If you want a reminder of how objectively disgusting the act of sex is, go ahead and get a dog. All thoughts of soft lighting and gentle moans will disappear the second you see a poor Cavalier King Charles Spaniel panting, unaphased, under the arched back and bowed, quivering legs of an amorous golden retriever whose face registers tenacious frustration as it tries to guide its jarringly unsheethed red rocket into a clammy, uninterested launch pad.

Though my boyfriend and I might take our dog Neko there together on the odd holiday, my prime haunting hours are weekday afternoons and his are nights and weekends. As such, we have completely different groups of the mostly anonymous, canine-defined social associates known as “dog park buddies.” While I might come home with an hours worth of stories that Koa’s daddy told me, or training advice from the dog walker with the red hat, his dog park life is comprised of a completely different cast of characters, made up of dogs and people that I will probably never meet.

There is no other place where a muscly French Bulldog-owning homo can carry out a 45 minute, entirely unawkward, conversation with an Argentinean dog walker and a middle aged straight couple. However, most of these conversations are based (unsurprisingly) around dogs. So I might leave the park knowing the frequency and consistency of a greyhound’s stools, but never even get the name of its adorable owner. Similar to the anonymity one can find in a gay bar, the denizens of a dog park give up the trappings of their rest-of-the-day self to surrender to the greater canine atmosphere.