For years, Olin-Turville Park on Madison's South Side has been known as the place to go for men looking for a quick, anonymous, sexual encounter, city officials and residents say.

But now the police department and the city parks division are developing strategies they hope will eliminate the activity permanently.

The men often do not consider themselves gay, officials say, and the park's circuitous road system and 65-acre conservancy provide them with a venue to have clandestine - if public and, therefore, illegal - sex.

"It's a great natural area, but people are afraid to go there," said Police Sgt. Jim Dexheimer. "Nine out of 10 people using the conservancy were in our target group of the public sex group."

Police admit they have made little progress stemming the behavior with traditional methods such as sting operations or sweeps and last week unveiled a multifaceted plan aimed at discouraging the behavior from happening in the first place.

Strategies proposed

Among the strategies police are proposing are:

• Aggressively removing brush and invasive species such as buckthorn and honeysuckle in the conservancy as a way to clear sight lines.

• Considering the creation of a list of people banned from Olin-Turville, much like the lists banning chronic drunks and aggressive panhandlers from State Street and the Central Library.

• Putting up fences to restrict access to commonly known spots for sex.

• Adding signs reminding conservancy users that going off its established trails is a violation of city ordinance.

• Putting in gates to close off access to sections of the park's road system.

More broadly, police want to increase usage of the park by members of the neighborhood and others as way to discourage its use as a venue for public sex, Dexheimer said.

On Wednesday, the park board had a favorable response the police department's presentation and assigned the matter to its Habitat Stewardship Subcommittee, according to board president Bill Barker. That group is expected to report back to the park board within a few months, he said, and the full board will make a final decision on what approach to take in the spring, when it will be implemented.

In the meantime, Barker said the parks division plans to step up efforts to eliminate invasive species in the conservancy and could eliminate or reduce the park's south parking lot, where the men often meet.

Barker said it's unlikely that a dog park will open there or that a bike path will be put in - two ideas that had been floated before.

From mid-September to mid-October, dogs were allowed in the park on a trial basis to see if their presence would discourage public sex, but Dexheimer and Bob Stoffs, a member of the nearby Bay Creek neighborhood, said it seemed to have only a minor impact.

Park's reputation

The park, most notably the conservancy, has been home to public sexual activity for nearly 20 years, Dexheimer said, and people from throughout the state know about the park's reputation.

But it may be hard to eliminate the behavior without changing cultural attitudes, according to UW-Madison psychology professor Janet Shibley Hyde, who studies human sexuality.

"What you have to do really is change the culture," she said.

As long as there is a significant part of the population that sees homosexual or bisexual behavior as aberrant, the behavior at the park will continue somewhere, she said.

Steve Starkey, executive director of OutReach, a Madison-based advocacy group for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, said Madison's gay community is aware of what goes on at Olin-Turville, but it's likely that most of the men who go there for sex are not openly gay or bisexual and thus don't consider themselves as part of the broader LBGT community.

"For a lot of married men who are bisexual, they have to be closeted," Starkey said.

To come out of the closet could mean risking losing one's family, he said.

Starkey said that, in general, he supports the city's efforts to curb public sex at Olin-Turville, but worries it could represent a double standard. Having grown up in Madison, he said he knows heterosexual teens, for instance, have sex in parks, but that this is seen as less of a problem.

Watching the park

Last spring, police spent several hundred hours doing surveillance at the park in an attempt to understand the illicit behavior and how the park's environment encourages it.

They discovered the men have something like a "courting ritual" that includes cruising the park's road system, vehicle maneuvers in the parking lots, and signals to one another once they are out of their vehicles and headed toward the park's conservancy area, where much of the public sex occurs.

The men are typically white, range in age from 18 to 85 and arrive at the park alone.

Police compiled a list of about 400 vehicles that are regularly at the park and Dexheimer estimates there are perhaps 400 more that visit less frequently. Nearly all of the vehicles are from Wisconsin, he said, but they come from all over the state.

Police also identified 29 locations in the park that have become known as good places to rendezvous, largely by following illegal paths through the conservancy and from the discovery of used condoms and other related evidence.

'Grown used to it'

Stoffs, of the neighborhood association, said many residents in the Bay Creek area have known about the behavior at the park for years, and to some extent have grown used to it, even if they don't like it.

"One factor is that it's just been really difficult to do much about it knowing that police have done sweeps in the past to no avail," he said.

Now some residents, are just "creeped out" by the behavior at the park and thus avoid it.

"If they would get a room, no one would care," he said. "That's what it comes down to."

Starkey said police have been in contact with his group about the plans for Olin-Turville and that OutReach "regularly puts out the message that it is illegal to have sex in public." He also said that men who engage in the type of behavior seen at the park can be much harder to reach with safe-sex messages and are at much higher risk for AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.