Bathroom gay cruising

Of the places gay people have transformed into sites to cruise for sex—from parks like the Central Park Ramble and Berlin’s Tiergarten, to sanctums love Provincetown’s Dick Dock and Fire Island’sMeat Rack—few have impacted the queer psyche like the common restroom.

“Mischief in universal 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]: Widespread Toilets, Private 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 common 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 objects and photos and conducting dozens of interviews about restrooms to try to capture the essence

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 know 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 see. Maybe it’s a smartphone millennial thing. Maybe it’s the pseudo-nostalgia I have for the fast-paced cruising encounters depicted in lgbtq+ 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 perfect synergy has happened to me maybe only once or twice in my decade of a gay sex life, and I wouldn’t illustrate them as especially good sexual experiences either. 

But for some reason, this magical possibility seems love enough of a basis to still pursue it all the time. And so, I discover 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 chilly, too, so my hands are going numb from idly refreshing a gay cruising app that I’ll identify by nam

How did toilet cruising work?
February 17, 2015 3:19 PM   Subscribe

I was reading an queer travel guide from 1980, and it reminded me that I've never understood the mechanics of the toilet pick-up. One of the notable features of the guide is that among all the bars and bathhouses listed, many locations also suggest cruising toilets. This seems soinherently sketchy. How would you know when it was safe to signal to somebody? Don't you race the constant risk of an embarrassing and unsafe confrontation? Do you actually have sex in the bathroom, or is a rendezvous point? And given that these locations are so well established that they appear in a travel guide, wouldn't they be easy pickings for the police?


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 planet. While cruising in the U.S. sounds risky, it seems like only those with a death aspire would cruise toilets as a tou

Public bathroom gay cruising: Exploring the dynamics and culture of public bathroom cruising

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CategoriesFunctions
qunhe-jwtRemember your login status: user id, name, email, avatar, character, region
qunhe-refreshRefresh your permissions: user id, name, email, avatar, character, region
showroom-jwtRemember your user id, email, company, and status
qh-localeStores your language preferences
qh-cm-fe-localeStores your language preferences
ktrackeridMonitors abnormal conditions during your visit
ktrackertimeMonitors abnormal conditions during y