An intimate look at one of culture’s most enduring taboos: public sex.

Park Cruising takes a long look at the men who cruise for sex in urban parks. Human rights lawyer Marcus McCann uses park cruising as a point of departure for discussions of consent, empathy, public health, municipal planning, and our relationship to strangers. Prompted by his work opposing a police sting in a suburban park, McCann’s ruminations go beyond targeted enforcement and police indifference to violence to examine cruising as a type of world-building.

The result is a series of insightful and poetic walks through history, law, literature, and popular representations of cruising in search of the social value of sex. What McCann ultimately reveals is a world of connection, care, and unexpected lessons about the value of pleasure.

MARCUS McCANN (he/him) is a lawyer who has been involved in a number of high-profile legal projects in the areas of sexuality and LGBTQ rights. He is a former managing editor of Xtra in Toronto and Ottawa. The author of three previous books, his writing has been shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert and Robert Kroetsch awards, and won the John Newlove Award and the EJ Pratt Medal for poetry. Born in Hamilton, Marcus now lives in Toronto.

Marcus McCann's profile page

[McCann] shows us the past and the present, and provides us with a vision of how the views of park cruising could and should evolve in the future.

In Magazine

Park Cruising feels immediate and personal in the exact way orator and rhetoritcian Isocrates counselled millennia ago: the emotion and the facts become a combined triumph that delivers McCann’s argument straight to the heart.

Xtra

Thoroughly researched but not drily academic, journalistic yet substantial ... McCann forges likeable, roving essays that are interesting, pointed, informative, and insistent.

Plenitude

McCann’s strong prose explores sex and sex laws in Canada. Park Cruising shows how those laws shape our behaviours and contribute to our urban fabric, but most importantly how they demonize an act that he argues should be joyous and full of pleasure.

The Grind