Sunday, September 16, 2007
News

The Men's Room

Public restroom sexual encounters and their consequences

CREDIT: Shutterstock.com

By Stephanie Ramage

One sunny afternoon last winter, a preadolescent boy walking with his mother in Piedmont Park walked into the men’s room near the children’s playground and quickly walked out again. He seemed upset. “Never mind,” he said. “I don’t have to go. Can we go home now?” He and his mother had just arrived at the park. She asked what was wrong and he said he’d seen something, he wasn’t sure what, but it involved at least one man. She guessed what was happening in the men’s room and told her son that they should find a police officer and report it. He said, again, that he just wanted to leave.

Once home, his mother called a friend who worked for the city and related the incident. The friend said he would pass it along to the police. The woman didn’t care that the incident involved men. She would have reacted the same if it had involved a heterosexual couple who were having sex in a public restroom next to a children’s playground. When she related the story to others, many of them, gay and straight alike, shrugged and said, in essence, that “a lot of gay men do that.”

Actually, they don’t.

Only a small percentage of homosexuals engage in sex in public restrooms. They are mostly males, some of whom are “in the closet” and justifiably terrified of the severe consequences that being exposed will call down upon their heads. Others do it because they find such risk exciting—just as some heterosexuals do. Or they have a sexual compulsion, so they use anonymous sex as a way to deal with anxiety. Reasons for engaging in “tea room” sex, as it is sometimes called, may vary, but the reaction to public disclosure of such activity is fairly uniform.

When Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) was arrested by Minneapolis police in June for allegedly soliciting sex in an airport men’s room—by tapping his foot and then moving it close to the foot of an undercover police officer—a ferocious public flogging followed. Calls for his resignation echoed through the media, Democrats used him as an example of Republican hypocrisy and Republicans used him as a sacrificial lamb to prove their adherence to their own conservative standards.

Last week, Craig withdrew his former guilty plea, strongly denying that he is gay, saying that it was a newspaper investigation into his sexual history that had stressed him out so much that he entered the guilty plea in the first place. For some, the entire debacle has been an eloquent measure of how little we have progressed socially since the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s.

You haven’t come a long way, baby

In 1965, sociologist Laud Humphreys submitted his doctoral dissertation on homosexuality. After reading it, his professor encouraged him to investigate the social constraints of impersonal sexual encounters. Ten years later, Humphreys published what is thought of as the seminal work on public restroom sex between men, titled “The Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places.” One would think that a 42-year-old book would be outdated, but according to sociologists and psychiatrists interviewed by The Sunday Paper, it is not.

Drawing on Alfred Kinsey’s “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,” Humphreys referenced numbers still cited today: “All that may be said with some degree of certainty is that the percentage of the male population who participate in tearoom [public restroom] sex in the United States is somewhat less than the 16 percent of the adult white male population Kinsey found to have ‘at least as much of the homosexual
as the heterosexual in their histories.”

Humphreys explained that men who are interested in such encounters tend to post themselves outside the restroom, perhaps pretending to read a newspaper, watching the restroom door and not going in until someone who appeals to them enters. Men interested in “action” tend to use the end urinals, as opposed to those in the middle, and they allow their private parts to be seen, while heterosexuals or other men who are not interested tend to stand close to the urinal, shield their privates from view and look straight down as they urinate. If consent is signaled, the action moves to a toilet stall.

However, Humphreys documented not only the signals that are used but also the social outcomes of being caught in such encounters. He related the following excerpt from an anonymous letter in the journal “Christianity and Crisis,” published June 13, 1966: “I am primarily concerned with this grieving family in my parish, with the fact that we have lost such a wonderful man, and that the news media played such an important part in driving him to suicide. There is no question but his learning that his name had been published was the direct cause of his jumping off a bridge. While I would agree with those who have told me that men who need to search for their sexual outlet in public men’s rooms are sick people, I would wonder whether these same people would approve of our listing the names of people going into mental hospitals. I also would say very strongly that a society that pays its policemen to spend hours on their haunches or lying prostrate on top of a building peering through a hole to spy on men is a very sick society.”

That’s not, however, the way the Atlanta Police Department carries out its restroom sex “sting” operations, which predate the Craig scandal by at least a year. Herschel Grangent, the APD’s public information officer at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, says that reports of Craig’s “foot-tapping” were news to him. He wasn’t aware of such a signal. Officers assigned to the airport restroom detail, he says, don’t look for anything so subtle as tapping feet. Instead, he says, the undercover officers have made arrests for solicitation that was much more blatant.

“A man would do something to entice the officer to participate in an indecent act,” says Grangent. “They’re very obvious. For example, a man will verbally proposition the officer or expose himself in a very inappropriate way.”

At the airport, such arrests, for what is termed “public indecency,” typically involve an undercover officer outfitted with luggage, sometimes an iPod, dressed, says Grangent, “just like everybody else at the airport.”

The result has been that such incidents at the airport have dramatically decreased.

“In January, we had 12 arrests and in June, July and August, we had a total of five,” he says.

Is it possible that the arrestees were international travelers whose home countries tolerate such activity? Like Holland, maybe?

Not even in Amsterdam

It turns out that in Amsterdam, where Americans tend to believe that anything goes, sex in public places is illegal.

“Even in ‘liberal’ Holland, many men visit highway stops and urban parks,” says Geert Hekma, a sociologist at the University of Amsterdam. “They are still closeted homosexual men, or bisexuals. But a significant group simply likes the promiscuity, or the outside environment for gay sex.”

Hekma says Dutch authorities do tend to turn a blind eye to such activity, though, which angers the general public who “feel offended by such sex when it is gay rather than when it is straight, which happens as often, but is less concentrated—gays need specific places as a minority while straight people do it everywhere in nature, or in cars. My heterosexual American students have told me many stories of how they had their first sexual encounter somewhere in a parking lot in a car, or in the hidden corner of a park.”

Hekma points out that Craig is only the latest American politician who has been publicly exposed for such alleged acts. (In “Tearoom Trade,” Humphreys notes that a presidential assistant was arrested in the men’s room of a Washington, D.C. YMCA in 1964 on similar charges.)

What happens to these men, says psychiatrist Fred S. Berlin, should prompt compassion rather than condemnation. Berlin, who directs the National Institute for the Study, Prevention and Treatment
of Sexual Trauma at Johns Hopkins University, says that quite often men who engage in public restroom encounters are, like Craig, married or otherwise involved in a stable relationship. (He adamantly notes that Craig is accused of doing nothing more than tapping his foot.) The motivation for having sex in a public restroom, he says, is not necessarily that a man is secretly gay and seeking an anonymous outlet. Instead, says Berlin, human sexuality exists in a broad range. Some people are more gay or more “straight” than others, and unfortunately, he says, gay politics have done to bisexuals what straight politics did to gays: disowned them.

Out of the closet, into the stall

In order for the gay community to consolidate its agenda, he says, it has promoted the rigid idea that one is either gay or straight, pushing bisexuals even further into the margins of society. Berlin has counseled men who have been caught in homosexual encounters, and says that many of them seem to be deeply in love with their wives and do not think of themselves as gay. Additionally, they may have a sexual compulsion, as some straight men and women do, that prompts them to comfort themselves with anonymous sex.

Having sex in a restroom where children might pop in is inarguably a bad idea, for anyone. But the history of men participating in the “tearoom trade” has been as tragic as it has been sordid. When they are caught, their lives are torn apart. Bisexuals, in particular, may feel pressured to “choose sides,” something that they may be ill-equipped to do. They often lose the people they love most—their wives and children.

Berlin cautions wives or partners who suspect their husbands or lovers of being involved in public restroom encounters to approach the subject carefully, keeping in mind the explosive nature of such a secret. He recommends that the confrontation take place with a counselor present.

But he also offers a bit of hope: Some wives are actually relieved to finally find out what’s going on.

“Some wives even say, ‘I’d be more threatened if this were another woman,’” he says, explaining that what he sees among his patients is that it is possible for a person to love someone deeply regardless of what he calls “sexual urges” and to forgive, just as one would forgive someone for any infidelity or “temptation.”

“It’s important to remember that our sexuality is not something we decide, it’s usually something we discover,” says Berlin. “I discovered that I was attracted to members of the opposite gender, and my life has been a bit easier because of it.” SP