But on his half-hour drive home, that lifetime of hurt crashed back to the present.
Not until his early 40s-after sobriety untangled his innate self from trauma and addiction-did he finally come out of the closet. When that failed, he turned to drugs to suppress it. For years, he endured evangelical Christian pray-the-gay-away therapy to cure his same-sex attraction. Ferguson had spent decades coming to terms with his sexuality, which he considered a symptom of being molested as a child. He’d taken an extended sabbatical to write a book-would the government hire him back with this kind of black mark on his record? Would he pass a background check for new work or housing? Would he have to register as a sex offender? How would he tell his family? Stunned, he agonized over how the ill-fated encounter would affect his career as a federal agricultural biologist. The man who exposed himself was caught in the act and charged accordingly. But Ferguson’s alleged violation was one of intent. The guy he’d been flirting with-Officer Samuel Marquardt, as it turned out-whipped a badge out from under his shirt and broke the bad news. Just then a fourth person arrived, brusquely introducing himself as Officer Adam Jenkins of the San Jose Police Department’s Downtown Services Unit. The sexual tension must have been palpable, Ferguson figured, because the newcomer stepped into the bathroom, dropped trou and began to masturbate. Maybe they could exchange numbers or continue the repartee elsewhere, he recalls thinking, indulging a whit of naïve optimism.Ī third man appeared minutes into the exchange. “How often do you come here?” the man asked, a coy smile parting his lips while telegraphing what Ferguson took for meaningful eye contact.įerguson puzzled over the mixed signals from this cute, much-younger stranger, but lingered to chat. But the stranger, idling by the door, struck up a conversation. Ferguson shrugged it off as polite rejection and got up to leave. The man on the other side stepped back, paused and then walked outside. Ferguson spied a round cutout in the mottled black partition-a gloryhole, meant for soliciting sex-and, impulsively, slipped his forefinger through as an invitation. But minutes after he latched the toilet stall, a man clad in shorts and a T-shirt ambled in to use the urinal. John Ferguson, a South County native in his mid-50s who knew of the park’s repute, says it seemed empty as usual when he stopped by one evening in May last year. A bathroom on the western edge of the baseball diamond becomes, on occasion, a byplace for men who want to have sex with other men. The park’s dusk-through-dawn desertion gave rise to its reputation as a cruising spot. Mostly, it’s left to the tent-dwellers who live among clustered trees and along the adjacent Guadalupe River. Weekends bring beach volleyball players and horseshoe pitchers. By day, the poorly kempt 10-acre tract bustles with softball teams. At Columbus Park, where San Jose decades ago cleared hundreds of homes beneath the municipal airport’s flight path, jets wing in low enough to rattle the signposts.