The sun, the strolling, even the solitude, and the natural beauty of the park’s most bucolic copse-more than the opportunity for a casual sexual encounter in the bushes-are the magnets that for much of this century have made the Ramble the city’s best-known outdoor gathering place for gays. You don’t have to be doing anything except walking through the tangled darkness to be abused, shoved, threatened at knifepoint, kicked, and beaten.īut these shadowy dangers are in sharp contrast to the serenity of the sun-flecked arboreal mecca the Ramble becomes for thousands of gay men throughout each day. Gangs of toughs-teenagers and the macho middle-aged, usually drunk, occasionally including a couple of off-duty cops-roam the Ramble at night, engaging in an old American pastime: fag bashing. But though Central Park at night-any part of the park-is dangerous, the gay ghetto that is the Ramble is perhaps the section most fear-ridden. The west side of that 30-acre section of Central Park known as the Ramble had a reputation as a homosexual meeting ground long before Cole teased his friends at private parties with this suggestive lyric. Cole Porter’s “A Picture of Me Without You,” 1935.
Picture Central Park-without a sailor, Picture Mister Lord, minus Mister Taylor.
