Tearoom History
by David Bianco
For over 100 years, police surveillance and sting operations have
targeted public toilets - or "tearooms" - frequented by gay men in search of sex.
Restroom facilities were probably first used for sex in the days before
indoor plumbing. In crowded urban areas, where families and neighbors lived
in close quarters and privacy was nonexistent, sex could take place
unobserved in outhouses.
By the late 19th century, many cities were overcrowded and had poor
sanitation. For public health purposes, public restrooms were built in parks
and near transportation facilities. Called "comfort stations," these
restrooms dotted the landscape in cities from New York to Seattle.
However, some men quickly began to use them for a different kind of comfort.
As early as 1896, the public facilities in Manhattan's Battery Park and City
Hall Park were associated with homosexual activity. The public men's room
beneath Seattle's Pioneer Square was a popular cruising area by the first
decades of the 20th century. During the 1930s, the Works Progress
Administration (WPA) put the unemployed to work building hundreds of public
restrooms in parks across the country, thus giving an inadvertent boost to tearoom activity.
Though it's unclear when and where it originated, the slang term "tearoom"
(that is, "t-room," which was short for "toilet-room") enabled men to discuss
their public sexual encounters with each other in a coded way.
Heterosexuals understood tearooms very differently, as genteel cafes where people
enjoyed afternoon tea and pastries.
One historian notes that, ironically, the use of public facilities for
homosexual encounters gave men a measure of privacy. Sex in city parks was
risky because it was out in the open. For many poor and working-class
men, then, public restrooms doubled as private sexual space.
But tearooms were also frequented by other classes. The washrooms of New
York's subway system were "(the) meeting place for everyone," as one man put
it. A businessman on his way home to his wife and children in one of the
outer boroughs could engage in quick sex at the end of the workday but still
not identify as gay. With the growth of suburbs after World War II, tearoom
activity shifted away from urban centers to rest stops on the highways that surrounded cities.
From the very beginning, tearooms fell under police scrutiny. The first
arrests in Manhattan occurred soon after the opening of public facilities in
1896. To circumvent arrest, one man would often remain outside the restroom
as a lookout, warning those inside if a policeman was approaching. An arrest
could ruin a man's life: When newspapers published the names and
addresses of those arrested, men lost families, jobs, and housing.
More intricate surveillance techniques soon came into use. In 1920 in Boise,
the men's room at one downtown building, the Boise Valley Traction Company,
was a popular tearoom. During the summer of that year, the management hired
one of its employees to spy through a hole in the men's room ceiling. His
surveillance resulted in the arrest and conviction of two men, who were
sentenced to five years each in the Idaho State Prison.
Entrapment was another method for policing tearoom sex. As early as the 1910s
in New York, plainclothes officers entered park toilets and subway washrooms,
pretending to be cruising for sex. In some cases, police decoys blackmailed
men for hush money. In the early 1960s, a man in St. Louis admitted that he
had made eight such payoffs to undercover cops, ranging in amount from
$60 to $300 each, in order to avoid arrest.
One of the most famous tearoom arrests in U.S. history took place in October
1964. That month, the District of Columbia's vice squad began conducting
surveillance of the basement restroom of the YMCA on G Street, just two
blocks from the White House. Spying through peepholes in the locked door of
an unused shower room, police officers caught two men in flagrante delicto.
The arrest, however, proved to be far from routine: One of the men was
Walter Jenkins, chief of staff to President Lyndon B. Johnson.
When the scandal broke, Johnson made televised remarks saying he was as
shocked as if his wife Lady Bird had murdered one of their daughters. Jenkins
resigned, and Johnson - acting on the commonly held belief that gay men were
national security risks - ordered the FBI to conduct a full investigation of
Jenkins's activities while in office. The 100-page "Report on Walter Wilson
Jenkins," released at the end of October, concluded that the former chief of
staff had never "compromised the security or interests of the United States."
Despite the risks, tearoom activity has continued to the present. In a
much-publicized incident in April 1998, singer-songwriter George Michael was
arrested for "misdemeanor lewd conduct" in the public men's room of Will
Rogers Memorial Park in Beverly Hills when, according to his account, a
handsome plainclothes police officer entrapped him.
"You don't see it as a massive risk," Michael later explained, "if there's no
one else around, and if there's someone ... waving their genitals around in
front of you." Michael received a small fine and performed 80 hours of
community service. His arrest, he said, brought him "into the political
arena," forcing him out of the closet and compelling him to speak out against
the kind of police entrapment that for decades has faced gay men seeking tearoom sex.
Edelman, Lee. "Tearooms and Sympathy, or, The Epistemology of the Water
Closet," in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove,
Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (Routledge, 1993).
Humphreys, Laud. Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places (Aldine
Publishing Co., 1970).
Leap, William, ed. Public Sex/Gay Space (Columbia University Press,
1999).
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