Restroom gay cruising
Of the places queer people have transformed into sites to cruise for sex—from parks like the Core Park Ramble and Berlin’s Tiergarten, to sanctums appreciate Provincetown’s Dick Dock and Fire Island’sMeat Rack—few own 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 recent exhibition at Berlin’s Schwules* Museum, Fenster Zum Klo [Window to the Toilet]: Public Toilets, Confidential 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, gender non-conforming people, escorts, libertines, are also unlikely bastions of freedom,” Martin writes.
Martin has spent years collecting tens of thousands of historic objects and photos and conducting dozens of interviews about restrooms to try to capture the essence
Public bathroom gay cruising: Exploring the dynamics and identity of public bathroom cruising
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How did toilet cruising work?
February 17, 2015 3:19 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 powerful 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 earth. While cruising in the U.S. sounds risky, it seems like only those with a death wish would cruise toilets as a tou
Cruising a Hotel Basement Bathroom in Search of My Queer Lineage
Let’s say you have a half-hour to kill in midtown Manhattan around 7 p.m. Surely somebody needs their dick played with.
I don’t comprehend why my horned-up Neanderthal brain always thinks it’s worthwhile to seek out somebody decently attractive to hook up with on a moment’s notice. Maybe it’s a smartphone millennial thing. Maybe it’s the pseudo-nostalgia I have for the fast-paced cruising encounters depicted in gay films, literature and anecdotes from friends. Men in the right mood find each other at the right time and the right place, and sparks fly.
Or at least so I’m told. Because this ideal synergy has happened to me maybe only once or twice in my decade of a same-sex attracted sex life, and I wouldn’t describe them as especially good sexual experiences either.
But for some reason, this magical possibility seems like enough of a basis to still pursue it all the hour. And so, I detect myself wandering between Seventh and Eighth Avenues peering into a sterile chain cafe too overwhelmed by tourists for me to sit in peace. It’s cold, too, so my hands are going numb from idly refreshing a gay cruising app that I’ll identify by nam
Secret Signals: How Some Men Cruise for Sex
Aug. 28, 2007 — -- While many Americans may only be vaguely familiar with the idea of "cruising," there is a secret world of sex between men that exists in public places across the country.
The police officer who arrested Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, in a men's restroom at the Minneapolis airport for allegedly looking to engage in gay sex wrote in his June report that he "recognized a signal used by persons wishing to employ in lewd conduct."
Craig tapped his foot up and down and swiped his hand underneath the bathroom stall in which the undercover cop was sitting, according to the police report.
Those efforts led to Craig's arrest by Detective Dave Karsnia and the senator's responsible plea to a disorderly conduct bill. Craig told reporters today that he did nothing inappropriate and said his guilty plea was a mistake.
Public places like men's restrooms, in airports and train stations, truck stops, university libraries and parks, possess long been places where gay and bisexual men, particularly those in the closet, congregate in order to get together for anonymous sex.
Over time, people familia