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Frisky, but risky

Locals don’t blush at sex in public

Durango is famous for outdoors activities like hiking, skiing, kayaking, mountain biking – and now, sex.

Though state and city law forbids fornicating in public places, the police blotter is littered with reports of it in the past 20 months.

These alleged crimes defy easy categorization, occurring alike in night and day, winter and summer, throughout the area, including: numerous parked cars; residential streets all over the city; the parking lots of Mercy Regional Medical Center and Bank of the San Juans; bushes near the Transit Center; Folsom Park and even Buckley Park on Main Avenue, next to the Durango School District 9-R administration building.

Deputy District Attorney Christian Champagne said he has never prosecuted a case of a couple dallying in public, saying the police rarely referred such crimes to his office.

Nonetheless, Champagne said the District Attorney’s Office is familiar with the issue.

Last year, he and his colleagues were astonished when a couple chose to copulate atop the Crossroads building, in full view of anyone looking through the windows of the DA’s Old Post Office building on Main Avenue.

“There were two teenagers on the roof of the Crossroads building just going at it. They were peering out over the ledge and thought that they were being all sneaky and secretive – but everyone could see them!”

An affair to remember

Through modern history, the “decline of public morals” – which has reliably proved precipitous – has obsessed and outraged society’s most virtuous souls. In 1881, Durango’s founding fathers made it illegal to “appear in a public place in a state of nudity or in dress not belonging to his or her sex; a lewd dress, or to do a lewd act or sell a lewd book.” Just last year in Britain, exposés of “dogging” – whereby exhibitionists and voyeurs organize trysts in public settings like parks – triggered a moral panic engulfing major newspapers.

Yet today, many Durangoans take a magnanimous view of public coitus.

Durango resident Brian Russell recalled stumbling out of the Irish Embassy Pub one night and turning into the alley. There, he encountered a couple in the full throes of lovemaking, up against a trash bin.

“It was pretty terrifying,” Russell said, offering that it must have been equally traumatizing for the couple.

Like many Durangoans interviewed for this article, Russell said he fled the scene without reporting the couple to the police.

Such reactions are typical, Champagne said.

“It really is an interesting thing. Most people who happen upon a couple having sex somewhere probably wouldn’t report it. But if you have a single man there in the street doing something untoward, they are going to report that right away,” he said.

Fort Lewis College student Wynter Lyons is bemused by the sheer frequency with which she discovers people fornicating at parties, mostly in bathrooms, sometimes in yards; she never calls the police.

Lyons, who’s also a manager at Gaslight Twin Cinema, said fornication isn’t a problem at the Gaslight, which specializes in high-minded films.

“It would be hard to do that in front of Meryl Streep – or during ‘Son of God,’” she said.

But her colleagues at Durango Stadium 9 are “constantly catching teenagers having sex. They have to go in and tell people to stop,” she said.

For some employees, it can become too much.

“One girl went in to clean after the movie was out, and there were teenagers ... she was too embarrassed and just left,” Lyons said.

Love over money

Indeed, several Durango businesses with robust no-sex policies have been defeated by customers’ lust.

Sydnee Rosen, a bartender at Joel’s Bar, said staff members had nicknamed the bar’s upstairs annex the “Boom-Boom Room” for patrons’ tendency to requisition it for assignations.

Recently, two female patrons even exploited the women’s bathroom for a roll in the hay.

“First we laughed about it,” she said. “But they were in there forever, a really long time. After a while I went in and said, ‘You gotta do that somewhere else.’”

As a venue for intimacy, Rosen considers public bathrooms “pretty nasty. I’d never have sex in the Ranch’s bathroom – never. If I had to choose, I’d choose The Office. They have really nice bathrooms.”

Angie Davis, a bartender at El Rancho, likewise said she’d “rather bang anywhere else – the street, a car – than the bathroom. It’s uncomfortable. It’s unsanitary.” Still, she’s heard persistent rumors about couples availing themselves of the Ranch’s tiny facilities.

Davis said she thought public fornicators have few good excuses on being confronted. “What are you going to say? It’s the Heimlich maneuver?

“People: Why not just go ... get a room for $30 – instead of doing it in a place where people can walk in and see you?” she said.

The beast with two (achy) backs

Though the practice is broadly tolerated, the appeal of fornicating in public remains mysterious to many Durangoans, who cited gross bodily discomfort, cold weather, fear of injury, cellphone cameras and security cameras as grounds for skepticism. Many women also objected to the presumed brevity of any carnal experience attempted on a city street.

Despite the impracticalities, Rosen said one of her friends managed sexual congress with another consenting adult on a bench outside Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory on Main Avenue in the early morning hours after the bars closed.

Rosen said, “I’m on the grid, so it’s not a big deal for me to bring someone home,” whereas her friend faced a long walk, suggesting the public fornication phenomenon could be an under-studied symptom of the city’s affordable housing crisis.

Kelly Kniffin, president of the Durango Area Association of Realtors and an agent at RE/MAX Pinnacle, said plans were in the works to provide young people with more housing options. She touted a new 50-unit complex at 32nd Street and East Animas Road (County Road 250) scheduled to break ground in July, where monthly rents will run between $625 and $825.

Another possible explanation for lovers’ taking to the streets – bedbugs – was shot down by Greg Brandt of San Juan Basin Health Department. While bedbugs do dwell in clothing, carpeting and mattresses, Brandt said Durango doesn’t have a very urgent bedbug problem.

Durango resident Bill Charles wondered whether there wasn’t something about kids today.

“With social media, this younger generation is comfortable with their picture being on the Internet, and they’ll expose almost anything. There’s just not that privacy factor. Since Jerry Springer in the 1990s, everyone’s more willing to be open in public with their dirty laundry,” he said.

The allure of park benches, brick walls and car interiors is similarly lost on Pam Morrell, of Northpoint Home Furnishings, who defended the mattress as infinitely more suitable for both vigorous and mellow human activity.

“It’s much better to be inside,” she said. “And then you can sleep for eight hours straight.”

Despite the poor job market, Morrell said many young people continue to embrace mattress technology.

“About a third of our clients are young people,” she said, saying Northpoint has a financing program for some mattresses.

cmcallister@durangoherald.com



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