One of you sent this Salon essay in as Dreherbait, and I guess it is, but there’s something more profound going on here. The author is Conner Habib, a gay man (you find out in the tag line that he’s a porn star) who loves to have anonymous sex in rest areas. It starts out as such:

If you’ve ever pulled over to a rest area, you’ve been near men having sex. I’m one of those men, I’ve done it a hundred times; we go into the woods or a truck with tinted windows, in a stall under cold light. It never stops, not for season or time. In the winter, men trudge through snow to be with each other, in the summer, men leave the woods with ticks clinging to their legs. Have you ever stopped at a rest area and found it completely empty? There’s always one man there, in his car, waiting to meet someone new.

This being Salon, there’s a celebratory air about this revolting phenomenon. No wonder the reader sees it as Dreherbait. It was so depressing, though, I was reluctant to post it. And then I got to this passage:

That’s the opposite of why people go. Some of the men at rest areas are stepping out of their lives. They’re not simply escaping their marriages, or their parents or their circumstances; at rest areas, they’re allowing themselves to be honest.

Once, after hooking up with a man in a stall, we walked out into the calm day together. I saw him go to his car, a car I hadn’t noticed before. In it, his children were waiting for him. Who knows what his life was like outside that stall?

His children were young and excited, crawling over each other in the back seat. He opened their door and said something to them I couldn’t hear. They calmed down and buckled up. I leaned against my car, with nowhere to be, and he got in his and drove away and did not look back.

It’s not “fun and games.” It’s men yielding to something they might be trying to deny, but can’t. These places give wholly different lives to some people. I don’t know if these men are “gay” or “straight.” Does it matter? At a spot that for most people is on the way to somewhere else, men can meet each other and meet themselves.

The man who wrote this stares into the abyss every time he looks into a mirror.

UPDATE: Totally forgot I’d blogged on this two years ago. I didn’t even check the date on it when a reader sent it in. It was new to me … though of course, it wasn’t. I had forgotten it. Anyway, sorry for recycling. But at least Pinkjohn and I had the following exchange, in the comboxes:

This a very unappetizing scenario, indeed. But he’s onto something. It reminds me of a scene in the memoir “Red Azalea” by Anchee Min where at the height of the Cultural Revolution, (which reinforced the most reactionary sexual mores but with a feminist twist) men and women would gather in a park late at night for anonymous sexual encounters. The enforcers would come around and urge people to leave, that they were engaging in “bourgeois decadence.” But even with the great danger of arrest, prison, execution, psychiatric hospitalization, etc. they would still do it. It was a desperation for connection, not just a sexual compulsion.

[NFR: Yes, I think you’re onto something. In Malick’s “To The Wonder,” the couple (Affleck and Kurylenko) wreck so much, just for a connection. They want deep connection, without commitment. Want to be free to follow their passions. Instead, it’s just one damn thing after another. Dante calls this hell — but it comes from wanting that connection, only being unwilling to do what is necessary to achieve it, or at least to make achieving it and holding on to it possible. — RD]