Hook Up Spaces

The Gays and the MSM community has always been creative in transorming a public place into a "gay space" where meeting up with other men is possible despite frequent raids and restrictions from an "un-gay" society.

Here's an interesting article on this phenomenon from Outrage Magazine:

"Frank N., who is in his late 40s, recalls how “not many years ago – less than 20, perhaps – that site where Ayala One (the Makati City office of the Philippine Stock Exchange) stands used to be a swamp. We used to go there to hook up, me and my friends, with other people like us, in search of quick fucks,” he recalls, laughing.

For a lack of a local term to identify such a venue, what Ayala Avenue used to be was, borrowing Western terminology, a “beat,” a venue (usually a public space) that men who have sex with men (MSMs, whether self-identifying as homosexuals or not) frequent for sexual activities.

When Makati City started to be developed, however, “the cops chased us out (of the place),” Frank N. says, adding tales of “many of us hiding in the darkness, our faces covered by the thick grasses, as we crawled our way out of the swamp to avoid the cops wanting to catch us.”

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