Another bizarre virtue signal just in time for pride month. Street signs that LA officials said previously targeted LGBT community members were taken down from a Silver Lake neighborhood this week. The signs that read “No Cruising” and prohibited U-turns were installed in 1997 when neighbors allegedly complained about gay men stalking back and forth in vehicles looking for “dates” in certain residential areas.
In other words, the signs interfere with the gay pastime of “cruising” (sexual solicitation). Whether or not they were actually posted specifically to ward off gay people is not confirmed, but the simple act of obstructing LGBT people from doing whatever they want to do is now considered “homophobia” by progressives.
“For me, growing up in South Central Los Angeles, cruising had a very different meaning. It usually meant folks in their lowriders or their cars, a lot of hip-hop music, just going up down Crenshaw Boulevard,” Council member Soto-Martinez said. “But here in Silver Lake, cruising, of course, meant something very different. It meant an opportunity for the LGBT community to try to find human connection and intimacy and to be able to express themselves in a society at the time that was not very welcoming to the LGBT community.”
The history of “cruising” in the gay community had very little to do with dating and far more to do with anonymous encounters as well as prostitution. With the advent of more socially accepted gay society in the US in the 1970s, a cultural problem of sexual solicitation and lewdness arose in public bathrooms and public parks in cities across America. The habit naturally attracted crime to certain areas and is even cited as one of the primary causes for the rapid spread of AIDS in the early 1980s.
Hellbound and Down 