Their solution has been, very much like police do with prostitution, to send undercover vice cops into the area. Police say they get complaints about the situation, particularly in Del Paso, because homes line the north boundary of the park. So now, on the levee, it’s still common to turn a corner and find men standing alone, staring off into the middle distance or apparently hiking, back and forth, cruising for consensual sex. They even tried hanging plastic bags containing condoms and safer-sex literature in the trees, but in Del Paso, according to one person, the condoms ended up floating in the creek as children from the neighborhood played on its banks. In about 1992, some people in Sacramento’s gay community tried handing out fliers in Del Paso Park, talking about the importance of safer sex and suggesting that people go somewhere else. Sacramento police have been trying to stop the public sex in these places for as long as it has been going on, but certainly since the early 1990s, when these outdoor spots became much more popular after the city’s bathhouses were closed during the worst of the AIDS epidemic. What goes on here looks more like gay life in the early 1960s, when police routinely made arrests at gay meeting places, before the New York Stonewall Riots gave gay liberation a name. And so, as the problem of public homosexual sex has become more visible, some leaders of Sacramento’s gay and lesbian community have tried to distance themselves from the goings-on behind the levee-because what happens here is a world distant from the 21st-century struggle for respectability, gay civil rights and marriage that is going on in the Capitol, just a mile and a half away. Del Paso Park, a wooded area surrounding a creek that runs through North Sacramento, is sometimes known as married man’s park. It is one of a number of spots in Sacramento where men go to have quick anonymous sexual encounters with other men-but the men who come here don’t necessarily call themselves gay.
It’s close to downtown but isolated, so that very few people, other than some homeless people and men looking to have sex with men, go there.
Its serpentine paths and overgrown bushes provide some privacy. This place, at the end of North 10th Street, where the roar of a nearby freeway drones behind the twittering of birds in the trees, has been a cruising spot for gay men for at least 50 years.
The state can’t quite call it a park, because it floods when the river overflows its channel, and it’s not a wilderness, because only a thin boundary levee separates it from the city’s industrial fringe. Back behind a North Sacramento neighborhood of tilt-up slab warehouses and discount furniture stores, North 10th Street ends its run from the state Capitol and dead-ends at the levee on the banks of the American River.įrom there, if you climb the path that goes up the bank, pause on the gravel road that tops the levee and look toward the river, in front of you is a canopy of trees that covers a boggy margin, which the state, lacking a better term, calls a nature area.