Welcome to Love, Us, a column for telling queer love stories in all their glory. (And by glory, we mean all the big, beautiful moments and otherworldly little details that make making and falling in queer love so, so fun.) Read more from the series here.
“Garrett is a total bathroom queen,” my friend was explaining outside of Driftwood, a gay bar in San Francisco, in a way that was only embarrassing because it was entirely true. “Oh my god!” I said-slash-screamed, burying my face in a classic queer beverage known as a too-strong vodka soda. “What?!” they said. “You are! Own it!” Everyone at the table laughed before my friend added, “Just think of it like this: you’re part of the grand tradition of gay people getting it on at the urinal. It’s historical, babe.”
I’m not exactly sure when I first came to understand public sex as part of the queer experience, but it is, undeniably so. I didn’t learn about George Michael being propositioned by a cop in an L.A. public bathroom as it happened, probably because I was seven in 1998 (I love to be young and also old, another crucial part of the queer experience). But the story definitely brought the idea that there was a connective thread between gay sex and public (or at least semi-public) space into my consciousness. Not too many months before my friend outed me as a bathroom queen, we were standing in that exact spot during San Francisco’s Folsom Street Fair (the largest leather and fetish festival in the world, brag), watching someone get an admittedly sloppy blowjob on the curb. That was public, public.
It didn’t feel particularly revolutionary to watch two dudes fellate each other in the sunshine on the street, although they appeared to enjoy it, much in the same way it didn’t feel revolutionary when I did the same in bars across Washington, D.C., although I appeared to enjoy it, too. But if not revolutionary, acts like those are nonetheless part of a grand tradition of queer people getting it on at the urinal, on the street, or otherwise, as my friend pointed out. Queers have been having sex in public since time immemorial — I mean, it kind of just seems like the ancient Greeks were just constantly fucking in an outdoor gym? More recently, of course, queer people have been driven to have sex in public spaces more out of necessity than kink, even though those two impetuses are more symbiotic than they are opposite ends of the pole.
“The kind of legal status of what it is to be gay, or to do gay things, totally hinged on what was viewable in public,” Jeremy Atherton Lin, author of the new book Gay Bar (which is excellent, read it immediately) told me on a recent call, recounting a fact he notes in his book: that the decriminalization of homosexuality in London and many other places was contingent on the fact that sex acts be done in private. Basically, lawmakers were willing to legalize our sex lives (wow, thank you!), but only if we agreed to keep those sex lives behind closed doors (honestly, no thanks!).
Yet for many queer people, the public is private in many ways, and vice versa. Isn’t that why cruising is so integral to the history of queer sex? When homes became too public to feel safe in, for queer folks living with parents or nosy homos with nosier neighbors, cars and bathrooms and little wooded enclaves became sanctuaries.
“I also think of it in class terms, really,” Atherton Lin told me. “Think about affordable housing. You may not have been able to be totally private, and if your neighbor could see you, they could say your act was an affront to their sensibilities. I think a lot of it has to do with, obviously, finding a place where you can go to get off, but I think that often comes back to what you can afford.” For many queer people throughout history, sneaking off to a park or bathroom to get off has been inherently more affordable (not to mention more thrilling) than a hotel or a more private home.
