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/

Emily Thornberry was born in 1960 so can't have been representing these men as a barrister until the mid 1980s at the earliest, by which time consenting sex between two men over the age of 21 was legal. I'm only slightly younger so I know there was nevertheless still a huge amount of homophobia around then and of course there was AIDS, which was largely regarded as a gay plague to start with. I don't find it difficult at all to believe that there were police officers targeting gay men out of homophobia. I don't think it was a sensible or proportionate response.

I don't think this is a homophobic thread in any way, though. Regardless of our sexua orientation, not many women want to have sex or engage in sexual behaviour in public with other people watching or listening. I could be quite wrong but I think mostly when women do engage in that behaviour it's usually with the involvement of a man. It seems to be far more common for men to behave in a sexual way in public and for many of them the knowledge that other people are aware of what they're doing makes it more enjoyable, in some cases probably because they know other people are disgusted and fearful, not despite that. I don't think this is a sexual orientation thing as much as a male thing.

I agree with PP and the unwritten social contract. I'd say the toilet block issue was largely tolerated. There wasn't much criticism attached. The men using the bushes in the park seemed to be criticised. The people using the bushes were seen as dangerous / perverted in a way the people using the toilets weren't if you see what I mean. When being warned off places, no discernable homephobia came with the warning. It was matter of fact almost like it was a fact of life. Men have these desires and this is what they do end of. Even from the older generation.

Were young boys often propositioned? Do we have any reliable evidence of this? We need to be very careful indeed that we're not assuming gay men are more likely than straight men to be paedophiles. I suppose in days of yore when men very rarely attempted to get into the ladies' toilet because they would have been spotted and challenged, young girls were perhaps safer from paedophiles in that one setting than young boys. But I believe statistics show that far more girls than boys are sexually assaulted which is what I would expect, given that almost all paedophiles are male and the majority are probably heterosexual.

Not saying it was a common occurrence, but a poster upthread said he was propositioned in toilets until he grew old/wise/confident enough to give off the right vibes. My use of the words "young boys" is misleading - apologies - I meant teens (who are still "young" and "boys" in my eyes).

Agree that care not to conflate homosexuality with paedophilia is important, apologies that my post implied that.

You knew the ones to avoid. It was rife back then. It still is in certain areaa

In my quest to find the evidence source for the reason the government’s new toilet designs have not stipulated gaps from the floor to the door, I went down an interesting path.

ARUP were commissioned by our government to provide research on designs for toilets for people who are disabled and have long term health conditions. They used an article from the design group Stalled as evidence to fully enclose toilets. Stalled was set up by Americans Joel Sanders and Susan Stryker. The only sources mentioning fully-enclosed was not about the U.K. nor people with long term health conditions. There were 2, one from a school using ‘Stalled’ design references and a ‘Stalled’ article itself. This is the quote: ‘A better solution, supported by many transactivists, and increasingly found in trendy nightclubs and restaurants, is to eliminate gender-segregated facilities entirely and treat the public restroom as one single open space with fully enclosed stalls’. (Note that often American toilets have doors that have bigger gaps- almost salloon type doors)

To try and find out if Stalled had done any safety assessments on their fully enclosed toilets that are listed as the evidence base informing the U.K.’s toilet legislation, including for single sex ambulant toilets, I watched his most recent Harvard talk on YouTube (From Stud to Stalled: Inclusive design through a queer lens’) from March 2024.

Sander’s 2024 talk is interesting as he looks back on his design work originating from Stud magazine and his interest in men’s rooms where ‘mirrors, cracks and gaps in partitions facilitates eye contact’ for gay men cruising. So he started putting that aesthetic into homes etc for gay men then, mainstream.

So 25 years later, in 2016 when gender-neutral restrooms became a social justice issue in America, transgender access to public restrooms rekindled Sanders interest in queer space though through a transgender not a gay male perspective. So he reached out to Susan Stryker for design implications. And they wrote the article referenced in the U.K. document. From his talk, on the subject of feminists and gay men saying his designs are taking away their spaces, he says, ‘we need to prioritise the needs of trans people and their population becoming visible’. On safety ‘more eyes to monitor’ (in the areas around the toilets) and on disability, they ‘feel inclusive’.

On analysing if they work ‘we don’t have enough data. For example with bathrooms there are so few on these bathrooms that have been built’.

It’s a fascinating talk to see where the design elements originated. And how they are misapplied for our legislation. These designs are for cubicles with just toilets in, in high traffic areas and very large open plan spaces. They don’t correspond to U.K. situations, especially for single sex toilets.

Considering it was looking at the requirements of people with long term health conditions, in the whole of the U.K. government-commissioned Arup document there was no mention of the words: seizure, faint, diabetes, cardiac, heart, epilepsy, syncope, endometriosis, menorrhagia, collapse. Neither in the Stalled article. The dangers from the toilet cubicle itself being completely private are not considered, which possibly leads back to Stalled designing the ‘opposite’ of gay design?

It’s all fascinating how it evolved. And the complexities between safety and privacy.

This is a good practical example of what happens when toilet design goes wrong:

https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/education/drug-dealing-drinking-dirt-problems-28517175

Dunno about loos but there's several areas I know of in London and Brighton used for outdoor gay sex. Whatever. I think what gets me is that when gay men support the lie that sex is irrelevant (NotAllGaysAreLikeThat) they never acknowledge that it would be entirely impossible for a lesbian equivalent of these places to exist. Why? Because men are a threat to women in a way that women are unable to be a threat to men.

I needed up meditating at length on exactly this after falling down a rabbit hole in sympathy with John Gielgud.

Sorry, rushing and haven't RTFT. But in case this hasn't been said...

I think, especially back pre- decriminalisation of homosexuality, one of the brakes on gay men cottaging would have been fear, not only of police, but of violence from offended straight men. (Something many women then and now will understand).So that would have been a curb on being too obvious to uninvolved passers by. (Not so sure about now. I must consult the menfolk here.)

The problematic trans women in women's toilets don't have that curb on their behaviour. They're not scared of us.

Which is the old "men are afraid women will laugh at them, women are afraid men will kill them" again. Don't we always came back to that?

Actually, I like Emily Thornberry a little better for this, in that it shows her as a) quite clever b) having a sense of humour.

I am slightly surprised, though, that the prosecution barristers didn't object to her asking the police officer witnesses to demonstrate how to masturbate using a rolled-up newspaper, as I don't really believe a jury needs masturbation explained to them.

It's still an offence to have sex in public places, it's called out raging public decency. Being gay is no longer a crime or something to be ashamed of,, so why the need to go cottaging? Just get a room ffs

Now it's a kink. Some would also claim its cultural.

Or another way to look at it would be that the police were preventing a public nuisance and upholding the law.

Except they didn’t. Preventing bad behaviour would have involved higher police visibility and patrolling of notorious locations to divert the cruising to elsewhere. Entrapment and creating holes in the ceiling to spy on men in a cubicle went much further than that and criminalised men unnecessarily.

However, as other people have said, now there is much wider public acceptance of gay people, and they no longer have to resort to cottaging to meet others for sex, cottaging in public loos has become a niche/kink area. Because of this, and the lack of alternative public toilets for people to use, I think there’s not so much tolerance for it any more.

Although it primarily impacts gay men, I think it’s a general male thing, not a gay thing. The overwhelming urge to get off, plus the thrill of being with strangers and of being in public/danger of being caught. Same category as dogging.

I'm a gay man in my late 30's. Too young for some of the things ET describes but it doesn't connect to the current trans issue because the context is completely different from today's conversations.

She's talking about a time where being gay might have been legal but that doesn't mean it was accepted or tolerated well in communities. Gay man had no means to identify and find each other which is why you hear about cottaging, gay bathhouses, cruising. Sexual element aside, these were some of the only ways for gay men to connect with other gay men. These were the actions of an oppressed minority trying to find ways to exist and function in a society that was out to get them. She's talking about a disproportionate targeting of these crimes that aren't necessarily more severe than others. Another poster above just mentioned that there's a difference between deterring crime and entrapment. The approach that was taken speaks volumes about how the police viewed these men. It was sport for them, nothing to do with a genuine concern for public order. At the end of the day, a crime is a crime, but I you can see how her approach was appropriate to the time and the context.

Yes, there was an impact on others, no one can say there wasn't but ET's approach clearly tells us that she saw the wider persecution of gay people as being more damaging on balance.

Other posters are right that some gay men still engage in that sort of behavior. I'm not here to defend or condemn it. Those behaviours are in a whole different time and with different context.

What I will say is that there is a huge hetrosexual kink community in this country but when I hear people talk about gay cruising vs. something like dogging in public or swinging, gays are always talked about as if it's inherently more perverse. Don't know that it's relevant to your point but it felt like it fit with what I was saying.

Today's conversations about trans women in female spaces are a lot different and more nuanced. I'm not weighing in on that in a public forum because I have no skin in the game but I don't see how you could take her actions and attitude to that situation and at that time and draw any parallels or assumptions.

Abney Park Cemetery was a nightmare to cut through in the 90's. Middle of the afternoon it would be very busy indeed!

I assume toilets were removed from service because of this.

The modern age (i.e. internet hook ups) means that even M&S toilets are not safe.

You’re showing your naïveté here. Local authorities have used cottaging as an excuse to close public toilets for over 30 years now - never with a mention of how it’s an easy money saver for them, as they’re not legally obliged to provide toilet facilities. Blaming the gays is so much easier than admitting the thing you’re really worried is getting blown is your budget.

Think about it logically. Claiming that cottaging has “forced” them to close public toilets because regular users felt uncomfortable makes a good headline (and feeds off the “Eeew!” factor many people will have about this) and, most importantly, shifts the blame. But if a local authority is going to argue that straight men and young boys (and indeed gay men who don’t partake in cottaging) might be reluctant to use public toilets, how can they argue that closing them is the best alternative? Because if the toilet doesn’t exist anymore, they definitely can’t use it. No problem has been solved - actually, one has been created. But a lot of money has been saved.

And guess what happens when public toilets close? Does it magically put an end to cottaging? Or does it shift it to toilets in M&S or supermarkets - toilets where parents are perhaps more likely to send their children alone?

Except they didn’t. Preventing bad behaviour would have involved higher police visibility and patrolling of notorious locations to divert the cruising to elsewhere. Entrapment and creating holes in the ceiling to spy on men in a cubicle went much further than that and criminalised men unnecessarily.

And guess what - it didn’t stop it!

Including the (presumably large majority of) men (and boys) using those men's toilets who were there for, you know, normal toilet-visiting functions?

Not the main question of the thread, but it was obviously so prevalent that even one of our former Prime Ministers was convicted of cottaging when younger, and it clearly didn't prove any kind of barrier to him in later life in becoming PM.

I'll bet most people don't even remember it being reported.

Not that it was the most appalling, evil thing that he was responsible for in his life so far, mind...

I had a weekend job in Debenhams when I was 16 and this was a big problem. They even cut glory holes between the cubicles. It wasn't confined to the toilets in our store, the staircase behind the lifts was a popular spot too. I remember one poor cleaner who has to clean up a 'mess' that was left on the stairs. Grim.

I don't know.

I understand where you are coming from and at one time would have thought the same. But I work in a public library, we have some of the only public toilets in this town. This is common in many areas.

The stuff that goes on in our toilets, and other library toilets, is beyond. It's frankly easy to say, lets throw money at it and it will keep them nice, but practically that means you have city workers or library staff or whomever going in and cleaning up sexual fluids, drug paraphernalia, menstrual products (which we give away free so they are located in the toilets) plugging the facilities, excrement, tampons inserted into soap dispensers, etc regularly; and the public who the toilets are there for can't use them a lot of the time anyway.

I hate that people who have no access to other toilets are left with no provision but gods, I don't think I can blame it on towns or the employees at these places. It is down to the selfish shitty people who don't care about others and mean that no one can have nice things.

Disgusting behaviour and really punching down on those who are left to clean it up or the children who are exposed to sexual activity at an inappropriately early age and left traumatised.

These days, there's no excuse. People who do this are not decent human being and only care about themselves.

I think this is one area where the liberal argument has been shown to be a bit naive, and that the conservative position had something real to say.

That is, the idea that this kind of activity only went on because homosexuality wasn't accepted, and it would stop when it was socially acceptable and legal. Well, guess what, it hasn't.totally happened. There is still a fair bit, and then some has moved elsewhere (sex clubs for example) which isn't a public nuisance but does have other implications such as for public health.

Part of the conservative POV on this I think was always that male sexuality is inherently socially problematic. Among heterosexuals this is somewhat contained because it includes women. It does become an issue where prostitution is involved. Among gay men however there isn't that kind of natural limit, which is why if you compare the average sexual partner counts between gay and straight men, they are nowhere near close.

Back in the early gay rights movement, when I was young, the usual thing was to say that this was a homophobic perspective and gay sexuality did not manifest differently than straight sexuality. (Gay men knew this was false of course. But that was the public face of the question for the most part.)

Now, the approach is to say that anyone who has a problem with that kind of sexual behaviour and kink is just homophobic - we should expect gay men to be promiscuous and only bigots would be concerned about it.

I'd suggest both of those claims are too simplistic, at best.

I'd rather not be exposed to any sexual activity whatsoever when I visit the loo, thanks. It's just an extreme form of selfishness and disregard for others using the facilities and results in groups self excluding themselves and not having any facility at all. Regardless of gender or sexuality. It's only consensual when anyone going in there consents to it going on. Maybe a harsh opinion but to me, if you don't have a private place, you don't have sex - that's why we have indecent exposure laws.

I don't think it's homophonic to be opposed to gay men having sex in public places in itself. I would accept that when talking about public sex, it's more prevalent amongst gay men. As long as you're equally judgemental of hetroxeual people dogging in car parks.

It moves into homophonic when people start to claim that ALL sexual practices that people would consider more niche or even perverse are confined to gay men. There as just as many kink spaces and communities behind closed doors for hetrosexuals as there are to gay people (if not more). It just doesn't have as much of a spotlight on it.

I do call it homobia when I talk about the police response in the 80's because the focus was on entrapment and harassment rather than simple enforcement or, even better, prevention where possible. When the crime is elevated because of who's committing it and not because of it's impact, then it's problematic.

Of course sexualiy manifests differently in male on male relationships than it does in male on female. The same in female on female relationships. Heterosexual relationships have been shaped by hundreds of years of social conventions in the open. Gay relationships haven't. We've only been able to live in the open and conduct relationships fairly recently by comparison so we've forged our own, less traditional relationship dynamics. To be fair, so are heterosexual couples now that norms are being expanded.

It would seem that gay men do tend more towards promiscuity and more fluid relationship boundaries but, as long as we're not shagging in your hydrangeas, who cares?