William E. Jones | Tearoom / 2007

framed coming and going

by Douglas Messerli

 

William E. Jones (editor) Tearoom / 2007

 

Researching public bathroom sex for a documentary project, the important documentarian of gay is gay concerns William E. Jones, uncovered a 56 minute long film made by the Mansfield, Ohio Police Department in 1962, wherein cameramen hid in a closet to film the clandestine sexual activities occurring in the bathroom. These clips were used in court as evidence against the defendants, 38 of them found guilty of sodomy which carried, at the time, a mandatory one year-sentence in the state penitentiary.

     Some background information about how these tapes came to be made is surely of interest. The taping arose, in part, from a near hysterical reaction that arose in June 23, 1962 when Jerrell R. Howell, a Mansfield resident, was arrested and admitted to killing to young girls whom he had attempted to force to perform oral sodomy. During interrogations Howell pinned the blame on the men’s public bathroom near the city’s main square. Found incompetent to stand trial, Howell soon became a scapegoat for homosexual activity, acts which at the time were deemed as deviant as child molestation. The result was the installation of cameras in the public square bathroom as the public outcry became what critic Roberto Tejada describes as a “media spectacle.”

       In the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, Mansfield was a successful business center with several notable factories including the Westinghouse Electric Corporation, the Tappan Stove Company, the AK Steel plant, and the Mansfield Tire and Rubber Company. Many of these industries closed or left the city in the recession of the 1970s, resulting in a significant loss of jobs and population, the city sharing the problems of nearby Cleveland and Columbus, between which it lays. In 1960 the city’s population was 47,325, similar to its population today of around 47,500.

       Fascinated by what he found on this unedited series of tapes of men and various classes, races, and ages coming together to have sex, Jones determined to present the footage as part of his recontextualization of gay historical documents with a minimum of editorial intervention.

     The result is many long moments of utter boredom, but basically a fascinating document of the comings and goings of workers, businessmen, vagrants, and even children who visit the public toilet, a great many of them to engage in sexual activities involving everything from mutual masturbation and oral sex to anal copulation and simple voyeurism.

    These men purposely endangered their reputations and daily lives by seeking out sex in this Mansfield toilet, many of them apparently with nowhere else to go, some of them clearly city leaders, perhaps married, and all—handsome and plain, thin, and corpulent—determined to allow themselves some momentary pleasure.

      By far the vast majority of these men are simply deprived of their privacy as they can be seen leaving the stalls and urinating back to the camera, washing up and even peering at their image in the two-way mirror rigged up for their detection.

      But a significant number of individuals have come to the spot of one thing only, to stand at the urinals and publicly masturbate, some clearly hoping to be seen through the tiny eye-hole drilled through the closest of the stalls, or to sit in one of the two stalls hoping for someone to come along whom they might jack off, suck, or fuck. As Tejada summarizes it:

 

“Encounters both cautious and perfunctory are evidenced here in hands and mouths groping to unfasten, release, arouse, and quicken. Tearoom trade in Mansfield did not differentiate on the basis of age, appearance, or race, and such democracy extended to the lives forever disturbed by this particular lens.”

      At all times there is a look of these men’s faces of perturbation, fear of discovery as others enter, and at moments pleasure—although always mitigated by the possibility of discovery if someone enters who disapproves and might report the activity to the police; all without imagining, however, that the police had already arrived and were watching.

    As the 56 long minutes pass, some of the visitors become familiar, the nerdy-looking young man, the beefy Italian-looking worker, a brown-suited businessman. And at moments there are delightful surprises, a thin handsome figure who darts in to view the scene, a lovely young man who temporarily engages. And gradually it is the proliferation of such desperately needy men that begins both to impress and depress the viewer. But in the end it is a sad parade of gay men and boys, the lives about to be destroyed perhaps because they have nowhere else to go to find a sexual partner and engage in the necessary and desired sexual relief.

      The spot demonstrates also not only a diverse gathering but men and boys who in 1962, a time when race relationships were still fraught in small midwestern cities, who engage in bi-racial sex, where men in suits fuck t-shirted workers, where the young do not fear sex with their older peers. Whatever their social and racial attitudes outside of this public toilet, inside the equal-opportunity desire of sex prevails.

       There is one moment with a white man appears to push a black man into position so that he might fuck him, but there are also black men who fuck whites. Besuited businessmen allow themselves anal penetration by day laborers.

     When Jones first showed this film in 2006, showings were closed down, until at one venue at least someone replaced all the men’s cocks with military missiles, which the censors allowed. The film was shown at the Whitney Biennial in 2008, and Jones wrote two essays for a book with photographs that mostly has taken the place of the film itself.

     In the end these desperate hurried men, coming and going, where framed not only by the police detectives lens, but before they even entered the public venue, their guilt determined by the lure of same sex behavior which little consideration of what that might have meant behind a hideous crime.

 

Los Angeles, October 24, 2022

Reprinted by World Cinema Review (October 2022).