By Paul Varnell

I have to plead a certain naiveté about this business of restroom sex. I have never solicited anyone for sex in a public restroom; nor, to the best of my knowledge, has anyone ever solicited me. Should I be hurt that no one ever did? Aren’t I attractive enough? Do I wear the wrong shoes? What am I doing wrong?

My discomfort with restroom sex, I suppose, is not so much moral as aesthetic. Public restrooms just don’t seem very appealing places to spend much time hanging around hoping for sexual connections. The ambiance—the chemical and bodily odors, the noises, the bustle of people going in and out—doesn’t seem very erotic. Maybe you get used to it. If you have enough sex in that kind of environment maybe you build up a conditioned response of finding it exciting. But I don’t think that’s a conditioned response I want to acquire.

Soon after I came out, friends took me to gay bars and told me about gay bathhouses. Those always seemed more attractive and convenient places to scout for sexual partners in the absence of a lover. And at bars and bathhouses if you failed to find a suitable partner, you could always socialize, get to know people, make friends, not just sit there idly on a hard bathroom fixture waiting for Mr. Anybody.

I had heard about this foot-tapping business (no one mentioned the playing footsie part) more than 35 years ago, but I guess I thought of it as something left over from the bad old pre-gay liberation days, something that would die out as people became more open about being gay and found more appealing places to meet other gay men.

But that sanguine view ignored a couple of things. 1) A lot of gay men live and work in locations that don’t have gay bars or bathhouses. With them I sympathize. 2) And a lot of gay men remain untouched by the message of gay liberation. They are married with families, or in the closet at work, or adhere to an anti-gay religion or refuse to acknowledge to themselves that they are gay. Some may even buy the religious line that homosexuality is wrong but find they cannot resist their “weakness.”

If they get caught in a restroom or highway rest stop incident, they may vociferously deny they are gay, thus implying that hanging around restrooms or rest stops is what gay men typically do. In other words, if their circumstances inhibit self-acceptance and public disclosure, their behavior on the basis of those circumstances, if revealed, simply supports the religious right’s propaganda that “the gay lifestyle” is lonely, seedy, and risky. Thanks for the great PR, guys.

Still, there do seem some openly gay men who enjoy hanging around restrooms or rest stops for just this sort of activity, or at least giving it a try when they have the opportunity. Maybe it is a kind of adventure. Maybe they enjoy the excitement of the uncertain possibility of sex. Behavioral psychologists tell us that the best way to reinforce a behavior is to provide intermittent rewards, not regular ones.

Yet I don’t think that I have ever overheard any such communicative behavior or any sounds of sexual activity any time I have had to use a public restroom. That suggests that it is pretty inconspicuous. So where do these (alleged) complaints come from? No one who doesn’t want to participate need respond to signals. They probably don’t even recognize them as signals unless they are looking for them. And how is any third party harmed by any of this?

I am no fan of Larry Craig. But even if the arresting officer is telling the truth (and it is always wise to be skeptical of vice officers), I have a hard time seeing anything that happened as illegal. Homosexual sex is legal, after all. And people assume they have privacy in their stalls. At most Craig was sending an invitation to engage in legal sex.

Nor does anything that allegedly happened amount to “lewd conduct.” Craig tapped his foot, then moved his foot to touch the other person’s foot. But Craig moved his foot only because he had a foot-tapping response from the other party. Had the officer not provided that enticement, Craig would presumably not have proceeded. Where is the lewdness? No wonder that charge was dropped. And what was “disorderly” (the vaguest of all charges) about contact between seemingly consenting adults?

And, really, if public establishments seriously wish to prevent sex between men in separate restroom stalls, why don’t they simply build the partitions all the way to the floor. That would be an easy way to end the problem!

Some of Paul Varnell’s previous columns are posted at the Independent Gay Forum (www.indegayforum.org). His e-mail address is pvarnell@aol.com.