I can maybe see that argument working for things like child abduction, as in we have always had that but now get whipped into froth about it by the media. But I don’t buy that for the public parks and rest stops being bastions of male homo hook ups. Sure, it probably happened at lot more than we think it did back then, but not on the scale it does now, right?
I don’t think it would be tolerated back then, even if news of it never got out of the locality. The folks who go clean up don’t even condemn the behavior, or at least they didn’t in the articles I have seen about it. It was more like they blamed society for making gay men hide their love, which completely misses the point of sure, free anonymous sex in a neutral locality.
Freegards
Well there wasn’t a highway yet to have rest stops, at least not the kind we have now. But anonymous sex hookup locations have existed as long as we’ve had sexual mores, as soon as society said “these two people shouldn’t have sex” those two people started finding places to have sex. But again the big difference now is more info is flowing. Back then if you wanted to do the anonymous sex thing you had to started asking questions of the right kind of person, and have them trust you. Now you can google it. Look up the history of photography clubs and you’ll get a good idea of just how much seedy underbelly we had in the 50s.