11th April 2015, 08:19 AM
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Bob S: Administrator / Manager / Editor
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Join Date: May 2002
Posts: 562
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April 12: Poetry In The Park Does Gay Cruising
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Guys, I usually can't work on weekends but I saw this in my email alerts today. The "Poetry In The Park" event in Miami's Soundscape Park on Sunday, April 12 including some pieces about gay cruising. You might like it. And you never know who you might see there. 
Here's an excerpt from the New Times article along with a link to the full thing. The entire program including music and so on is 4 pm to 9 pm. Check for more details if it appeals to you.
Quote:
Poetry in the Park, the crown jewel of O, Miami, is back at SoundScape Park for its second year bringing the masses the written word. This year, the unintentional theme of the event seems to examine the intimate versus the public.
Attendees will be surrounded by poetry, including “O, Hi There,” a project created by Reading Queer. The project will put folks up close and personal with poets and their work thanks to the idea of “cruising culture.”
José A. Villar-Portela, the programming director of Reading Queer, explained more about how cruising culture served as inspiration for “O, Hi There.” “The project itself takes cruising, which is a longstanding…mostly queer tradition of using public spaces in order to cruise for sex…walking up and down a street, looking for sex in public,” he says.
Looking back to cruising culture is a way for Reading Queer to take a look at what could be in the future for queer politics. [T]hat moment of queer history, this moment of pre-AIDS sexuality before the recoil effect AIDS had on queer exploration and sexuality—that moment’s important to us,” he said. “It signals the future of the queer politics we’d like to see. One that isn’t knocking on the door of heteronormativity asking to be let in, but is more concerned with [the idea of] now that we’ve been cast out, what can we make new? What else can we imagine is possible?”
The cruising inspiration also seemed like a good way to interject poetry at a very personal level. “We’ve [used] that dynamic of a public sex encounter, which is paradoxical. It’s an intimate encounter in a public space,” says Villar-Portela. “We were interested in that because Poetry in the Park is such a public engagement with poetry, which is unusual…[P]art of the success of O, Miami has been bringing poetry outside of that [collegiate, stuffy] space. We were interested in seeing how we could create an intimate encounter with poetry in what is otherwise a very public encounter with the genre. For us, the perfect model for that is cruising in the sense that people will engage these…poems from local poets on a very personal basis.”
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Read the rest at O, Miami's Poetry in the Park Mixes the Personal and Public | Miami New Times |