I just found this related piece:
archive.li/xDwgF
It's very long, so I've copied a few excerpts below.
Then again, simply being in public can be a disaster when you’re queer. Having sex in a public place almost comes naturally when your body is hardly welcomed to begin with.
Still, there’s an ongoing culture war within the queer community between those who advocate for public sex and those who believe it’s abhorrent. As radical queers go toe-to-toe with burgeoning purity culture, issues of class, race, gentrification, sexual consent, and the long-term legacy of the AIDS crisis merge together to create one of the most complex issues the LGBTQ community deals with.
For teens or young adults that live in strict, conservative households, public sex provides an opportunity for sexual exploration outside of family control. For women, having sex in public can feel empowering, doubly so if you’re in a space where public sex is expected, such as a music festival, sex party, or BDSM club. But there is a double standard around who gets to have public sex, and who doesn’t, which fuels backlash against queers who have sex in bathroom stalls and park forests.
During the 20th century, public sex was a cornerstone of LGBTQ sexual expression. By having sex in public, queer men, women, and nonbinary folks reclaimed public spaces from heteronormative society and turned them into hubs for queer eroticism and desire
Bathrooms, parks, and alleyways also give queers the privacy they need to hook up with each other away from discriminatory parents, partners, and siblings.
Homoeroticism is so attractive to men across sexualities that the police have to suppress it in order to uphold the heterosexual status quo, Califia writes.
Why is sex supposed to be invisible? Other pleasurable acts or acts of communication are routinely performed in public—eating, drinking, talking, watching movies, writing letters, studying or teaching, telling jokes and laughing, appreciating fine art. Is sex so deadly, hateful, and horrific that we can’t permit it to be seen?
Sex workers, leather gays, and radical queers still push for destigmatizing public sex, if not engaging in it themselves, but public sex isn’t quite the widespread queer pastime it used to be.
Instead, moral panic over gay public sex has grown. While cisgender heterosexual couples are much less likely to be seen as boundary violators for hooking up in a bathroom stall or the backseat of a car, queer sex is inherently transgressive, so queer public sex quickly becomes a target for homophobia from within and without the queer community.
“I no longer find nudity frightening or repulsive […] Instead I have become more accepting of my own unadorned, vulnerable, imperfect flesh,” he writes. “Seeing other people having sex is reassuring and enlightening. It calmed the panic I’ve been carrying around ever since I first heard my parents fucking and thought they must be murdering each other.”
Many queer people follow in Califia’s footsteps. Datalore66 is a millennial born and raised in New York City, where she started having public sex during her teen years. Growing up, “almost no one [had] a car” in New York, and queer community was hard to find, leaving few alternatives available. While she’s since stopped having as much public sex, Datalore66 still enjoys it to this day and only discourages public sex when it’s particularly distracting, inconsiderately messy (such as sex with vomiting), or involves sex near a place where children could be present.
In a world where our phones are tracking our every moves, our voice assistants are listening in on our conversations, our unencrypted sexts can be seen by service providers, and our webcams can spy on our BDSM sessions, we are all having public sex now. Defending public sex is partly about defending the right for consenting adults to decide when they have sex, where, and who they do (and don’t) allow to gaze in. And in that case, it’s the most marginalized that are gawked at and policed the most.