Wow, it only took aboput 3 years to close that rest stop off I-205 in West Linn for the same reasons.

The I-205 was closed twice. The first time to let the reputation expire.

But unfortunately when it reopened it started all over again being the random sex hang out for gay men.

Which led to the permanent closing and demolition.

A revitalized park complete with anonymous hookups?

I didn't think I was so clueless, but until the Sen. Craig debacle, I had no idea that public restrooms are a major hook up location for gay men.

Many years ago when I lived in New York it was well known that the Vince Lombardi rest area on the New Jersey Turnpike was a major hangout and trysting place for gay truck drivers.

My understanding is that this kind of thing is quite common in parks and public restrooms, and that the only reason the rest of us don't know more about it is that the authorities hush it up until they can't anymore.

In 1980, a friend that had just graduated the BPST Academy called me and excitedly told me he had been picked "for an undercover assignment."

I was surprised in that we were less than 6 months out of the academy. Usually they picked officers with more seniority for such assignments.

A couple weeks later I asked my friend about it. He explained that it was working survelliance at the West Linn rest stop.

I was pretty amused, my friend hated the detail: "Do you know how sore you ass gets sitting on a toilet seat for 8 hours?"

A few years later the Ore Supremes struck down the misd charge of "Soliciting for purposes of deviate intercourse." Now, an officer has to view two people actually in the act, rather than just a verbal solicitation.

It's rare to see any enforcement in this area in the metro area these days, and it almost always complaint driven by citizens angry about walking in on someone.

Wow, what a way for someone I know to make it into the NYT. Not by name, but by action: I know one of the eight guys arrested at Holman that day.

No one thought he was gay - not his wife, not his teenage kids, and especially not himself. He and his wife both lost their jobs as a consequence of the arrest, and God knows what his kids had to put up with in school. Rather a harsh sentence for an unproven misdemeanor accusation, I think.

(And especially so in contrast to a woman I know who can't get the Marion county DA to pursue her rapist.)

Some mistakes are punished more harshly than others, I guess.

That's one heluva way to be outed especially if he isn't gay, like Larry Craig. What, he says he was wrongly convicted that makes him not gay doesnt it? Hey, he's a member of the GOP - they don't lie, do they?

jimbo: "didn't think I was so clueless, but until the Sen. Craig debacle, I had no idea that public restrooms are a major hook up location for gay men."

Larry Craig maintains he isn't a gay man. Same goes for the rest of the Republicans caught in various m2m sex scandals recently. The lesson being that public restrooms aren't a major hook up location for self-identified gay men, they're a hook up location for those men who have sex with men but don't identify as gay. There was a sting in Mass. highway rest stop last month in which 18 men were arrested: all were married to women, save one, who was a priest.

As long as men continue to be pressured -- by political expediency, by their social network, by their religious beliefs -- to deny their own natures, they will continue to seek out satisfaction wherever they can find it.