In a college sociology class on deviance I took in 2004, the professor, who was known for her sense of humor and explicit knowledge of what she studies, explained to 400 undergraduates what a “tea room” is. We were reading an academic essay detailing the ritual of gay male public cruising, and discussing how it is so strikingly consistent from one hot spot to another, as if driven by something more innate than cultural.
The essay was about a particular public park in London, but the professor’s lecture brought us closer to home - she explained to our amusement why the bathroom stalls in the men’s room of the Chemistry building (the building the lecture was in) used to be changed once every few weeks - whenever the maitainence staff found a glory hole carved in one - and why they eventually removed the stall doors altogether.
There was also once a glory hole hotspot in the university library, but the new campus cruising site was a men’s room in the Engineering building, she said.
I’m not sure how she got this information, but it was verifiably true. The Engineering building was open virtually 24-hours a day and even if the main doors were locked the hidden side door would be propped open. So when a friend told me he thought he knew where the infamous bathroom was, we decided to check it out one night after dark.
There was no way in hell you could miss what went on in the room - the first clue that it received more-than-usual traffic was the scattering of gay magazine pages on the floor. Then there were the painfully obvious open condom packages and dangling, soggy condoms cluttered in the bathroom’s back corner, while the white cinderblock wall behind the toilets bore a public sex directory:
“25/m/7inchUNCUT - be here this afternoon.”
“I love black cock,” in heavy permanent marker, with a phone number.
“Check out the restroom by CHEM140.”
“I’m here 10pm on Sundays” was another note. Beneath it was a doodle of an erect penis ejaculating. There were well over 100 messages and sketches there, while the black stall doors were whitewashed in piss or cum stains and water spots. All the toilet paper dispensers were emptied and the naked cardboard rolls lay on the ground.
There was no one in the room but us, and we only stayed long enough to read some of the messages and to giggle like nervous children sneaking pornography for the first time.
I was a sophomore then and had only hooked up with probably four or five guys in my entire life - I was surely too green to get involved in what went on in that room. But there was something titilating and amusing about it, so I checked back a few months later to see if the room was still messy, or if - even better - there would be someone there hoping to hook up, coughing coded messages, tapping his foot or flashing uneasy glances from the urinal. I wondered if I would recognize him as an acquaintaince from a gay party or the university GSA. I didn’t think anyone I knew would frequent a place like that, but was curious to see what kind of guys would be there - especially in a white, upper class college town where there was little reason, I mused to myself, not to come out and date in a straightforward way.
Around then I was first hearing about a website called Manhunt, which my gay under-21 friends still treated like a terrible place but if you pried they’d admit they have a profile there. There were other similarly straightforward hookup websites, along with a host of new gay “networking” sites like Connexion that claimed to help people find friends and serious relationships but you’d regardless get the “r u looking” messages every time you logged on. I had a number of profiles on different sites I’d check weekely, hoping to find the perfect guy and fall in love.
My plan was to go in to the Engineering men’s room pretending to wash my hands, find out if anyone was there, and if so, I’d scope him out, still being sure to leave before anything started. But this time my shock was the room’s cleanliness, washed in the jarring, sterile glow of fluorescent lights. The bathroom stalls were painted over, the toilet paper was neatly stocked, and the floors were clean. Scrawled on one wall in black pen was the solitary and telling message; “Where did everybody go?”
How does a place like that disappear so quickly?
I think I know the answer to that. I know that cruising spots like that should thrive on mobility, staying ahead of the university maitainence staff and campus security. They may have moved to another bathroom on campus or outside to a park when the eather got warmer. But though I’ve heard of many now-defunct cruising places that once dotted the campus, plus the city rec center and a mountain park up the road, I haven’t found or heard of anything like that going on today.
The new place for hooking up seems to be, instead, Online. It’s funny - after years of fruitless police stings, public health campaigns warning of AIDS or chlamydia, pleas from the home-and-family wing of the gay community and humiliating public arrests of George Michael and Larry Craig, the male-on-male cruising scene is being diminshed, at last, by something as simple as the personals section of Craigslist.
I don’t know if the new scenario is better or worse; it’s safer - you probably won’t find yourself in the middle of an illicit scene by accident, you can’t be targeted by cops, and it’s easier to have a conversation about what to do before you do it, which is good both for those concerned with safety and those who are shy.
And there are clear benefits to being able to put your HIV status right on an anonymous profile, to seek out those with the same status or to disclose a positive status in an impersonal way when the sting of rejection won’t be as intense.
I’m sure there are still cruising locations out there, but but they’re surely fewer and farther between. They represent a deviant underworld that is withering away. It’s a bittersweet transition; while the opportunity for casual hookups are as ripe as ever with the Internet, it just isn’t nearly as fun to study or to watch.
It’s pretty irresponsible to suggest that hooking up online has any health benefits, how ever convenient it might be. When getting tested for STDs, one of the first questions asked is, “Do you meet guys online?” This is asked because it is understood to be a particularly at-risk population.
Oh fuck that, Steve. Every population of pole-smokers is “at-risk” according to CDC propeller heads. Do you think Manhunt is any more “riskier” than meeting some dude in the bushes at the park? I’d rather utilize Manhunt to hook up with someone than have to suffer the indignity of the tearoom. Hooray for science and technology!
Never forget an exam at Harvard- Sci Center, if I recall, had to submit an exam. Went for a piss in an anxiety ridden, busy men’s room. Stall doors had been removed long before. An older man with the most classic erect healthy penis was in the stall I headed to…whoa, the power of gods Priapus and Eros….I was so shocked by the Puritan grip being lost…veneer etc, and resented not indulging. Shame we’re losing our nature….hidden trysts I had all over Massachusetts and NY roadsides, or beaches, amid Nature, and which involved human touch, caress, and that, is god Eros, Love.
Oh stop it, you’re break’n my heart! Bittersweet?! There was nothing bitter about the transition away from gross, discusting, trashed PUBLIC bathrooms to the internet. It’s probably not any safer and those kind of hook ups will never garner you a boyfriend, so stop fooling yourself. But the upside is that I, and other guys who go to the mens room to use it the way it was intended, will not have to confront the embarrasing spectacle of sad queens who somehow failed to discover sciences latest triumph…THE BEDROOM!!
I miss the halcyon days of the tea room. That may not be PC or acceptible with todays uptight, image obsessed we wanna be just like the straights homos but I don’t give a shit what they think. It was exciting, it was a little dangerous, it was kinky, it was forbidden, it was certainly dirty, and it all played out like a “b” class porn flick. I haven’t done the tea room scene is years. It just got too dangerous and thanks to the internet, like my food, I don’t have to leave the house when I’m not in the mood. I can have my pizza, dry cleaning, groceries, and my tricks all delivered to my house. I think those cruising sites are helping to kill the tea room scene as well. It used to be a secret only we knew. Now any cop or politician looking to make a name for himself by being tough on perversion can log on, find out where the sex is happening (thank you, Cruisingforsex.com) and go hunting for fags. To them it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.
What a terrifically underinformed essay this is.
The theory that “the male-on-male cruising scene is being diminished” by online hookup sites is an interesting one, but the only evidence Matt P. cites to back it up is a dubious-sounding story about a seedy college tearoom (A restroom in a presumably functional, “upper class”-university building that is littered with condoms and gay magazines? Every college tearoom I know is cleaned regularly to help stave off the cruisers.) that, in just a “few months” time, is dramatically devoid of action. If this story is true it probably has more to do with law enforcement than it does with the popularity of Craigslist M4M.
And since when do cruising sites “thrive on mobility”? Tearooms only work if people know where they are. Spending a minute or two on cruisingforsex.com (which Matt P. apparently hasn’t done, else he’d know where his “[professor] got this information”) will easily illustrate that tearooms are hardy enough to survive for years, even through rough patches with the law. In fact, tearooms thrive on the secretive nature of the acts performed in them, where the peeing-and-pooping masses can go about their business without knowing that men are fucking in the next stall down.
Love or loathe them, tearooms provide a venue for men who want to have sex with other men in a quick and anonymous fashion, without the commitment of exchanging phone numbers and finding a suitable venue. For now, they’re alive and well.
The tearoom the author writes about was probably a victim of its own “suck-sess”. Someone has to clean up the after effects,the litter, the cum filled bags, slippery floors, writing on the wall, damage to the facilities, etc. If that someone gets tired of all the extra duty, they will complain to higher-ups, and the end begins. I’m not saying homos should pick up after themselves, but, a place thrives and dies by its own devices….
Tearooms are still alive, but since 9-11 many of the ones in colleges or larger buildings are off limits due to security issues, real or imagined. At least this is true in NYC. As for craigslist, isn’t it true that advances in technology are re-routed from the original intentions into more sexualized ones? The rancid squalor of the world wide web is evidence enough, god bless.
Maybe it’s not so much Craigslist taking the sex out of tearooms, but tearooms taking over Craigslist?
Anyway, gotta go, just got an email from my hookup on clist.
Bye boys.
(Cyber stall slamming shut sound)
Although I couldn’t have said it as eloquently as you, bacteriaburger, I completely agree. I think public bathroom sex is still alive and well and practice and the fantasies of many a gay man—-this one included (on the fantasy side only for many years).
There used to be a lot of cruising spots in Minneapolis and St. Paul - adult bookstores, University of Minnesota tearooms, parks, downtown restrooms, etc. They are all gone, not because men drifted to the internet or better spots but because The Authorities (city council, park board, bldg. management, police, etc.) decided to get rid of them. Same thing for the bath house - killed off by public decree.
One park along the Mississippi had been a cruising area for at least 30 years until it was radically reconfigured to allow drive-through surveillance by park police.
Laud Humprheys published TEAROOM TRADE in the late 1960s based on his research into the manners of sex in public toilets in St. Louis.
Stability was, and/or is, the name of the game in any public sex venue, because (as noted above) how did one find out about new locations? (Well, news about police activity is the old fashioned way.)
The internet has surely been more of a boon than a hindrance to casual sex - all kinds of information can now be had immediately that used to take years and years to accumulate.