San Francisco park experiences gay cruising renaissance – SFGATE

Running parallel to those public-facing elements of LGBTQ culture in San Francisco are traditions like cruising — seeking out public places frequented by queer people looking for consensual sex from suitors, usually afforded by way of a reciprocated gaze and gesture. The history of cruising dates back to the 1810s in England, but it wasn’t until the 1960s that cruising had its hyperlocal bloom as SF became the gay capital of America. 

Ever since then, Buena Vista Park — the 37-acre park that was established in 1867, first as “Hill Park ” — has been one of the most notable locales to find a discrete public sex partner. It’s been a well-known historical landmark, whose reputation has carried forth into the digital age via the queer cruising app Sniffies, which launched in 2018 and now has millions of users. The app’s geolocation data shows that the elevated green space is one of the most frequented cruising spots in San Francisco; one description calls Buena Vista Park “the most notorious cruising park in SF.”

On any given day, dozens of — sometimes, over a hundred-plus — Sniffies users visit the park. The area’s “wall,” which serves as a community forum for people to post, is always filled with posts from people looking to meet up in and around the park; many users state that the park serves as a “warmup” for sexual acts that, say, require a room with well-fastened wall hooks.

Local gyms, like the Fitness SF location in the Castro and Equinox’s Sports Club San Francisco gym off Market Street, are also popular cruising spots on Sniffies — reminiscent of the bygone era of local queer bathhouses, which all shuttered by 1984.

Buena Vista during AIDS 

In the early 1980s, San Francisco resident Terry Beswick had his first forays into cruising at the men’s rooms at San Francisco State University, in downtown San Francisco and by the windmills at Golden Gate Park, but he soon found out about Buena Vista.

“One of my first experiences at Buena Vista Park was by myself on one of those rare hot summer nights in San Francisco,” Beswick says. Having spent much of the ’80s as “somewhat sexually repressed,” Beswick had his liberation in the later part of the decade.

Like many, Beswick was first introduced to Buena Vista Park as a cruising hotspot by a friend.

“When I came out as gay and became an AIDS activist, I befriended a fellow activist who was sexually adventurous,” Beswick says. “He introduced me to the notorious sex clubs and the paths of Buena Vista Park. We never had sex together, but we would go to the park or a club and carve out the territory between us. I would take the upper park, for example, and he would take the lower. And after a while, we would switch.”

But AIDS would take its toll. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that more people were diagnosed with AIDS in 1985 than in all earlier years combined. By 1994, AIDS had grown to be the leading cause of death for all Americans between 25 and 44 years old. Between 1981 and 2000, the San Francisco Department of Public Health’s Atlas of HIV/AIDS notes that the blocks around Buena Vista Park recorded some of the highest AIDS case densities per number of residents anywhere in the city. 

Beswick’s friend would become HIV-positive in the 1990s, at the height of the epidemic. Eventually, Beswick would stop cruising at the park as the AIDS epidemic worsened — and after suffering a jarring attack in 1991.

“I was in one of the heavy cruising areas in the middle of the park, and I was starting to play around with a guy, and my pants were around my ankles as I started to go down on him when suddenly he pulled out a knife,” Beswick recounts. “He didn’t say anything but lunged at me. I managed to evade getting cut by throwing myself over the edge of the steep, wooded incline where we stood. I rolled down the hill and escaped with scrapes and bruises.”

“I didn’t often play there again,” he continued. “I felt lucky to have survived.” Beswick now recommends anyone cruising bring with them a mace bottle and whistle for safety. (One piece of advice from the community: Inform a close friend that you’re going cruising and where you’ll be so your whereabouts are known in case of an emergency.)

Cruising among coyotes

While not nearly as dire, cruiser Stephan Harris noted the park’s “haunting” qualities at night — which, in his words, add to its allure.

“It can be pretty f—king creeping wandering through the dark woods on my own late at night,” he says. “It can feel like something right out of a horror movie, but that’s part of the fun.”

Harris, who began cruising at Buena Vista Park during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, when outdoor sex was recommended as a harm reduction strategy, recounts cruising the park one Halloween night.

“When I was walking up the steps, I could hear police sirens wailing in the distance, which made the coyotes in the park howl in unison with the sirens,” he says. “That was a pretty cool soundtrack to f—k to.” 

Buena Vista Park, too, can serve as a jumping point into relationships that linger well past a moment of heated ecstasy. Longtime resident Alan Pex met his first partner there — “he was sitting on a motorcycle and looked so butch” — and they ended up going to his place after some back-and-forth. They were together for five years.

In a day and age marked by right swipes, taps and woofs (IYKYK), Pex remembers that Buena Vista Park was a place everyone understood as a hookup place — “of course, this was before cellphones and the internet.”

Buena Vista gets a graphic treatment

With its scenic vistas and steeped queer history, it’s little wonder why Buena Vista Park served as a perfect setting for the cruising scene for California College of the Arts comics professor Justin Hall’s upcoming graphic novel.

“There are winding pathways that give vertical drama and a bit of mystery as they ascend to the top of the park, where views open up — the literal vistas of Buena Vista Park — over the city, the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, and the Marin coastline,” Hall writes in an email. “I drew images of my hero walking up those pathways and looking out. The POV is always behind him in this scene, so we don’t see his face, and initially, there aren’t any other figures in the panels, either. When the men start appearing in the bushes and the furtive sex happens, I also don’t draw their faces, as I wanted to highlight the anonymity of the cruising.”

Hall himself grew up cruising parks and deserted city streets. When he first arrived in SF in 1995, Hall did what he found most comfortable — and found his way to Buena Vista Park. 

“I didn’t drink alcohol and felt uncomfortable in the gay bars, so cruising was my way of connecting with men,” he says. “Mostly it was just about sex, though. I hung out with dykes and straight people, and it took me a couple of years to find communities of gay men that I had something in common with besides a love of dick.”

Cruising into tomorrow

In the current digital age, Hall, like others I spoke with, made it clear that more analog means of cruising have a certain shaping quality to them. “It’s hard to imagine who I’d be if my formative sexual experiences were managed not in bushes and alleyways and parked cars but online, as is the case for younger generations,” Hall says.

As the modern-day cruising landscape continues to expand, meetups catalyzed by digital mediums will inevitably grow even more common. Martin says Sniffies’ community of cruisers is growing year over year and that San Francisco remains one of the most popular cities for them to frequent. For San Francisco’s “most notorious” spot for straightforward sexual encounters, Buena Vista Park’s standing as a cruising touchstone in an increasingly online age shines bright.

Matt Charnock is a writer based in San Francisco, who previously served as the editor-in-chief of The Bold Italic and the weekend editor for SFist. He’s now the founder of Underscore_SF.