At a recent film festival, I watched À Nos Jardins, a short film by Samuel Dijoux exploring gay cruising in Paris' Jardin des Tuileries. Yes, the former royal gardens right in front of the Louvre. On that same hallowed ground where kings once walked and tourists now take selfies, men gather in the bushes there also. They are searching for sex, intimacy, and something harder to name: belonging.
The Tuileries has been a cruising spot for centuries — even before the French Revolution. At times criminalised, at times tolerated, the space has carried a cultural memory of men gathering in the dark to explore their desires, often long before they had the words or safety to do it anywhere else.
The film's director shared how important that space was for his self-discovery. The Tuilleries offered for him a rare moment of authenticity when he could simply be in his body, with another body, without explanation – in a time of his life when he was still finding the words to describe who he was.
Underscoring the narrative of À Nos Jardins is a paradoxical reality of cruising. On one hand, it's a practice that is hidden, secretive, stigmatised. On the other hand, it's a means of profound honesty, freedom and acceptance. The anonymity strips away layers of performance to something deeper – "an animal reality" as the director described it during the post-viewing question and answer session.
There's a kind of freedom in being unknown. Although of course, what happens between the men in the Tuileries is known between the men, something the author poignantly illustrates in describing how when leaving the Tuileries he would always wonder if he would encounter any of these men again.
Cruising comes with real danger of many forms — from the police, from others in the space or simply from the complicated feelings that arise from doing it. And yet for many, the risk is precisely what makes it feel real.
The film reminded me that safety isn't just the absence of danger. It's also the presence of understanding. Of shared codes. Of knowing that you're not alone. It's the safety of this unspoken understanding that makes the Tuileries a safe space for the men who cruise there.
For many gay men — past and present — the Tuileries is more than a meeting place. It's a sacred site, in the truest sense. It's been formative place where people have discovered who they are, claimed their desires, and come into contact with others who reflected something back at them that the rest of the world would not.
What makes À Nos Jardins so moving is that it isn't fiction in any sense of the word. It's a documentary built from the voices of real men, many of whom step in front of the camera to tell their stories — with courage and candour. They speak about what the Tuileries means to them.
In a world that still punishes queer people for speaking honestly about desire, for claiming public space, and for valuing their own history, their testimony is important. These are men who lived what others only whisper about — and now they are giving it shape and permanence, on film, for all to see.
In a world that has so often asked queer people to live in hiding, the Tuileries offered visibility — even if only to each other hidden in the bushes. That shared space, steeped in secrecy and possibility, has held so many stories. It has held shame and liberation, danger and tenderness, rejection and connection.
How beautiful it is that this film exists to honour that space, to capture its layered history, and to offer a kind of immortality to the invisible lives lived within it. It's an act of reverence — one that says: This mattered. These people mattered. This place helped make us who we are.
Everyone deserves places like that. And everyone deserves to honour the landscapes that shaped them — even if others find those places taboo, transgressive, or difficult to understand. These are not just sites of memory. They are chapters in the human story, and they deserve to be kept alive.
Have you ever had a space (physical or emotional) where you felt free to explore your identity without explanation?
What does "safety" mean to you — and where do you find it?
What parts of your sexuality or selfhood have had to live in secret — and what has that secrecy cost you?
Step 1: Think of a time or place where you were able to be more yourself — even if just briefly.
Step 2: Write down what made it feel different. What was present? What was absent?
Step 3: Consider how you might invite more of that feeling into your life now — or how you could offer it to someone else.
One of the aspects of the screening of À Nos Jardins that stuck with me was what film-maker Samuel Dijoux spoke of in the audience question session: that many of the men who go cruising in the Tuileries married to women. Some were gay, some bi, some unsure of what labels they would give themselves if they were interested in them at all. For some it was the only place they felt safe enough to explore anything at all.
There's so much complexity in these stories — desire, guilt, longing, compartmentalisation. But more than anything, there was humanity. These men weren't living fantasies. They were seeking contact. Meaning. Relief. Witness.
What the men in the Tuilleries do is about sex and so much more: freedom, risk, and the complicated experience of being visible and invisible at the same time.
Human sexuality is a revealing topic. Not because of what it says about our bodies, but because of what it uncovers in our emotions, longings, and wounds. It tells the truth about what we fear, what we want, what we're ashamed of — and what we might be ready to heal.
The film doesn't romanticise cruising. It doesn't condemn it either. It simply holds space for its reality — the messiness, the beauty, the contradiction.
In doing so, it offers a quiet kind of validation: your desires, however complex, make sense. Your way of surviving, of seeking connection, of looking for yourself — it all makes sense.
What's a part of yourself that you've kept hidden from others — or from yourself?
Write about what it would feel like to let that part speak. Not to justify itself, but simply to exist.
What happens when we step outside the culture we were raised in? Between Worlds: Reflections on Culture, Identity, and Living Abroad is a five-part series exploring how life abroad reshapes our sense of self, belonging, and how we relate to others.
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What happens when we step outside the culture we were raised in? Between Worlds: Reflections on Culture, Identity, and Living Abroad is a five-part series exploring how life abroad reshapes our sense of self, belonging, and how we relate to others.