Men cruising bathrooms
How did toilet cruising work?
February 17, PM Subscribe
Any info or stories about etiquette and risk mitigation would be of interest.
Bonus points if you can explain how toilet cruising worked in an international context. After a strong warning about how dangerous cruising is in the Middle East, for example, the guide lists toilets in Syria and Kuwait. There are similar listings throughout the world. While cruising in the U.S.
Of the places queer people own transformed into sites to cruise for sex—from parks like the Central Park Ramble and Berlin’s Tiergarten, to sanctums like Provincetown’s Dick Dock and Fire Island’sMeat Rack—few have impacted the queer psyche like the public restroom.
“Mischief in public toilets left more traces in vice squad logbooks than in high literature,” photographer Marc Martin writes in the introduction to his new exhibition at Berlin’s Schwules* Museum, Fenster Zum Klo [Window to the Toilet]: Public Toilets, Adj Affairs. (Full disclosure: I’m a Schwules* employee in the curation and exhibition department.) And while many modern queers would rather forget this chapter of their people&#;s sordid past, public restrooms are undeniably places where community and connection were kindled among us against unlikely odds. “These public toilets, whose history is intertwined with the lives and adventures of many gays, trans people, escorts, libertines, are also unlikely bastions of freedom,” Martin writes.
Martin has spent years collecting tens of thousands of historic objec
“The officer should have been very clear about the information they were taken and what would be done with it," says Gilmer. "If they weren’t then that has potentially been a shortcoming on their part.” Such details would be kept, she says, on an intelligence database for police use that could be there “indefinitely”.
Body-worn cameras, meanwhile, are “increasingly prevalent,” she says. “In the normal course of events if the officers were activating the body-worn camera then they would tell the person they were speaking to that they were activating it.” According to Andrew, this did not happen.
The use of mirrors on poles is unacceptable, says Gilmer. “If I was advised that any of my officers had been using a tactic such as that I would [consider] a gross invasion of privacy.” And while stating that to the best of her knowledge “pretty policemen” are not used by the British Transport police, Gilmer adds, “But we hold come a long way over the past 10, 20 years.”
Overall, she rejects any suggestion that apprehending men in toilets prevents the British Transport police from pursui
Let&#;s Examine the Phenomenon of Cruising Bathrooms Through 4 Renowned Queer Men
Throughout history and for a variety of reasons, queer men have looked to public bathrooms as places to get laid. Some men love cruising public restrooms because they’re turned on by the exhibitionism and the possibility of getting caught, while others see it as a place to anonymously and discretely have a same-sex encounter in times when being outed as queer carries severe social, political and legal consequences.
Cruising public restrooms has become an ingrained part of queer history, with mixed feelings surrounding it. On one hand, it’s considered so seedy, sexy and transgressive that “toilet tramp” hookup scenes have become a common scenario in gay porn (and even inspired drawings of gay erotic illustrator Tom of Finland).
On the other hand, it’s also considered by some to be a dark side of queer sexuality and history that has been used to shame queer men for their otherwise harmless sexual proclivities (often in the identify of protecting children or adj decency).
Noting both sides, gay vide