I first visited Portland, Maine, in 2008 with my then-future husband. We did the tourist circuit: the Old Port, Casco Bay, Monument Square, Deering Oaks, and the Western Promenade. That's where I stopped in front of a sign that read "No Cruising."
It confused me. The rules were oddly specific, down to how many times a car could pass the same spot, and I suspected the whole thing was aimed at gay men. So I asked my boyfriend. "Of course it is!" he said, and explained that the Prom had been a popular cruising spot back in the day.
That was all I knew for years. Then I finally looked up the whole story.
What the sign actually says
The law was Section 17-5 of Portland's city code, adopted on March 4, 1996. It banned driving a car, or letting your car be driven, past a "traffic-control point" three times within two hours in a posted area. A traffic-control point was whatever spot a police officer picked.
Fines started at $100, jumped to $300 for a second offense, and hit $500 for every one after that, plus the city's attorney fees. Taxis, buses, emergency vehicles and business vehicles were exempt.
On paper it was a traffic rule, and a broad one. The president of the West End Neighborhood Association told The Bollard he once looked at the signs and wondered whether circling the block for a parking space could get him reported.
From Deering Oaks to the Western Prom
For decades, Deering Oaks was where gay men in Portland went to meet each other. A 1996 Casco Bay Weekly cover story called the park a nationally known magnet for cruising, and reported that the city mostly looked the other way while the neighbors were low-income renters with little political clout.
Then Parkside started to gentrify. New homeowners lobbied the City Council through the 1980s, and in 1990 police stepped up enforcement in the park. In 1993, a committee formed by then-Mayor Anne Pringle got cars banned from most of Deering Oaks.
The men moved a few blocks over to the Western Promenade, a street of historic mansions whose residents had considerably more pull at City Hall. By the end of 1993 those residents were complaining about cars circling at all hours.
The police chief at the time was Mike Chitwood, a former Philadelphia drug cop hired in 1988. The Bollard's 2024 history of the law describes his years in Portland as a campaign against porn shops, nude dancing, prostitution and gay cruising, one the Portland Press Herald labeled a "moral crusade."
The letters
The pressure started two years before Portland had any cruising law. Chitwood asked West End residents to write down license plates, and sent plainclothes officers to do the same. Then the department mailed letters, signed by the chief, to each car's registered owner.
About 50 letters went out in late 1993, and nine more in 1995. Of those nine, one went to a Portland address. The rest went to Biddeford, Gorham, Old Orchard Beach, Westbrook, Falmouth and Augusta. Each letter named the day, the time, the car and the plate, and said the vehicle had been seen repeatedly driving through the Western Promenade.
Think about who opens the mail in a house. Many of the men driving those cars were closeted, and plenty were married. A police letter on the kitchen counter could end a marriage or a job.
The Maine Civil Liberties Union objected at the time, saying police were contacting residents guilty of nothing other than driving around in their cars. A group of about ten people from the community started walking the Prom on random nights to watch the police watching everyone else, a story one of them tells in an oral history archived at the University of Southern Maine.
A traffic law with a target
The City Council passed the ordinance in March 1996. Two months later, Casco Bay Weekly ran a cover story that opened with a straight man who cruised the Old Port for women nearly every week, sometimes ending up in his car or on the grass of a nearby park. Police left him alone. "That doesn't have anything to do with me," he said of the new law. "I'm not queer."
The paper's editorial in that issue said the ordinance "implicitly and unfairly singles out homosexuals" and called it virtually unenforceable. Councilors speaking off the record doubted any judge would hear a case. Deputy Chief Mark Dion told the reporter that police could only hope to displace cruising to somewhere else.
The other side deserves its hearing. West End neighbors described cars circling with music blaring and nights of broken sleep. A gay former board member of the Parkside neighborhood association said the Deering Oaks decision was about drug sales and prostitution. And in a June 2024 memo to the council committee, Portland's police chief relayed the recollection of an officer with almost 38 years on the force: the law was meant to deter men soliciting prostitutes and "was not specifically designed to target homosexual males." The department found ten earlier citations, all for men propositioning women from a car, plus one more in 2023. The same memo concluded that repeal would do no harm to public safety.
Then there's Mark Dion. He helped write and enforce the law as deputy chief, and once got jumped on the Western Prom while working as a decoy. He went on to become sheriff, a state legislator, and in 2023, mayor of Portland. At a council committee meeting on June 11, 2024, he said on the record, about 19 minutes into the recording, that during his years enforcing it the ordinance "was used primarily to target individuals that were believed to be gay." He called repeal "a manner of reparations."
About 26 minutes into the same recording, he added a footnote. He and the other officers believed they were doing lawful work, he said, and the community and the courts backed them at the time. Then he said what the work was: "we were only there for one reason, that is to interrupt homosexual men from engaging each other. That's it."
That's the man who enforced it, on the record, twenty-eight years later.
Portland had company
A year after Portland's vote, Los Angeles did the same thing in Silver Lake. Signs reading "No cruising. No U-turns. Midnight to 6 am" went up in 1997 near a cluster of gay bars, and the Los Angeles Times reports that West Hollywood had installed similar signs in 1991. The Silver Lake ordinance restricted drivers from passing through the same area twice within six hours overnight.
Silver Lake's neighborhood council voted to pull the "No Cruising" signs in 2011. A handful of the no-U-turn signs stayed up, forgotten, until a resident heard about them on a podcast. The last ones came down on June 10, 2024, and the neighborhood council arranged to donate them to ONE Archives, the LGBTQ+ collection in Los Angeles.
Portland's committee voted to recommend repeal the very next day.
Most no-cruising laws in America were written for a different kind of cruising. In California, the bans were used against Latino lowrider culture, and the state has since repealed every local anti-cruising ordinance and barred cities from passing new ones. Old Orchard Beach, just down the coast from Portland, had its own anti-cruising law too. And in 2000, Bangor passed a law with wording nearly identical to Portland's, limited to the hours between 7 pm and 5 am.
So whether a "No Cruising" sign is about gay men depends on the city you're standing in. In Portland and Silver Lake, the paper trail points straight at us.
Where the law stands now
The law is gone. On June 11, 2024, the council's Health and Human Services and Public Safety Committee voted 3 to 1 to send a repeal to the full council. On August 19, 2024, the City Council passed the repeal 6 to 1, with two councilors absent and Mayor Dion running the meeting.
The signs are another matter. In June 2025, ten months after the repeal, the Portland Press Herald reported that visitors to the Western Prom could still find them. The Prom is now a stop on Stepping Out, a self-guided queer history trail built by a team at the University of Southern Maine.
I'm not sure if the signs are still there. I'll go see for myself next time I'm in Portland. If you cruised the Prom, remember the Oaks, or grew up wondering what those signs meant, tell me in the comments.
