--of gay men who are drawn to sexual adventure outside the bedroom.

Certainly the cruising scene provides ample opportunity for run-ins with police. The stigmatization of homosexuality may be fading and the laws that kept gay relations furtive and criminal may be long gone in states like California, but for some, the appeal of quick, anonymous encounters remains.

Now, there is even an Internet site that offers an extensive, constantly updated listing of sex cruising spots across the country. “It is the most useful page I have ever encountered on the Web,” one site user enthused.

The Southern California section goes on for pages, detailing scores of parks, public restrooms and adult bookstores where men can find public sex--from the bathrooms at Venice Beach and Orange County department stores to the bushes of San Fernando Valley parks and Long Beach parking lots.

Some who frequent these spots are married or deeply closeted, unwilling to engage in conventional ways of meeting other men. Some are sexual compulsives. And some simply enjoy sexual activity with strangers. …

Even for the unmarried, cruising defies a simplistic explanation. “It implies they’re making this conscious decision and ignoring the law,” said Beverly Hills psychologist Brian Gold. “These are people who are often bright, very successful, very well educated, but for a whole complex of reasons are struggling with ways to connect with people.”

Although Los Angeles psychologist and veteran gay activist Donald Kilhefner believes a desire for quick anonymous encounters can be a healthy sexual expression, he said many of the men he has treated are involved in “compulsive, addictive sexual behavior” that is often tied to shame about their sexuality. “It really is something they can’t stop.”

At the same time, Kilhefner suggests there is a broader cultural dimension at work. To the extent society defines homosexuality by sex acts, that can become a self-fulfilling identity. Gays are “going to play out the roles that are ascribed to them,” he observed.

Yet that explanation stumbles over the lack of a comparable lesbian cruising scene. “I think it has to do with male sexual expression rather than exclusively male homosexual expression,” Gold said. “I think heterosexual men probably would [cruise] if women were responsive to it.”

Can you imagine a Los Angeles Times reporter pointing out a logical flaw in gay conventional wisdom in 2024 by citing a Steve Sailer-like why-lesbians-aren’t-gay type argument?

… “A lot of gay guys are part of gay culture because they don’t want to be locked into the bonding thing,” said American University anthropology professor William Leap, who is editing a book on public sex. They don’t want to adopt heterosexual conventions such as monogamy, and “one way of expressing that resistance is having a lot of sexual partners in different locations.”

As Orwell said:

“‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’”