okay so in order to combat my utter disillusionment with the video games industry as a whole, i want to start playing more weird little indie games on itch.io made by one person as a passion project & i’m gonna try to share the ones i find interesting in case people might want to check them out.
ANYWAYS. this one got a lot of press when it was originally released in 2017 but here’s the tearoom, which is a historical public bathroom cruising sim
historical public bathroom simulator
and if you don’t want to actually play a game about sucking dicks in a men’s restroom in 1962, the game is still really interesting as a reflection on gay history and culture and on police surveillance, and the artist’s statement is definitely worth a read on its own.
The Tearoom as a record of risky business
The Tearoom is a historical public bathroom simulator about anxiety, police surveillance, and sucking off other dudes’ guns. In it, you basically cruise other willing strangers for sex, and try to have some fun without getting caught by undercover police. It’s heavily inspired by Laud Humphreys’ epic Tearoom Trade (1970), a meticulous 180 page sociological study of men who have quick anonymous sex with men in public bathrooms (“tearooms” in US, “cottages” in UK), along with interviews, diagrams, and derived “rules” for participating in the tearoom trade.
My game is set in a small roadside public bathroom in Ohio in 1962. Much of the game sequences and gameplay are based on Humphreys’ notes (in his book, Humphreys even calls it a “game” himself) and the layout of the bathroom is based partly on diagrams from his observation reports. And while I wanted the game to be about gay history, I also wanted it to speak to how video games think of sex and violence.
[…]
But what is the LGBTQ community’s relationship to violence? Historically, cops have been perhaps the #1 most dangerous enemy of gay / trans / queer people for decades, and continue to target gay people today: in 2016, the Toronto Police started “Project Marie” to target gay men who cruised parks late at night; and since at least 2004 and continuing today, the NYPD have been targeting men at the Port Authority who “seem gay”, spying on them through slits in bathroom stalls and charging them with “public indecency.” (Isn’t going to the Port Authority already punishment enough?)
[…]
The Mansfield police had to figure out how to jail people for having “public sex” that wasn’t actually in public view. If a tree falls in the woods and no one’s there to hear it, then can you prosecute the tree for sodomy? To make this invisible subtext visible, the Mansfield police secretly recorded the public bathroom for 2 months and basically made one of the first full-color gay porn films in history. […]
Thankfully, no other US police department went to such creepy lengths to prosecute men for having consensual sex with men, but many departments did deploy undercover plain-clothes officers to actively solicit and entrap men. (Most famously, in the case of singer George Michael in 1998.)
Thus, each NPC in this game has a 23% chance of being an undercover cop. As in my previous game Stick Shift, I specifically used a relevant statistic from a 2015 study of anti-LGBT violence: of LGBT people who’ve survived abuse or violence from a stranger, police officers were 23% of the perpetrators. I like the gesture of imbuing politics within the game code itself, and I like how it plays out in the game balance: 23% chance sometimes feels a bit too frequent in the game… as it should.
[…]
[…] gay sex, especially in quasi-public or semi-private places, helps reify and build gay culture. The point of the tearoom comes down to this: when and where are gay people allowed to do our gay shit?!
If the police are going to raid and shutdown all our gay bathhouses or gay bars or gay theaters, fine, then maybe gay people should just do gay shit everywhere, all the time! Because without gay places and a gay geography, there can be no gay community. So maybe one answer is to project our gayness everywhere, and remap the entire city to our needs. Why stop at just one gay bar, when the entire city could be like a gay bar? (If you want to know more about this, I highly recommend reading Samuel Delany’s “Times Square Red, Times Square Blue”)
The tearoom represents an exciting and radical reclamation of public space, for members of the public who usually aren’t allowed any space of their own. Humphreys used the phrase “patterns of collective action” to refer to these dudes bonking each other, but to me that phrase also has a political tinge that reminds us how the tearoom is / was also a collective of white and black men, working class and middle class men, and straight and gay men… uh, bonking each other.
But if there’s any simple moral to be gleaned from this game, I just hope you never look at a bathroom, or park, or office, or shopping mall, etc. the same way ever again. Above all, the tearoom is about transforming the world around you by seeing (creative, erotic) potential in every corner and crevice. Even if you’re not a sex-with-men-haver, how can you remap your world to strengthen your community? All you need is some willing players.
Federal law enforcement turned a person they arrested in the transit hub directly over to ICE.
A surge of public lewdness arrests inside a Penn Station bathroom by Amtrak Police has rattled the LGBTQ community and landed at least one person in ICE custody, THE CITY has learned.
The surge in arrests by the Amtrak Police, a national police force who are not bound by city sanctuary protections, kicked off in June, targeting a Penn Station bathroom listed on Sniffies, a popular cruising website and app used for gay hookups.
Among those arrested was David, a 31-year-old health care worker, who says he was just trying to use the bathroom on his way back from visiting a friend in New Jersey when he felt he was being watched by a man nearby. David, who is gay, was wearing a rainbow Pride wristband as he says he was simply trying to pee when he was arrested.
[…]
David said he was then handcuffed to a wall in a cell inside Penn Station, where he heard one officers say to others, “Yeah, we got three more fag pervs.” He later asked them for a cup of water and was told, “Sure, you want a steak too?”
[…]
The bathroom in question is near the Eighth Avenue entrances to Penn Station, and directly next to an Amtrak police booth. The men’s bathroom, unlike the women’s bathroom a few feet away, has a large warning sign next to the entrance: “This facility is monitored 24/7 by uniformed and undercover Amtrak Police Department Officers.”
Sending plain clothes officers into bathrooms to combat public lewdness isn’t new. In 2022, the Port Authority Police, a state agency, had to halt their use of undercover officers staking out bathrooms following a settlement in a lawsuit by the Legal Aid Society claiming the tactic had spurred years of false arrests and unlawful discrimination.
In that case, Jennvine Wong, an attorney with Legal Aid’s Special Litigation Unit, said officers were “targeting folks on this random officer’s perception of what their sexuality might appear to be, and quite often wasn’t based on probable cause.”
That lawsuit, however, had no impact on the Amtrak Police, and this new wave of what she said were “eerily similar … false arrests without probable cause based on discriminatory targeting of folks because of their perception of their sexuality.”
“Plainclothes” reinforces many of the tired and moralizing claims about cruising that queer artists and activists have worked hard to counte
Beginning in June, the Amtrak Police Department (APD) had been running a plainclothes sting operation in New York’s Penn Station bathroom—the old one near Eighth Avenue, not any of the new Moynihan ones. Writing for The City, Gwynne Hogan reported a clear “surge” of twenty-three arrests for “public lewdness” during Pride month alone. In the months that followed, around two hundred men were arrested, including, by September, twenty in one day. Amtrak confirmed this as a response to “customer complaints”—which, if true, marks pretty much the first time they’ve responded, and with such exacting force, to customer complaints.
We’ve been here before—but not so long ago as you’d think. As recently as 2017, the Legal Aid Society brought a class-action lawsuit against the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, claiming that its police officers were violating the constitutional rights of queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming users of the men’s bathrooms. The suit followed more than a decade of documented “entrapment-style tactics” by officers, including “star[ing] at the targeted individual, mak[ing] gestures, or grab[bing] his own genitals, even expos[ing] his own genitals and/or peer[ing] over or around the privacy divider separating the urinals.” In other words, the officers were cruising to coax the queers out of the woodwork. […] If anyone so much as met an officer’s gaze, they were arrested.
The tactics of this year’s raids have been more aggressive. Undercover cops flirted with men in order to get them to touch themselves. Cops filmed men at the urinals from behind the locked doors of stalls. At least one man was arrested simply for wearing a rainbow wristband and taking too long to pee. Officers handcuffed him to a wall inside a detention facility, referred to him as a “fag perv,” and mocked his request for a glass of water. Amid all of this, as if to confirm the irony that recklessly flirtatious and obsessively voyeuristic cops were calling civilians “pervs,” the APD arrested a man for masturbating at the urinal who turned out to be, yes, an off-duty NYPD sergeant.
But intensity aside, something is categorically different about these raids. Subsequent reporting by Ramsey Khalifeh at Gothamist found that at least twenty of those arrested by APD were turned over to and detained by the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). One man had sought asylum in the United States after fleeing homophobic violence in Ecuador only to be arrested at Penn Station for, as he claims, being “very feminine in the way that I walk, that I talk, that I sit.” Most of the two hundred or so charges for “public lewdness” appear to have been, in the end, dropped, perhaps because of the 2022 settlement and the clear unconstitutionality of the tactics. But for the men now in ICE custody, it’s too late. They now face deportation.
[…]
What counts as criminal or distasteful behavior to the dominant culture […] changes. Respectability is the enemy of progressive queer politics because it rarely seeks justice for behavior perceived as criminal. Instead, what Richard Grenell calls “normal gays” gain cultural capital by distancing themselves from those on the fringes of the cultural center—a fringe who, incidentally, shift that center. Meanwhile, “normal gays” (or “basic bitches,” if you prefer, as I do) leave the rest of us behind—or in an ICE detention facility. If there’s any use in raids like this, it’s in unmasking the normies of our culture, our own undercover narcs, who snitch on themselves as much as on the most vulnerable of society.
Just last year, in this very magazine, I wrote this about public sex: “The days of surveillance sting operations and plainclothes patrollers seem to have passed, at least for now.” I added the last clause because some part of me knew that what preceded it was merely provisional. I should have known the days would come back sooner.
[…]
For Tearoom, [a 2007 video piece by queer artist William E. Jones], Jones presents real police footage with hardly any edits from a 1962 sting operation in Mansfield, Ohio. Using a color 16mm camera, Mansfield police, over the course of three weeks, hid behind a two-way mirror on the door of a supply closet and filmed men as they fooled around: A man in shirtsleeves and khakis jerks off next to another at the urinal, who leans over to whisper in his ear. Another man is bent over, looking over at the two-way mirror, perhaps watching himself, as he’s fucked by someone hidden by the stall. Shot after shot, men wash their hands, and we watch them as they scan the room for trade, for cops. At one point, a man walks over to the mirror and stares directly into the camera as he runs a comb through his hair. In his notes for the piece, Jones states that all of the men pictured in the film, which remains eerily silent, were later tried in court and convicted of sodomy—not “public lewdness” or “indecent exposure” but having butt sex or sucking dick. Each of them spent at least a year in the state prison, the mandatory minimum sentence at the time.
Watching all fifty-six silent minutes of Tearoom is a powerful experience. The initial “establishing shots”—footage of the bathroom entrance, the steps down, the layout of the bathroom—are ominous because we suspect what’s coming. There’s an undeniable melancholy that arises from knowing that every single one of these men was sent to prison. But the lack of commentary makes space for multiple, contradictory responses. More than sorrow, I felt exhilaration. At times, the footage is, to be blunt, hot. It looks like any of the best “amateur” bathroom content on the internet. In this context, the men look brave, avant-garde against the forces of sexual oppression. The trysts seem not in vain; the cops somehow defeated. We watch the watchmen, and we know they’ve lost the culture war.
There’s another, more profound response to Jones’s Tearoom that’s difficult to articulate. The men perform their gestures with an ease and exactness that signals the ritualistic. You get the sense that this has been going on for a long, long time, and that, watching it in 2025, little has changed. As man after man performs the ritual, you feel, perhaps for just a moment, that whatever eradication of queer erotic life the state has attempted has failed. Over and over again, it has failed.
[…]
Sodomy, the so-called and ill-defined “crime against nature,” was illegal in Ohio until 1974, and it was illegal in New York, too, though only until 1980, when People v. Ronald Onofre, a state case, struck it down on grounds of the right to privacy. It’s worth noting that a similar right to privacy was established in Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 landmark Supreme Court case that found anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional, though twelve U.S. states, most of them in the South, never repealed their sodomy laws, which remain on the books today. It’s worth noting that the same argument for the right to privacy was used to establish Roe v. Wade, the constitutional right to abortion, and that the same line of reasoning, the right to privacy, was seen as insufficient in 2022, overturning the federal right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. And so if anyone brought a sodomy case to our current federal Supreme Court, it could overturn Lawrence v. Texas, which would, in twelve states, immediately criminalize gay sex between two (or three! or four!) consenting adults—and even, potentially, non-procreative heterosexual sex.
What I’m getting at is that Tearoom isn’t just a glimpse at the past. It shows us our ongoing present—perhaps our future too.
[…]
With a few technological tweaks, Plainclothes [Carmen Emmi’s 2025 film about an undercover and closeted cop in the 1990s who arrests men for cruising in a public bathroom] could easily be set in 2025. The implication, likely unintended, is that cruising like that is a thing of the past, something that gay men resorted to because they had to, out of loneliness or out of shame, and that police raids on cruising have largely ended. A friend I watched the film with mentioned that it made him think of Andrew Sullivan’s controversial 1996 essay “When Plagues End,” which claimed that the AIDS epidemic was coming to a close because of the advent of protease inhibitors. In reality, the crisis was slowing for middle-class white men, who had better access to information and medications to treat and (later) prevent HIV, while, at the same time, the crisis was escalating for black and Latino men, especially those from working-class backgrounds. The analogue fits for Plainclothes. Persecution has lessened for normative, white, gay men whereas it has persisted for black and Latino men—and with the recent raids that turned men over to ICE, we may be seeing the pendulum swinging more decisively from fines and criminality to detention and deportation.
Um actually scrub daddy is my comfort character and it physically and psychically hurts me to see you chop him up and eat him after freezing and cracking him up with liquid nitrogen while naked with big boobs?
Conservative students can't be failed for writing a dogshit essay. Everybody also has to like them and be their friend or you're basically infringing on their first amendment rights.
a lot of loving and being loved by people is recognizing when they're sincerely trying to help or comfort you even if their words are clunky and unhelpful at best and holding onto the sentiment that they are trying to reach for you at all. and a lot of the time that has to be enough because it's all you're going to get
vaporwave
turnnoffyourmind
dailybridgerton
izzy806
prguitarman
kianamaiart
baratheonpilled
ellievsbear
discoholicmusic
