From TPM Reader TB …
Dear Editors (here specifically David, and Josh):
Fine coverage, as always. I very much enjoy and appreciate your site.
Regarding Larry Craig’s bathroom actions and American public sex in general: there are two comments I’d like to add to the discussion. First, male-male sex in public bathrooms has been going on in America for at least 100 years…probably since the invention of the public bathroom. Our culture’s lack of understanding of sexuality, and our gender-segregated bathrooms, created an environment where males naturally happen upon each other in stages of undress (much like the locker room). Such scandalous behavior has been uncovered at YMCAs (originally built as boarding houses for World War I soldiers), park restrooms, and transit station restrooms since the early 20th century. Typically, men who had sex with each other in these restrooms were caught by plainclothes investigators who pretended to accept their suitors’ advances (and, in some cases, were quite passionate about their … investigations) before booking them. Long prison terms, psychiatric “treatment”, and public humiliation were common outcomes of these investigations. For most of the 20th century, there were very, very few public places in most of America for men to meet each other. There was certainly no public space friendlier to gays in Boise, Idaho, than the library and park bathrooms when Sen. Craig was a young man. I call them preliminaries because they preface more intricate coded behavior that can indicate a variety of things: whose stall the contact will happen; what activities are amenable to either party; whether money will change hands; whether there is a lookout; whether the place itself is safe; and much more. “Tearooms,” as these bathrooms are called, established an entire non-verbal dialectic to facilitate sexual union between American men. They are as enshrined in gay culture as Sunday afternoon “tea dances,” or Bette Midler singing at the baths, or Stonewall, or, currently, Internet dating. Even for me, as a young gay man from Wisconsin curious about gay sex in the mid-1980s, the park restrooms were the place where it all happened. The restrooms were not just an urban legend: they were living history — noisy, confusing, heady, stinky, and nervewracking places for a sexual — and cultural — initiation. The codes that Craig and his arresting officer used (looking through the stall door; tapping one’s foot; touching your stall neighbor’s foot) are historical preliminaries to sexual contact.
Which leads me to this: we do not live in the 1930s anymore, or even the 1980s. One can make the distinction now between furtive behavior and discreet behavior. There are lots of ways by which and places where men can meet other men to wine, dine, kiss, screw, get married, or just civilly unionize. It doesn’t have to happen in the bathroom, unless that is what you choose. I feel some fondness for tearooms, where men would look at me, then just 18, like I was Ganymede come back to earth. There is an excitement and danger and kink to public sex that I still enjoy, in empty cemeteries on moonless nights with someone I like, offending only the dead. There are so many ways to meet someone and approximate the thrill of the tearooms. We could say that Sen. Craig was just unimaginative, or wouldn’t have it any other way; I think he hadn’t caught up with the ways gay culture has changed, and he didn’t know how.
But it’s never too late: if I were him, I’d be on Craig’s list with a crotch shot and a “married, discreet” tag.
