Public Urinals

Today's New York Times news article featuring the arrest of two males for lewd behavior in a public restroom took me back to a long ago day when males who were sexually attracted to other males were desperate for venues where they could advertise that interest and find someone congenial with it.  Public lavatories were the place where a man who quite naturally has his penis out of his unzipped pants and in his hand could with a little adjustment and restraint turn into a man with an erection which he is stroking, the transformation suggests an entirely other agenda.  That's lewd behavior in the eyes of the police and get you days in the poky.  When I was eighteen and living in Manhattan, a rube from Iowa, sights of such men in public lavatories frightened me, either because "they didn't do such things in Iowa" or my own attraction to stroking erect penises came into play and scared me.  I tended to repress any attraction and moved on out of the urinal area.  As I grew more sophisticated I grew to understand that lots of lavatories were simply de facto meeting places for men who had nowhere to go to meet another male sexually.  These were the deeply closeted males, in a rigidly repressive society, the fifties, for instance, who might desperately crave even the merest hand-penis or mouth-penis contact to satisfy a deep well of desire, men who could never make so open a statement of desire as to walk into a gay bar.  Sad and desperate but all very true.  As a professor who used many a public toilet I can remember in the sixties the ground floor mens room in the Stanford University Library where the excessive foot traffic suggested other uses, the Boston Public Library's ground men's room where someone with a legitimate call to urinate sort of had to fight his way through the assemblage there for other purposes, the fourth floor of a certain classroom building at Boston University only in the evening, which I discovered once when I was teaching a night class on that floor. Nowadays it is sad that there are males out there who still cannot understand that it is now okay to meet other gay males socially and proceed to the dating game from that.  From the ones I have known these are male so damaged by their families, so thoroughly made to hate themselves and their desires that they have made a complete separation of their personalities and daily comportment from their homosexual desires.  A quick orgasm and out of the place has a kind of sordid logical alignment with the quick dump one can take in the stall of the same room, then relief, clean up, on to big and better things.  The orgasm should never be left behind dismissed and forgotten, it should be the beginning of a whole new life. But then there are the "happily" married men, along with their wives "pillars of the church," whose brief moment of ecstasy in the stall stinking of urine has to make do for the other side to the relationship they know at home and support on Sundays. All so sad.