ABSTRACT
By 1997, countless panics raged as yet another ACT UP spinoff group, ironically calling itself SexPanic!, dropped off fl yers at the Gay Pride parade. They announced:
By many accounts, New York City was in the midst of a sex panic (Crimp et al. 1997). Radical historian Allan Bérubé suggested the panic over public sexual space targeted gay men because of where they choose to play; it:
demonizes gay men . . . for stealing moments of sexual semi-privacy with other men in places such as public parks; public toilets in subways, bus and train stations, libraries and department stores . . . trucks, docks, ships and piers; booths in porn shops; gay bars, sex clubs and bathhouses; SM dungeons and other sex play spaces, and, recently, cyberspace. (quoted in Wockner 1997, 1)
The logical culmination of such panic is a less tolerant approach to play. For the purposes of this study, panic serves as a description of a frenzied drive to support conservative politics favoring a better business climate for progrowth economic policies poised to privatize, control, and profi t from everything from water to public space to social welfare services.
