Gay Cruising And Public Toilets 1

We do not encourage illegal public behaviour
 
HISTORY: 

Necessity, Secretive, Expedient, Curiosity, Depressing

NOW:

Secretive..?  Expedient..? Curiosity..?  Addictive..? Fun..?

HYPOCRISY:

Why are YOU sneering at cruising in public toilets, when YOU are publicly cruising on Grindr, checking out guys and hanging your cock out..?

(Underlining, highlighting and bold print by FuelMix):

Fifty years ago cruising and cottaging [action in public toilets] weren’t the fetishes or fantasies that they arguably are now; they were a necessity — the only way for most men to meet other men, albeit it a risky one. 

From the early 1950s, there was a witchhunt afoot, with Conservative home secretary David Maxwell Fyfe vowing to “rid England of this plague” as he dispatched undercover policemen to prowl in parks, cruising grounds and public toilets. Their enticements led to the imprisonment of an estimated 1,000 gay men each year but that didn’t put a stop to the covert goings-on. 

That’s because, a leading gay rights campaigner believes, cruising and cottaging represented the only way for gay men to explore their sexuality. Bernard Greaves, who, as a policy adviser to the Liberals in the Seventies, became the first openly gay man to hold national office in a UK political party, points out: “The idea of being ‘out’ wasn’t a concept at all and it was easier to find sex cottaging than it was in bars. 

“There were no gay bars as such, anyway. People lived in a straight world and lived straight lives.” ........ “You grew up in isolation and you didn’t know anyone else who was gay. In fact, the word ‘gay’ wasn’t in use, the word most people used at that time was ‘queer’, and there was no readily available information or knowledge about homosexuality.” 

Bernard went to Cambridge University and, aged 19, first encountered cottaging [action in public toilets] when he wandered into public toilets 50 yards from his lodgings. The “furtive, anonymous and depressing scenario” was better than nothing, ......

“You’d spend hours trying to find somebody, visiting one set of toilets then another, enduring the cold and damp, spending a lot of time waiting for a fleeting sexual experience that wasn’t particularly satisfying,” .....

.....Bernard was eventually introduced to a barman whose place of work served as a meeting place for a small group of gay men. “You couldn’t say it was a gay bar because the concept didn’t exist. It was full of straight people but towards one end of the room a group of gay men would meet up.” They were cautious and used Polari, [gay slang] “which I didn’t understand at all .....

They’d discuss chat-up etiquette, which included approaching someone and, if they weren’t interested, making it seem like a joke. “That’s an art that has largely gone now and very often it was the older gay men who mentored the younger ones. Having older gay men teach younger gay men how to survive in a hostile society was very important.”

.....Bernard moved to Huddersfield and discovered the concept of cruising in cinemas, where there was a lot of furtive sexual behaviour in what were then dark and dingy auditoria. “It was another form of anonymous sex and again not all that satisfactory,”.....

Flash-forward to the present, and gay sex has never been easier to arrange — as simple as ordering a pizza, delivered to your door via an app or served up in gay saunas around the country. 

Sodomites Walk

But cottaging and cruising have links dating back to at least the 17th century, with the first recorded instance of entrapment being the 1698 case of Captain Edward Rigby, who was lured to a private room in a London tavern by a man on the payroll of the Society for the Reformation of Manners, a group which aimed to suppress what it saw as profanity and immorality by bringing private prosecutions. 

The turn of the 18th century saw the rise of molly houses: taverns, coffee houses and private rooms where gay men could meet. These were frequently raided by the police, but the publicity this caused only served to draw more gay men to the capital, with the London Journal reporting that men cruised for sex in Covent Garden, Lincoln’s Inn, St James’s Park and a path in Moorfields that was dubbed Sodomites’ Walk. 

Public toilets, .......were also haunts for gay men. A 1706 court report vividly details Edward Barker being prosecuted for poking his member through a hole in a cubicle wall, and in 1728 John Bennet was found guilty of attempted sodomy. 

In 1890, a case was brought against the Earl of Euston, who had allegedly been cruised by a male prostitute in Piccadilly and accompanied him to a notorious Cleveland Street brothel, in London’s West End. 

The jury acquitted the earl but the trial and that of Oscar Wilde for gross indecency five years later prompted many gay men to be less brazen. They began to rendezvous in Turkish baths and swimming pool cubicles......

After the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967, there were still very few gay bars in the UK so men who wanted fast sex often found it in toilets. 

Dermot........ is in his seventies....... he discovered the cottaging scene, only to be arrested in 1973 at a urinal in Deptford. He stood next to a good looking guy who turned out to be a policeman (“very pretty, nice cock as well”) and a witness — required to make any charge stick — appeared out of nowhere. The resulting £1.50 fine did little to discourage Dermot. 

Bernard Greaves remembers high-profile court cases .......but it was only after decriminalisation that police action visibly increased. 

“They felt they had to uphold morals, and while homosexual behaviour between consenting adults over the age of 21, in private, had been legalised, sex in public toilets was an ‘outrage’ and they were going to stop it,” .....

Entrapment is something Bernard went on to publicly challenge in the early 1970s, branding it an absolute outrage. He spent three months researching it and presented his evidence to the Cambridge Evening News, which gave the subject extensive coverage. “It was not just pursuing gay men, it was spying anybody who used public toilets for legitimate reasons,” ........

“There were police officers concealed in the roof and they had pretty policemen trying to entice gay men. In one toilet they actually installed a secret room through which they could observe men using the urinals. It was disgraceful.”

Dark Alleys 

Unlike Bernard, I was a teenager in the 1970s ..... as a teenager in Nottingham, I was under the age of consent — 21 at the time — and didn’t dare to try to bluff my way into the gay clubs that I’d heard existed down dark alleys and behind discreet doorways. In addition, I had little confidence in being able to attract other men with my looks but the usual rules of attraction didn’t apply when it came to cruising; no-one was looking for love or Mr Right. 

..... “There was nothing lovelier than some hot action on a hot summer night,”.....“It felt decadent and very non-judgmental because it didn’t seem to be about body images or what you looked like, just what you had to offer when you whipped it out".

....... “I just wanted sex, not pleasantries and all that game playing.” 

Chris, who is now 47, discovered cottaging when he was out shopping with his parents in Poole, Dorset. Soon he was travelling to London where the cottages were heaving, especially at lunch time. Public loos outside the capital could be hit-and-miss but were essential for married men. 

“I never saw so many wedding rings,” Chris laughs. 

But cottaging wasn’t only a means for married men to find quick, easy and anonymous sex. Pete, now 74, found his life partner Mike while cruising a sauna in the 1970s...... 


.......Pete and Mike got chatting, consummated their relationship back at Mike’s flat and remained a couple until Mike died in 2010. Pete doubts whether a relationship could develop from cruising nowadays, “because sex is too easy and people are more likely to move on”.


Causing Offence

Bernard Greaves thinks cottaging, ..... is on the way out because sex in public toilets is illegal, whereas sex in the open isn’t — unless it is deemed as causing offence to other people. And for some people, he sighs, cruising remains a necessity. 

“There are lots of people who are still in the closet. ..... the idea of being openly gay in ethnic minority communities, or for that matter in Eastern European communities, is still appallingly difficult and lots of them are using cruising areas and saunas.” 

Present-day cottager Carlo, 35, enjoys the speed and convenience. “It offers one thing all men want,” he explains, “namely a quick wank in the middle of the day.” He doesn’t advertise the fact that he does it, however, adding: “People are ashamed of it. You can’t tell people: ‘we met in a toilet’.” 

Zia X, a 28-year-old Londoner ...... has no such qualms. “I’m very outspoken and I’ve always been open about cottaging and cruising. People could be quite judgemental but when Grindr came along they were getting up to much the same thing only in a digital way and that felt like hypocrisy to me.” ...... But times have changed. “The spaces I used to use, are nowhere near as busy now and I don’t cruise outside so much any more because it’s cold,” says Zia, who now tends to stick to saunas. “Going on dates can be complicated and you’re always trying to read people’s emotions, but when you’re in a cruising environment such as a sauna or toilets you know what you're there for." 

But outdoor cruising, Zia feels, hasn’t stopped. ......

Zia adds: “Many people say most of the activity has shifted online and that’s partly true, but a lot of people still use the parks. I’m not so sure about toilets, though. A lot of them are closed down or have heightened security. There’s an infamous one a mate of mine used to frequent in the British Library and they had a whole system going on, with look-outs and day-long sex parties, but then security found out and cracked down on it.” 

The city used to be cruisier, Zia says. “Quite often I’d make eye contact with someone on public transport and that would lead to something somewhere, but that hasn’t happened in years. Maybe I’m getting older and I’m not catching those eyes.” 

Or maybe all those eyes are glued to Grindr. The popularity of saunas is a reminder that gay sex is still furtive for many people, even if they’ve taken it indoors. “Living in quite a queer world, I assume everyone is out but going to saunas it’s like: ‘Oh wow, there’s a swathe of people who are in straight marriages, with kids, who aren’t out’,” Zia says. 

“There are still lots of people who haven’t found that place to express their desires openly so they use these more secretive places to do so. 

“It’s a part of queer life that is still very much with us.”

-----"Why do so many gay men go cruising and cottaging?", by Simon Button, Attitude, Issue 285, July 2017