Cottaging ... how were things back then for other toilet users?

[Gettingmadderallthetime]

I followed a rabbit hole (POW candidates for GE) that took me to this interview with Emily Thornberry. In this interview with pink news in 2020 she talks about her work as a barrister defending gay men accused of public indecency in toilets. She was obviously very effective at this. It made me think though ... Led me to think about objections to the presence of trans women in female toilets nowadays. Is this the same sort of 'joke' to ET and others trans allies feel they would make now? During the years when cottaging was prosecuted did anyone speak out about the impact of this activity on others - those who wanted to go to the toilet. I assume toilets were removed from service because of this. Some users will have had unpleasant experiences and I wonder whether this was a consideration at all. Other users in this case being men. To my view toilets are not places for sex or sexual gratification. There seems to be no consideration (then or now) for those who want to just use the toilet and be safe and private in doing so.

Yes, I realise that the police entrapped gay men then. This ruined lives. There were presumably some men who were caught in this net who were just using the loo?

'There was a time when the Metropolitan Police was absolutely fixated with cottaging.They used to hang out in cottages, they used to lie on roofs, they used to drill holes in walls of toilet doors and this sort of thing; sit and wait for gay men and then arrest them, and then they’d be taken to court. I basically developed a practice of representing gay men charged with gross indecency.

Basically, what I used to do was just make the jury laugh, because it was so ridiculous.

Here we were at a crown court in front of a jury with a judge and everything else, and they were charged with gross indecency. And it would be the same police officers would always turn up because you had to volunteer for it.
So you get the same police officers again and again, and I remember they would see me coming, and you could hear them saying, ‘Oh, God, I got that b*h again,’ because they knew the way I would be cross-examining them and I would be playing it for laughs.

I would say things like, ‘So, you say he was “masturbating furiously”, could you explain to the jury what that means?’And of course the police officer would just say, ‘Uhh!’ And I’d say, ‘Well, I’ve got some newspaper here, if I roll it up, would you like to show us?’ Once the jury cracked, once the jury starts to laugh, we knew that they were never going to get convicted.

But it was the only way to deal with this. It was ludicrous that people were being persecuted in this way, it seemed to me, and frankly, it had to be shown up to be ludicrous.

And that’s what we used to do.

I had absolutely no compunction of doing this. And the judges just didn’t know where to look – but you had to do it. You just had to take the mickey.'

https://www.thepinknews.com/2020/02/12/emily-thornberry-labour-leadership-contest-lgbt-rights-boris-johnson-trans/

Sorry but what’s POW, GE and ET?

Prisoner of war?
Gastro enteritis?
Extra Terrestrial?

Yes, there were certain public toilets that people avoided in terms of actually wanting to use the toilets. And boys in particular were often forbidden from using toilets known to be places where cottaging went on.

This is actually still an issue in a park near my sister's house. It's worse in the evenings, but there is a certain area that is a known meet up for anonymous gay sexual encounters. It's a kind of woodsy place with a path, and the men go in the bushes and screw. There are from time to time incidents of people who are unaware walking their dogs there who get quite a shock, but locals don't use the space and don't let their kids go there.

Party of Women
General Election
Emily Thornbury

Party of Women
General Election
Emily Thornberry

I remember chatting to a gay guy at work who was extremely open about his activities. He was saying how he could go and have sex with anyone, right this minute. He opened some app or other and there was a guy who had posted saying he was in the end toilet in the Marks & Spencer's toilets in my nearest big city and to knock twice on the door if you wanted him to give you oral sex. I was thinking about the other guys going to the toilet there on how horrible that would be for them.

DH was very cautious about using public loos when he was younger ( very good looking, was hit on in clothing shops as well😵‍💫). My father worked in the West End just after the war, he said that some toilets were known for being gay ( he would have said homosexual) hang outs, but that straight guys using them were pestered as well.

Why is this a big joke to Emily? Do men’s right to privacy and to pee without being hassled and sexually harassed not matter? I suppose it is just part of the agenda to normalise every sort of sexual / queer behaviour nb NOT talking about consenting adults in private!

One of the reasons I spend so little time on the feminism board. It's all abbreviations and 'in the know' language. There was one on Bristol earlier this week-didn't have a clue what they were on about. A PhD doesn't help, either.

When I went to Heaven once I was astonished at the light show , all the different bars , the beautiful people. Later I asked a gay friend why people still hang around grotty toilets. He thought some men were sort of 'stuck ' because of formative sexual experiences in schools , prisons , the armed forces etc. Perhaps less comfortable with the Scene. But given all the above I'm not sure why trans identified men should feel particularly unsafe in make toilets?

• NB I meant the gay club in Charing Cross not the Afterlife.

Thank you to @TempestTost and @nothingcomestonothing for the translations of my abbreviations.
Apologies to anyone who was confused (I was in a rush - will try harder).

ET seemed an obvious one as the post is about Emily Thornberry.
POW comes up as Party of Women if you put it into the search bar in Mumsnet above - there has been lots of discussion about this new political party here (using POW as abbreviation) and if you are unfamiliar with them note that are 16 POW candidates standing in the General Election (GE) which is quite something.

One is standing in the seat currently occupied by Emily Thornberry. Which is how I arrived at starting this thread.

@marmaladeandpeanutbutter MN is full of abbreviations! It's OK to ask and it's equally OK to spend a little more time reading the subject to work it out.

It shouldn't be a reason to stay away (and you certainly don't need a PhD).

@Abhannmor My searching led to me being offered this on a feed. It shows just how grim toilets used for cottaging were. https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/discover/bog-jobs-gay-encounters-and-public-toilets Really really grim. (This guy did photos for court cases).

I wonder whether in those days gay men seeking encounters with anonymous others for sex wanted to be not far from possible help in case they needed assistance. Thinking that going back to a strangers place or into the woods with them (remote/unfamiliar places) could have catastrophic consequences. But there may also have been a public sex thrill too. (Hard to know really). It feels like some of the same problem with trans women using female toilets - are they there because this is the safest option for them or because its a sexual thrill?

@determinedtomakethiswork that is interesting. The modern age (i.e. internet hook ups) means that even M&S toilets are not safe. Those for men as well as possibly those for women which may include men identifying as women.

There was a public toilet in the carpark adjacent to where I work, now long gone after they built houses on the carpark, it was famous cottaging spot. The police would often use our premises for surveillance.
Eventually the council swapped the toilets around. The men’s entrance face our building but the women’s entrance face the main road across which was a petrol station. Once they switch the toilets they could monitor the use of the toilets using cctv footage from the petrol station.

Watching the comings and goings was entertaining and revealing. There was one bloke who sat in his car all day Mon-Fri, regularly using the loo whenever anyone went in. He always had a stack of hand towels on the back shelf of his car.
Another “gentleman “ would sit on a low wall just in front of our property on Wed afternoons and all day on a Friday, regularly following men into the loo.

We also had a drug dealer using the disabled loo for transactions, until they were caught. After disabled loos needed keys the drug dealing stopped.

All this took place in a free carpark in a fairly middle class residential area. Until the police started using our premises I had no idea it was used for cottaging.
It’s all history now. There is a distinct lack of public toilets in the town, many lament this fact but I doubt they know the real reason why most were closed.

I’m sorry OP, but I find this thread to be quite homophobic and ignorant.

Gay men cottaged at that time because they completely marginalised from normal society. It was nothing like life now for gay people. They faced lack of acceptance from their family, colleagues and friends. Men were closeted and had no where else to meet - hence the cottages. Not to mention so many of these poor lads were dying of AIDS or watching their friends die around them, with the government doing fuck all. Imagine if everything is stigma and shame. They were allowed to find a little bit of joy and expression of sexuality, which is what cottaging was used for.

No I’m sure it wasn’t nice for other public toilet users, but as other posters have said, other people could just choose to go to a different toilet.

I don’t think it is comparable to TW using women’s toilets, or the motives there. Cottaging wasn’t caused by perversion, more a very sad set of social circumstances and marginalisation.

It doesn’t do GC movement any favours to toy with homophobia.

Where I grew up we knew the two public toilet blocks to avoid as well as the area of the park to never ever go near. My parents told me when I started going out and about on my own. My older siblings told me. And friends all talked about it. No idea beyond that but those places were definitely out of bounds to the general public who weren't seeking those activities!

Reminds me of this post about ways of establishing dominance in spaces so they can be claimed for particular groups and activities.

https://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3296831-Can-we-talk-about-the-mental-impact-of-being-told-the-definition-of-woman-is-changing?msgid=79810590

Sheila Jeffreys discussed public lavatories and Sheila Cavanagh's work on dung smearing as a way of establishing territorial dominance over a space and making it unsuitable/undesirable to women.

[Cavanagh] says that men like to spread faeces about in the toilets to mark their territory in a way that women do not, ‘There is a none too subtle correlation between heteronormative masculinities and the territorialisation of public facilities through the spread of dung’ (Cavanagh, 2010: 163). Men, it seems, like to spread their ‘dung’ on the walls and doors of public lavatories…
Sheila Jeffreys: Cavanagh discussion about public lavatories and gender

http://sheila-jeffreys.com/the-politics-of-the-toilet-a-feminist-response-to-the-campaign-to-degender-a-womens-space/

@YellowCloud I am sorry that you feel like that about this. Its not meant to be homophobic and I hope any ignorance can be dispelled.

The posts from others suggest that casual hook ups in public spaces still exist in current day (sex in M&S toilets mentioned) so its not wholly lack of a place to have sex. I thought I made clear above that I can see why people would want not to go to a private space with someone they did not know (there was queer bashing and queer baiting and I expect that both of these still exist). There have been murders of young men lured to the flats of strangers. I understand and sympathize with gay men who - even now - feel this is their only option.

I found troubling Emily Thornberry's approach to making her case by humiliating and shaming people who objected. To make their concerns seem ridiculous. That seems (to me) to be a common theme then and now.

I found troubling Emily Thornberry's approach to making her case by humiliating and shaming people who objected. To make their concerns seem ridiculous. That seems (to me) to be a common theme then and now.

I interpreted ETs statement a different way, but maybe I just read it differently. These police officers who tried to trap these men were pathetic, ridiculous, obsessed. They weren’t fuelled by valid concerns for other toilet users comfort or safety or anything else. They were fuelled by homophobia, being a jobsworth, probably wanting to further their careers by getting easy convictions (that’s why ET talks about the same police officers showing up
again and again).

The “concerns” of these police officers weren’t worthy of respect. It was a targeted hate campaign against gay men.

I can see why you might want to draw parallels, but I don’t think it’s helpful to conflate this with TW in bathrooms. There are too many differences. Gay men went into cottages to meet with other gay men, not to interact with other toilet users. TW go into women’s toilets, it could be argued, to interact with women and obtain a reaction from them. Gay men were prosecuted for consensual sex. Some trans women offenders are NOT being prosecuted for non-consensual acts (eg getting naked in front of women in changing rooms). Gay men in cottaging culture were minding their own business, not trying to inflict discomfort on others.

As a straight man I found this quite intimidating when as a young teen I was approached in public toilets by gay men , didn't happen a lot but often enough for me to be wary of using loos if anyone else was in there .

Later on I had the confidence to decline or give off 'not for me ' signals, and talking with gay friends now it seems that there is still a thriving underground scene in certain places and car parks where otherwise straight married men go for casual gay sex, and that may be why cottaging was popular too.

@YellowCloud you are assuming that there were only two parties here. The police (who were all pretty nasty in your view 'The “concerns” of these police officers weren’t worthy of respect. It was a targeted hate campaign against gay men.' And the gay men who were using the toilets for sex. There are not only those points of view and I am assuming (perhaps too kindly?) that police were asked to intervene by other toilet users, people with property nearby, or local pressure groups (some of these may well have been homophobic - but that is just a guess and I don't assume they all were).

FWIW I don't think its homophobic or transphobic to object to someone using toilets for purposes that involve public sexual activity unless your motivation is to be homophobic or transphobic. Its an obviously uncomfortable thing to be an involuntary party to. That is the parallel with current TW in toilets that I wanted to explore.

(Some of the posts on this thread suggest that people were stopping using toilets or directed their children not to use them because of this activity. Nowadays we hear that girls in schools are not using toilets because they fear encounters with boys).

Yes, but what is the value of looking back and criticising the behaviour of gay men from fifty years ago? A group who were, at the time, so incredibly marginalised, living through a dangerous and awful period of history. I don’t see any value in this conversation.

It's all just about men's sexual demands and no one else matters.

Errr shes criticising Emily thornberry.

I'm not entirely sure it's homophobic to criticize gay men for having sex in public bathrooms, even if they were incredibly marginalised people.
I agree that it was not a good time to be alive for gay men, and violent homophobia was rife, at the end of the day, nobody needs sex to survive - and choosing to have casual hook-ups in a public space is not irreprehensible. Especially when it runs the risk of young boys walking in and seeing it, or being propositioned.

Raising my hand to say yes, as a child there were certain public toilets that we were told to stay away from, even as a girl.

In hindsight, there seemed to be a certain kind of unwritten social contract amongst the adults. A recognition that homosexual men were unfairly persecuted by the police and that other adults accepted certain areas becoming cottaging hot spots if it contained “all the perversion” into one area that could be avoided. “The poor buggers have to go somewhere” being the prevailing thought.

i must admit I’d never thought about the men who did indeed just want to pee. But I can’t get too worked up over Emily’s court room tactics, as a barrister she would do whatever necessary for her clients and she obviously hit on a winning strategy - people’s squeamishness about discussing sex in public. It seems to me a part of it was the hypocrisy of the police officers voyeurism.

I found troubling Emily Thornberry's approach to making her case by humiliating and shaming people who objected. To make their concerns seem ridiculous. That seems (to me) to be a common theme then and now.

Except that's not what she's doing, is it.

She's laughing at the police who made it their job to make gay men's lives a misery.