Loading ...- Category:
- Soap Box
- Author:
- Andrew M Potts
- Posted:
- Wednesday, 19 November 2008
CAAH’s vigil over the weekend defending beat users from police patrols couldn’t have had stranger timing, coming less than two months after a youth was convicted of the stabbing death of disabled man Gerard Fleming at another beat in Sydney’s north.
Others will question the wisdom of CAAH not only naming the location but trying to get mainstream press interested as well.
Living just three blocks away, I’m quite familiar with the park being fussed over this time. Last year I was mugged walking past it, so you’ll forgive me if I’m quite keen on police patrolling it. Because it’s listed on the internet, lost and lonely beat users unfamiliar with the area sometimes congregate in the much smaller park outside my house.
Unless you’re homeless, there is no legitimate reason to be loitering in a park in the middle of the night. If police break the law when dealing with you then complain to the proper authorities, but don’t expect them to be happy to see you -” particularly if you’re arguing the point.
On top of the gay-bashers and muggers beats inevitably attract, I’ve also met young men who’ve been raped at them.
If police stay away then who will you run to for help?
People who live in the vicinity of the park or have to put up with the detritus of beat use during the day have every right to complain -” let’s not forget this beat is located less than 15 minutes walk from a legal sex-on-premises venue, as are many others in this town.
The claim that inner city beats are mostly used by closeted or bisexual men is a lie. I know it’s a lie because I know
people who use them, and criticising beats always draws a flurry of defensive letters from proudly gay men. If it wasn’t the case, then why are there fewer and fewer of them the further you go from the city centre?
Inevitably when beat users monopolise public spaces, councils and businesses lock them off or close them down -” then nobody gets to use them.
Don’t get me wrong, beat sex isn’t evil or some existential sin -” just lazy, selfish and disrespectful to others.
At the end of the day, beats are nothing more than a sad anachronism from the age of criminalisation. Perhaps there’s an excuse if you live in the country or on the far fringes of the city, but we should no more celebrate them than European Jews would romanticise having to hide in attics during World War II.
The more we all start acting like we’re a part of society, the smaller the chances of those sorts of dark days ever returning. Stop acting like a bunch of horny teenagers and get a room.
Tags: Andrew Potts, beats, CAAH, gERARD fLEMING
November 23rd, 2008 @ 3:26 pm
“Stop acting like a bunch of horny teenagers and get a room” – I agree, also want to say that its your coloumn I enjoy the most in the website! – Keep up the GREAT work!
November 24th, 2008 @ 3:50 pm
Mr Potts, I feel it is my duty as an obviously much more comfortable gay man than your ‘restricted along with the straigh collective’ self to clearly advise you of the choices a gay man is allowed to make in our world. I am pretty sure at 40 years old that I have come to accept many people’s choices whether I like them or not, this is called acceptance, as we broad minded gay people know that tolerance is not enough. Keeping things behind closed doors is ‘tolerable’ to say the least, closeted and hidden to be completely honest. As through human history, many straight sexual practises have been publicly displayed and on show and our ‘beats’ having this derogatrory name is now known to be due to hate and discust of our sexual practises, all be it publicly. Whether we sexually play behind a tree or ‘in a room’ does not stop many still finding discust in our choices, so in knowing this, we must deliver any forms of sexuality in an open and comfortable manner…not caring about the sexually frigid or immature that continually try to stop anything comfortably sexual, be it gay, straight or of one of the many varied spices of sexual life that exist and has always existed in our human world.
Yours sincerely,
A Comfortable Gay Person (finally, after all of these wasted years on the uncomfortable one’s attitudes…and there are many)
November 24th, 2008 @ 10:27 pm
Hi Elliot, glad you enjoy it- thanks for the feedback!
Peter Mazey- so long as consenting adults are involved and they’re not placing themselves at risk of harm, I don’t pass judgement on what people get up to sexually, whether there’s money involved, how long they’ve known each other, or how many partners might be involved. If beat users were having sex outdoors on private property and it was out of sight of neighbouring properties I would be totally fine with that.
However, the issue here is precisely one of consent. When public spaces and facilities are monopolised for sex, members of the public have their ability to give consent before seeing or hearing that behavior taken away. They have every right to object to beat sex in the same way that they have no right to object to nudity at a legal nude beach, or sex and violence on the screen if they’ve bought a ticket for an R rated movie.
Heterosexuals merely not wanting to encounter gay men having sex is no more homophobic than my not wanting to encounter heterosexuals having sex is heterophobic. Crying homophobia for that alone not only demeans the word but risks making it meaningless.
November 26th, 2008 @ 6:40 pm
ok Andrew consent for use of the space is a valid point, but only that, a point and I am still not sure how you got money or group sex out of my comment (maybe just another tactic still attempting to prove how ‘filthy’ beats are, using the worst case scenarios…sounding a bit like a politician). We humans must remember with the reality of too many liars (with a hidden agenda) in life masking themselves as ‘do-gooders’, we need to also realise how easy it is to lose human freedoms amongst control groups or power freaks who will most of the time make their reasons sound legal, logical and rational. These tactics are used by governments, politicians, religious groups and many other cruel and inhumane structures who attempt to control and minimilise our human experience…whether it sounds legal, logical and rational, at the current state of many losing their freedoms through so called ‘law’, including 2am lockouts for half of the gay bars in Sydney (with 3 out of the 4 originally selected being gay venues, throwing in one straight one for good measure and no confirmation on the stats they are using for this outcome), beats being targeted and so on, you don’t see a possible ‘gay hate’ picture here, at all, possibly? Let’s not get caught in being held by headlock with intelligent words such as propeganda, when there is always the definite reality of hidden agendas. Don’t let them fool you or you attempt to fool others with their possible fascade…I made my conservative mother read a book on hidden agendas and she is still to this day horrified and refuses to believe, like many others, the way humans misuse and abuse having hidden agendas.
November 27th, 2008 @ 8:51 am
Peter I mentioned people who pay for sex and people who engage in group sex in private as things that I could care less about in comparison to beats as you implied in your post that people in the gay community who oppose beats had hang ups about sex or were dour moralising puritans of some description.
There are valid questions to be asked about how venues were chosen for the lock outs (which by the way I oppose) but there’s nothing to link that to police patrols at beats in other commands- so to answer your question, no, I don’t see any ‘gay hate’ picture here.
December 10th, 2008 @ 10:50 am
I think police craking down on beat use should go hand in hand with the police craking down of drug use at dance parties.
After all they are BOTH illigal.