Douglas Messerli | Gay Bathroom Sex [essay]

gay bathroom sex

by Douglas Messerli

 

It is rather startling to suddenly perceive as I recently have, that although it is a subject seldom mentioned in regard to LGBTQ cinema, one of the most recurrent activities played out on the screen, particularly in male gay movies, is sex in public bathrooms

   Although bedroom sex, and sex in almost any place other than a bathroom is far more common in queer cinema, it is still prevalent enough that it stands out in relationship to heterosexual moviemaking wherein such a subject very rarely appears, primarily because the two sexes are separated by separate facilities.  But just scanning some of the movies I have written about by the date of this essay took me aback.

     No movie embraces sex in public lavatories more fully Frank Ripploh’s 1980 film Taxi zum klo (Taxi to the Toilet), wherein the central character is so fond of outhouse sex that he escapes from a hospital bed to a public toilet in a taxi, just as the title suggests. Canadian director John Greyson’s 1988 film Pissoir (aka Urinal) brings together an entire assemblage of famous gay artists to study the history and current problems in the Toronto and Ontario province’s public toilets with regard to gay sex. William E. Jones’s Tearoom (2006) is a “found” work of actual police surveillance videos of the Mansfield, Ohio town public bathroom where numerous gays were arrested for having sex that recontextualizes the original footage used for entrapment.

      But far more telling is that that location of sexual activities were central in gay films as early as Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947) and continued to appear regularly in gay cinema in films made in numerous countries and cultures such as James Bigood’s Pink Narcissus (1971 but made earlier), Rosa von Prauheim’s It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse… of the same year, Francis Savile’s Equation to an Unknown (1980), Paul Morrisey’s Forty Deuce (1982)—wherein a Penn Station bathroom is even described as one of the central figure’s “office”—Stephen Frears’ Prick Up Your Ears (1987), Eythan Fox’ Time Off (1990), Constantine Giannaris’ Caught Looking (1991), Patrice Chéreau’s Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train (1998) (sex in a train toilet), Simon Shore’s Get Real (1998), Kōschi Imaizumi’s Angel in the Toilet (1999), João Pedro Rodrígues O Fantasma (2000), Lawrence Ferber’s Birthday Time (2000), Welby Ings’ Boy (2005), Pedro Almadóvar’s Bad Education (2004), Adam Baran’s Love and Deaf (2004), Stephen Haupt’s The Circle (2014), Antonío Hens’ Doors Cut Down (2017), and Sebastien Muñoz’ The Prince (2019).

      Along with the ten films discussed in this essay, mostly films from the second decade of the 21st century, this is just a sampling of what I presume are dozens of the others I will eventually encounter in my queer film viewings.

      People of the same sex, many of whom are interested in observing their fellow’s private sexual organs, are of a necessity brought together in such public places, and the fact that given that many such individuals cannot make use of their own homes because of their age, the propinquity of parents, children, wives, and even husbands as well as other family members, make these highly accessible public spaces a natural alternative for sexual intercourse, despite and even because of their notable restrictions by law and police surveillance.

      There is, moreover, the sense the excitement of challenge of public sex behavior, which obviously brings out the exhibitionism and voyeurism hidden within in various degrees in most individuals. If one were simply to look over the vast lists of even Hollywood stars, openly gay and closeted heterosexuals, who have been arrested over the years for public exhibition of private body parts or for lewd behavior I think it would attest to this reality, let alone the countless numbers of everyday gay and “straight” men who have arrested and imprisoned for public sex.

      And then is the anonymity of such places. Even the back room of bars and porno bookstores, most of which were closed down forever during the AIDS crisis, would have more reason to recognize their regular visitors than public bathrooms, where thousands of different individuals come and go during open hours. Especially in large urban areas, such spots permit even those heterosexuals who are afraid of being labeled as gay an opportunity to experience queer sex.

      Moreover, not all public bathrooms are equal. Some gain underground reputations as being spots where gay men cruise while others are generally bereft of such activities. Not every public toilet is a cruising spot, surely a blessing for straight men many of whom want no part in participating or even observing through the corner of their eyes such activities. Yet, some such bathrooms are equally notorious for attracting heterosexual men.

      Finally, such locations are, after all, dedicated to the release of bodily fluids, all which provide us some pleasure.

      Yet beyond these general statements, I cannot totally explain—without writing a long and researched tome that goes far beyond the purposes of this study—why gay men throughout modern history have been willing to risk such behavior in public cottages, toilets, WCs, bathrooms, latrines, men’s rooms, comfort stations, pissoirs or whatever you want to call them. And despite all the attempts to restrict, close down, and correct such behavior in public places, sexual action has continued to take occur in these public spaces so significantly that queer cinema obviously feels it is necessary to portray it.

       Eight of the ten films I discuss below are from the second decade of the new century, and accordingly I have entered this gathering under the year of the third of these entries, 2010, instead of the first in 2006. As usual, however, I have listed all the films in red under the year in which they were released to show their places within the context of when they were created.

       These films represent a wide range of bathroom sex, from Argentinian director Claudio Bonelli’s wry commentary of an unlikely young man’s encounter with a regular bathroom denizen In el WC (Restroom) of 2006, the youthful explorations of teenage schoolboys in Brazilian director Felipe Sholl’s Tá (Okay) (2008), an attempted arrest that ends instead in a bathroom tango and the unfulfilled desires of the cop in Julien Leyre’s Honeypot (2010), a police sting of bathroom sex in a small midwestern town in Monte Petterson’s Caught (2011), a near-homophobic scare-tactic pic against such sex in public park bathrooms in Jane Pickett’s The Men’s Room (2012), something close to a panegyric of pleasure of the sex in gay subway stations in Ashton Pina’s WC (2014), a satire about the propensity of such activity of school and public bathrooms in  Erik Clemensen’s two shorts of 2014, also titled The Men’s Room and The Men’s Room 2, to the far more-nuanced tale about a regular meetup of an outsider and security guard at a factory’s public lavatory in South African director Chadlee Skrikker’s Arrangement (2019), and another comic satire, this of opera bathroom queens in US director João Dall'Stella’s Stalls (2019).

 

Los Angeles, October 21, 2022

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2022).