PROVINCETOWN, Mass. - Gay men engaging in ... ahem ... "naked sports" on the beach at the Cape Cod National Seashore are wreaking havoc on the picturesque tourist haven's "family-friendly" reputation, local authorities say. They have cracked down on the practice in the hope the sun worshippers will find somewhere else to play.
"This is not what we're interested in seeing," National Seashore Superintendent George Price told the Boston Herald. "Over the last couple of years, public [sex] acts like this have been viewed by visitors."
No one knows why gay men - and some straight folks, too - have begun flocking to the traditional playground of the rich and famous, but as word has spread, locals have noticed a decline in the numbers of families that vacation there. Typically, Cape Cod's beaches attract tens of thousands of tourists from around the world each year.
"The majority is gay, but we've had issues with hetero sex as well," Price told the Boston Herald. "Families are upset and outraged." He added that public sex violates federal and state laws and can incur heavy fines.
Officials hope the heavy fines will discourage people of any sexual orientation from participating in inappropriate public displays of affection. Within the past year authorities have written more than three times the usual number of citations for public indecency: 132, compare with an annual average of 40 previously.
Price does not attribute the increase in citations to stepped-up enforcement efforts, though. He said there just seem to be more targets these days.
"Laws and enforcement have not changed," he told the Herald. "It just seems to be something that some people decided we want to see."
Complaints have flooded in from groups as diverse as whale watchers who accidentally discovered a pod of naked men to a family from New Jersey that reported couples and men having "sex in the nude, including oral and anal sex right out in the open," according to the Cape Cod Times.
"It's really two issues," Price told the Herald. "One is the nude sunbathing, which has been around since the '70s and '80s, and that issue is being addressed. But the issue that we're talking about today is public sex: It's a seashore problem and it's a town problem."
GayVN
- By
