One night in the mid-1980s, Scott* tells me, his roommate went to the Fruit Loop — a secluded stretch of roadway in the southwest corner of Schenley Park — hoping to catch some dick. When the roommate returned, Scott, who had never gone cruising himself, despite spending many nights looking out the window of his apartment into the park, longing, or at least curious, asked how it went, expecting a raunchy story.
But the roommate, scowling, recounted a distasteful exchange that had turned him off: Making a slow turn about the Fruit Loop in his car, watching and being watched by the men at the edge of the woods, the roommate rolled his window down. One of the watchers approached, friendly and direct: “J’need blowed?”
This yinzer was too much for Scott’s fussy roommate, whose desire could not override his bourgeois, judgmental impulses. He’d rolled up the car window and high-tailed it home.
Many years later, Scott recounts this night with regret. Despite living so close to the Fruit Loop, Scott spent the ‘80s too afraid of contracting HIV/AIDS to pursue his own desires — to allow himself the surprise of connection and pleasure with strangers — so instead he got too drunk at gay bars (once smashing the glasses behind the bar at the House of Tilden), and lived vicariously through his roommate’s stories. Because Scott allowed himself so few experiences of his own, he was especially disappointed when his roommate’s forays didn’t pan out.
Scott’s anecdote swiftly illustrates something of the range of men who seek sex with men, a range which, when considered with any seriousness, challenges popular ideas about who might or might not have gay sex. What’s exciting about cruising is that you don’t know who you might encounter, or who you’ll desire — Yinzer, or priss, or both — until you try it.
In the last few years, the closing of gay bars and adult bookstores, as well as a clearer understanding of the profoundly limited benefits of visibility and assimilation in a structurally homophobic and transphobic culture, have reignited a robust interest in cruising, and its history, especially among younger queer people. But because public sex is technically illegal, cruising is, by necessity, a secretive act, largely anonymous, and mostly undocumented, except when intercepted by police. Case in point: in 2008, a school principal seeking gay sex at Harrison Hills Park in Natrona Heights was entrapped by a police officer which, after the man lost his job, was reported in the local paper.
For reasons of both safety and neglect, historical information on cruising beyond out-of-date listings on old web pages is difficult to come by, though it’s worth remembering that many more people have gay sex at night than live gay lives during the day. Cruising, historically, includes not just gay men seeking sex with other gay men for pleasure, but also straight-identifying men looking for gay sex, sex for pay both straight and gay, and trans women, often misrepresented as men in newspaper coverage.
So how to begin telling Pittsburgh’s cruising history? The Fruit Loop is one of few spots to survive AIDS, redevelopment, the closing of the leather bars, and the rise of Grindr, but for much of the second half of the 20th century, the most well-known place to cruise in Pittsburgh was a series of now-quiet blocks surrounding the board of education building in North Oakland. In those decades, the area between Forbes and Fifth Avenues along Dithridge Street was known as the “meat rack” to police, and the “meet rack” to gays.
On June 2, 1980, Jerry Byrd published an article in the Pittsburgh Press with the headline “Police Turn Spotlight on Gay Night Life in Oakland.” For “the first time in 25 years,” Byrd wrote, “homosexuals in search of partners” were “the subject of police attention.” Over an eight-day period, 24 men were arrested, though, according to Randall Forrester, cofounder of the LGBTQ mental health facility Persad Center, and the only gay man who appears to have been willing to speak on-record about the arrests, “No one was arrested who was actually participating in illegal acts ... It’s our position that we’re not going to defend people having sex in people’s backyards or behind buildings. ... If that has gone on — and undoubtedly it has — an attempt is made to make it invisible.”
Forrester’s sanitized take was largely at odds with the potent, sensual atmosphere Byrd conjured: “Beginning after dark on Fridays and continuing well past 3 a.m. through the weekend, they ‘cruise’ slowly on foot and by auto along Dithridge Street ... the squared-off five-block section has been quietly acknowledged as a ‘cruisy area’ since the mid-1950s, when homosexuals were driven from the downtown area by the city’s Morals Squad.”
In September 1982, the same blocks of Oakland were in the papers again. Two queer people, David Fields and Kim Rogers, had been murdered during a night out; they had been seen hours earlier on the steps of the DOE building. Seeking to nuance the sensational early coverage, Byrd, along with a second Press reporter, Douglas Root, published several articles about Fields and Rogers’ lives and circumstances, instead of focusing exclusively on their murder. In an article profiling Fields and Rogers’ families, Fields is described wearing rose-colored nail polish, press-on nails, and a white minidress purchased in secret but worn in public when out with queer friends.
Another article profiled the scared and grieving hustlers who had worked alongside Fields and Rogers downtown. One hustler, who worked in Mellon Square near the William Penn Hotel, described for the Press how sex workers protect each other, at work and in their private life: “A little hustling for money Downtown, homosexual activity Uptown ... ‘I know most of these guys. We have a sort of friendship-type thing.’”
Underscoring the hustler’s point about the compartmentalization of work and play, the Press article notes of the meet market: “Unlike other sections of the city, sex for money is out of place here. Men meet men to love men.”
In this same era, people seeking gay sex could, increasingly, find it for cheap or free in the video arcades of adult bookstores and porn theaters, whose gaudy marquees illuminated the streets of Downtown Pittsburgh, and at social venues like gay bars, bathhouses, and after-hours clubs. The infrastructure of gay social life was supported by mob connections and built by Robert “Lucky” Johns, and members of the Tavern Guild he founded. In 1978, an anonymous hustler, speaking to Gay Life magazine, claimed that “you can’t hustle in Pittsburgh. Hell, I hustle the hustlers … the 25c booths ruined the hustlers … now it is a giveaway.”
In 1979, a gay man looking for sex in Pittsburgh was likely to find success at any of the three bath houses around the city, or at the Crossover Lounge, a leather bar just down the street from where Central Outreach is today. In 1977 the Holiday Bar in Oakland advertised its “new, deodorized men’s room” and “completely sanitized cruise bar” in a special issue of Gay Life magazine, whose cover story was a first-person account of a visit to the baths. Brian Michaels, who was also the magazine’s society columnist, tried to demystify the experience for readers: “Tonight I’m the new piece of meat in town ... It is usually assumed that gay baths are patronized for but one purpose — quick, anonymous sex ... but there are those who attend just to watch or be watched, or to make an attempt to socialize in a non-alcoholic environment.”
Pittsburgh’s notoriously lively cruising scene in the 1970s and 1980s was also reported to be a racist boys’ club for white men who just happened to be gay, though Pittsburgh’s first, less-documented queer nightlife scene preceded the gay bars run by Lucky and his network.
Photographer Teenie Harris, who was born in the Hill District in 1908 and spent decades documenting Black Pittsburgh in attentive, prolific detail, was perhaps the first to positively represent queer life in the city. As Justin Hopper wrote for Pittsburgh City Paper in 2007, many of the nightclubs in the Hill, such as Little Paris and the Crawford Grill, hosted both major jazz performers and drag queens, who sometimes took the stage together. Harris’ photos show queens dancing, pulling faces in gorgeous outfits, drinking and smiling among the men.
Looking from the present, we must assume that cruising happened in the Hill District’s queer-friendly nightclubs, as well as at the docks and in the rail-yards that were crucial to Pittsburgh’s industrial life 100 years ago and which give “trade” its name, even if we have little explicit historical evidence that this was so. Wherever people gather, so does their desire, and desires which cannot or don’t wish to exist in the open emerge elsewhere.
In 1983, the Pittsburgh Trucking Co., a new leather bar named for Tim Kincaid’s 1976 pornographic film Kansas City Trucking Co., which codified trade as a fetish genre, opened on River Avenue on the North Side. PTC quickly supplanted The Crossover, and by 1985, was hosting the northeast regional Mr. Drummer contest, part of a network of leather competitions sponsored by the San Francisco-based Drummer Magazine ahead of the International Mr. Drummer contest.
While neither the Crossover nor the PTC survived the 1980s, Mr. Drummer remained, relocating to the Norreh Social Club, which later became Donny’s Place, in Polish Hill. In 1999, when Drummer folded, Mike Zuhl bought the contest and headquartered it at Leather Central, the basement leather bar at Donny’s. More recently, International Mr. Leather, a new contest founded by Zuhl, has diverted his attention. Then the eponymous Donny retired. His bar’s liquor license expired last summer, and it closed in late September.
Officially, Donny’s was the last place to cruise indoors without a membership. Unofficially, however, the story is different, richer, more complicated, and more precarious as well. Like sex work and illegal drug use, cruising happens regardless of its legal status, and those without access to more discreet indoor venues are more at risk of violence and contact with police. In the present economic and political climate, secrets once open are more likely to be closed, or to be guarded closely by those to whom they are precious.
But secrets are hard to keep in what a friend calls this one-degree town. A few weeks ago a man I know from Grindr sat down with his mother at the bar where I work. We avoided eye contact for the length of their drink, then cracked smiles as he paid the bill. Because he’s so circumspect, for months I had thought he was straight or stealth until I ran into him in the Lucky’s bathroom last summer, where he embraced me, then went on about his night. This happened again at Jellyfish, at Hot Mass, and once, I think, on the street.
Now I understand that he is just exceedingly respectful, reticent to step on my toes or my time. In a city as densely connected as Pittsburgh, this is a rare gift. Because we met by cruising, I can’t look him up on social media, or find his work history. I don’t even know his last name. But desire itself is an archive if you know how to look; because some of our wanting is the same, we find each other again and again.
