Opinion: Make the Eastmoreland Golf Course a Public Sex Forest

A “MAKE THE GOLF COURSE A PUBLIC SEX FOREST!” sticker in one of the GCC basement bathrooms, January 2023. Photo by Louis Chase

The campaign to transform the Hiawatha Golf Course in Minneapolis into a public sex forest has been filtered through so many layers of internet discourse and humor that uninitiated viewers might not realize the “MAKE THE GOLF COURSE A PUBLIC SEX FOREST!” stickers in Reed bathrooms represent a serious campaign by radical queer organizers. The organizers of the campaign published an anthology of political theory and porn in 2023, detailing their struggle to restore communal access and self-management to queer and kink spaces. In these trying times, which see ever greater attacks against queerness and sexual liberation at the same time as the intensification of the capitalocene’s global ecocide, I believe it is critical that we expand the struggle to transform all golf courses worldwide into public sex forests or locally appropriate perverted equivalents. As Reedies, our attention should naturally be drawn to the massive Eastmoreland Golf Course just a few minutes away.

Now, compared to others, the Eastmoreland Golf Course has done a relatively good job of environmental protection on and around its grounds. It is an Audubon-certified sanctuary that employs goats to trim the bushes around its ravine instead of herbicide. But there are no good golf courses in an ecocidal system, and in literally all cases, there are better uses of the huge swathes of land they occupy. 

Like the UK’s socialist Tribune magazine points out in a 2021 article helpfully entitled “Abolish Golf,” golf itself is an exclusionary activity premised on undemocratic, inequitable, and anti-ecological land distribution for the enjoyment of a small number of mostly upper-middle class and wealthy players who can afford membership and course fees, which is why this massive resource demand can’t be justified. Although Portland has a public golf system with much cheaper fees than private golf courses would charge, the city’s five public golf courses see just 296,000 rounds played a year, which averages out to 162 rounds per course per day. Imagine if the massive amount of space – the Eastmoreland Golf Course has more land area than Reed – required just to accommodate 162 rounds of golf per day at each of those locations was put to a more socially useful and less resource-intensive use. I’m not saying that we can’t leave some holes for golf players to insert their balls into if they aren’t satisfied with the new ones, but they’ll have to deal with an environment that isn’t designed for that single use. 

Having discussed the negative component of the proposal, let’s take a look at the positive aspect of the proposal to turn the Eastmoreland Golf Course into a public sex forest, which is, of course, creating the sex forest. Cities have “jogging paths for joggers, bocce courts for bocce players, family beaches for families, roads for drivers, and, yes, golf courses for golfers. Why not sex beaches for perverts?” ask the Minneapolis sex forest advocates. While this is an excellent point, I differ somewhat from their argument in that I don’t think public sex forests should be exclusively for public sex. A good example of the versatility of actually-existing public sex forests is Washington DC’s P Street Beach, which not coincidentally, is the only public sex forest I’ve been to. Located on the edge of gentrified but historically gay Dupont Circle, P Street Beach is a partially forested grassy beach on the banks of Rock Creek, and was historically one of the city’s premier gay cruising spots. Despite being a well-known public sex forest, P Street Beach is also a great space for a picnic, sunbathing, sightseeing, or even a meeting of your leftist affinity group (the only purpose I’ve visited for, disappointingly). 

Reedie perverts once had kink collectives to provide them with training, guidance, equipment, and a pool of potential partners for non-normative sex. Nowadays, we don’t have jack shit, despite a small effort to revive Reed’s kink scene announced in Issue 1.5 of this semester’s Quest. As the policing of on-campus student spaces becomes more intense and the college becomes more and more concerned with minimizing risk of liability at the expense of student wellbeing, radical perverts interested in reviving the kink scene may have to take action by moving to the Eastmoreland Golf Course. Transforming the Eastmoreland Golf Course into a public sex forest, rather than the more obvious choice of the Great Lawn, would allow Reedie perverts to build solidarity with other local Portland freaks and hopefully help make the sex forest more durable. The point of a public sex forest is, of course, that it’s public. 

Like Minneapolis’s Hiawatha Golf Course, the Eastmoreland Golf Course is municipally owned and funded. That means, as the Minneapolis sex forest advocates point out in a 2021 manifesto, “the city is subsidizing a handful of mainly upper-middle class golfers while thousands of perverts have no good place to fuck.” Portland’s self-managed pervert infrastructure is severely lacking, to say nothing of Reed’s and the Reed area’s, which is nonexistent. Since golf courses are classist, ecocidal blights wherever they are located, replacing our nearest golf course with a public sex forest seems like an obvious choice. Additionally, the Eastmoreland Golf Course occupies prime real estate near Reed, the Crystal Springs Rhododendron Garden, Sellwood-Moreland, and two MAX Stations. 

Affordable housing advocates previously recommended shuttering the Eastmoreland Golf Course for new housing construction in 2017. At the time, the golf course called this proposal “odious,” and its representative pointed out that the City of Portland is legally required to return the land to its original donor if the golf course closes. A Portland Parks spokesperson told the Willamette Week in 2017 that closing the public golf courses would fully cede the sport to the rich, but this argument prioritizes Portlanders’ right to tee time over their rights to housing and public sex forests. While affordable housing is probably a more socially responsible use of the land than a public sex forest, the unfortunate reality is that public sex forests can be constructed without the golf course management’s agreement via a sustained direct action campaign, and housing developments probably cannot. For legal reasons, I am of course not encouraging readers to trespass onto the Eastmoreland Golf Course to plant a forest and have sex. That would be ridiculous. 

Rendering of the Eastmoreland Golf Course liberated by public housing. Reed, not pictured, would be up and to the right. Image courtesy of nextportland.com

Anyway, once the golf course is transformed into a public sex forest, nobody should deny community members the right to camp there (barring obvious caveats like sexual assault and harassment), and if in the future the public sex forest needed its lifespan cut short to construct more permanent affordable housing, that would be completely fine. Ideally, in fact, we ought to make the whole world a public sex forest by eliminating the violent enforcement of the distinction between those spaces which are not yet public sex forests and those few which already are. An affordable housing development at the Eastmoreland Public Sex Forest could maintain indoor and outdoor greenspace for fucking while still housing thousands of Portlanders.

Like the example of P Street Beach shows, public sex forests aren’t just for kinky queer sex, although that’s certainly an advantage. Rather, the demand to transform every golf course (in the immediate term) and eventually the entire world (in the mid to long-term) into a public sex forest is a demand for greater acceptance of deviant sexuality and greater self-management of social spaces. So, let’s start the journey by making the Eastmoreland Golf Course a public sex forest.