![gay men kissing. gay men kissing.](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/15/dd/f0/15ddf0fd84046c5e543f7c78d68cc5ab.jpg)
GAY MEN KISSING. FREE
And that’s when the sad truth struck me: with the exception perhaps of just a handful of places in the world (and even those are questionable), gay couples are not free to participate in this most basic, mindless and normal exhibition of romantic behavior. Suddenly I became acutely aware of the many American and British tourists who-if not quite as passionate as these lustful Magyars-were similarly expressing their attachments to their partners in, say, an arm casually draped around the shoulder, a hand held or a possessive grip on the waist. It put me in an ethnographic state of mind.
![gay men kissing. gay men kissing.](http://logoonline.mtvnimages.com/uri/mgid:file:http:shared:s3.amazonaws.com/articles.newnownext.com-production/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/GettyImages-564726119-1499694344.jpg)
My partner, Juan, and I witnessed many other public displays of “affection” like this one during our stay in Budapest, which was curious enough from a cross-cultural perspective and a bit counterintuitive for such a socially conservative country like Hungary. The expression, “get a room,” seemed wholly inadequate for this carnal scene. My brain, unfortunately, was soon able to peel apart what I was actually observing, which was a particularly corpulent young woman devouring a young man half her size in what can only be described as a feast of open-mouthed, public lovemaking.
![gay men kissing. gay men kissing.](https://image.shutterstock.com/image-photo/homosexual-couple-hispanic-gay-men-600w-662861278.jpg)
In that fleeting moment between sensation and perception, when images settle on the retina but aren’t yet processed in a form fully accessible to conscious awareness, what I saw was a multicolored, gyrating mass of vaguely human substance, squirming and twisting on a park bench in animalistic fervor. While walking through a park in Budapest a few weeks ago, I spied a very strange sight.