Sex in Public Places

From an article by Richard B. Woodward in the Guardian:

Anyone looking for sex in a public place is in effect asking to be looked at and perhaps found out. The likelihood of exposure – of being recognised by a partner or featured one day in the police blotter – is so high it should be factored into any sexcapade in a city park or an airport restroom. For some, this calculation no doubt stokes the heat of the encounter. Anyone who just wants to get it on with a stranger can usually do so in relative privacy. That’s why God invented escort services.

The American public’s fascination with the Larry Craig case has a lot to do with the insane risks he allegedly took in his quest for sex and, of course, the delicious hypocrisy of a family-values US senator caught in a bathroom stall with his pants down. The arrest report also turned a flashlight on the rituals of a hitherto underground world. The elaborate codes that initiate gay dalliances in public restrooms, the toe-tapping and under-the-partition hand wipes, were news to many and probably invented, as were those in espionage tradecraft, to heighten the illicit thrill for the participants as well as to cloak the action from the uninformed.

Kohei Yoshiyuki’s photographs of Japanese having sex at night in Tokyo’s public parks, which ran at the Yossi Milo gallery in New York and now moves to the Doug Udell gallery in Vancouver on November 22, are revelatory in much the same way. They would simply be tawdry and exploitive if they weren’t also, like the Craig saga, so odd and funny. The behaviour they record has to my knowledge never been recorded before on film. In an essay that accompanies a reissue of The Park, the long out of print book that for most people has been the only source until now about Yoshiyuki and his work, the critic, Vince Aletti, calls them "among the strangest photographs ever made"

Photo by Kohei Yoshiyuki. More available online here.