In both the UK and the US, for example, I’ve got to first scout out who’s in our immediate vicinity before daring to even brush my pinky finger against Juan’s hand as we’re walking side-by-side.
GAY MEN KISSING EACH OTHER FREE
And that’s when the sad truth struck me: with the exception perhaps of just a handful of places in the world (and even those are questionable), gay couples are not free to participate in this most basic, mindless and normal exhibition of romantic behavior.
Suddenly I became acutely aware of the many American and British tourists who-if not quite as passionate as these lustful Magyars-were similarly expressing their attachments to their partners in, say, an arm casually draped around the shoulder, a hand held or a possessive grip on the waist. It put me in an ethnographic state of mind. My partner, Juan, and I witnessed many other public displays of “affection” like this one during our stay in Budapest, which was curious enough from a cross-cultural perspective and a bit counterintuitive for such a socially conservative country like Hungary. The expression, “get a room,” seemed wholly inadequate for this carnal scene. My brain, unfortunately, was soon able to peel apart what I was actually observing, which was a particularly corpulent young woman devouring a young man half her size in what can only be described as a feast of open-mouthed, public lovemaking. In that fleeting moment between sensation and perception, when images settle on the retina but aren’t yet processed in a form fully accessible to conscious awareness, what I saw was a multicolored, gyrating mass of vaguely human substance, squirming and twisting on a park bench in animalistic fervor. While walking through a park in Budapest a few weeks ago, I spied a very strange sight.