Causing a Stink!: Why the Bathroom Has Always Been a Queer Space
Georgia Scheerhout reclaims the queer history of the bathroom in the face of polarising political debate.
Once Upon A Time, by Keith Haring. Photo via: gaycentre.org
Queerness has always had something to say about being in a bathroom. Whether in Leslie Feinberg’s account of bathroom phobia in Stone Butch Blues, or Keith Haring’s iconic 1990 mural on the walls of a New York public bathroom, queer culture sometimes seems preoccupied with the bathroom as an ambiguous, dangerous and strangely sexual space. So why has the bathroom now become such a contentious part of the discussion of LGBTQ+ rights in British political discourse?
“By illuminating the unseen queer history of the bathroom that runs counter to the misleading narrative that modern-day gender divisions are sacred mechanisms for sexual safety, the bathroom can be reclaimed as a fraught and sexual space for queer people, both now and historically.”
Any reader of the Telegraph’s recent opinion columns might wonder when exactly the historically right-leaning paper had become so committed to feminism: with one of the lowest percentages of female writers of the big British broadsheet newspapers, and an archive of headlines such as ‘Men “suffer sexism in the publishing industry”’, this recent political turn towards a commitment to apparent progressivism is more than just surprising. Why has a defence of segregated bathrooms become synonymous with the cutting edge of modern feminism for these Telegraph writers? By illuminating the unseen queer history of the bathroom that runs counter to the misleading narrative that modern-day gender divisions are sacred mechanisms for sexual safety, the bathroom can be reclaimed as a fraught and sexual space for queer people, both now and historically.
It was in the 18th century that Lady Mary Montagu, writing home to England from her outpost in the Ottoman Empire, revealed the erotic relation between public performance and naked bodies occuring in a female bathhouse. Montagu writes luxuriously of seeing “so many fine women naked, in different postures”. She longs to get closer; her myopic obsession with such public sexual displays of touching and arousal means the Turkish bathhouse, rather than the culture itself, becomes the centre of her letters home. By exporting the concept of eroticised bathing rituals back to Victorian England and indulging in their expressions of open sexuality, Montagu recreates the bathroom as a space not just of hygiene, but of queer sex.
But it is not just repressed queer desire that seeks refuge in the bathroom. Cruising, the practice of soliciting sex in public bathrooms that became especially prominent in the latter half of the 20th century, sees non-normative desire seek out the bathroom as a place for queer sexual expression. Documented since at least the 17th century, cruising has always operated as a kind of early Grindr, offering spaces for gay sex when the bedroom was still heavily policed. The precursor to modern day cottaging (a cruising practice that revolves specifically around the toilet) was the molly-house, taverns in which queer people could meet for sex and drinking. Surviving accounts of molly-houses suggest that they were not just quasi-brothels, but spaces of gender non-conformity, artistic expression and political activism: one account details a theatrical performance of mock heterosexuality by ‘mollies’ who would ‘go out by Couples into another Room on the same Floor, to be marry’d, as they call’d it’ and ‘for that Reason they call that Room, The Chappel’. In an early 18th century trial, one man, George Whytle, described being ‘help’d’ to ‘two or three Husbands there’. By virtue of being hidden from the social gaze, the pre-Victorian bathroom, as an extension of the molly-house, was less regulated and offered queer people exciting possibilities for non-normative sexuality and expression.
“it is vital we use these histories of queer euphoria as a reminder of the importance of hope and resistance.”
Although Victorian queerness, hidden from public gaze, used the bathroom as a place of sexual subversion and dissent, the current climate of fear and repression around queer sexuality has done much to restrict this once exciting space. Now more than ever, in the aftermath of the US election results with all that a second Trump presidency will mean for the policing of transgender bodies, it is vital we use these histories of queer euphoria as a reminder of the importance of hope and resistance.
It was Victorian society that first produced the segregated bathroom, a political mechanism to ensure the separation of the private, feminine space, from the public, masculine space. The history of the gendered bathroom, then, is bound up with this explicit political desire to police women’s access to free expression: if women are unable to access hygiene facilities beyond the home, then they are literally excluded from public life. In a period obsessed with categorisations and pathology, and which first produced the term “homosexual”, the 19th century regulation of queer sex worked through distinction and separation, much like this separating of the bathroom.
Mural commemorating a Victorian molly house in Manchester’s gay village, featuring Alan Turing, Emmeiline Pankhurst and Foo Foo Lammar. Photo via Wikkimedia Commons
But the role of the bathroom extends beyond gender politics: American racial segregation equally sought out public hygiene facilities as dangerous places where “good” and “bad” bodies should be kept separate. The current mainstream fixation, then, is nothing new. In fact, the bathroom has always figured in authoritarian politics as a space of potential disorder. A recent Telegraph article proclaimed, ‘Rules are in place around women’s toilets for a reason. Enforcement is vital to maintain proper boundaries’. Another article calls single sex bathrooms a ‘rare space of sanctuary’ from ‘filthy urinals’. But why are bathrooms such important hot-spots for the policing of social categories?
Queer theorists have long held that gender expression works through repeated performance. Whether you abide by this or not, it holds true that, if I am a woman, I should mark my femininity by wearing certain clothes, cultivating a certain lifestyle or appearance, or by being seen to move in certain spaces. The architecture of the public bathroom follows this logic by directing the flow of one “type” of body into this space and another type of body into that space. But this is an anxious correlation: if the basis for gender fixity is merely the difference between two adjacent rooms, then the possibility of a “wrong” body destabilising this order is dangerously apparent. This idea is illustrated by how we distinguish between the “right” and “wrong” bathroom using the signs of male and female, signs which operate beyond language to suggest that gender is originary rather than performative. In other words, femininity is an intrinsic category stemming from the material fact of the female body, not a social marker ordained by things like clothes and language.
It is easy to see how, then, the transgender body in the bathroom comes to be read as a violent assertion of culture over nature, a ripping apart of the whole “bathroom logic”. When someone visibly gender nonconforming enters a bathroom, chaos is created of the entire system of categorisation. Rather than a concern for feminism, then, these ideas actually seek the preservation of the bathroom’s historical norms, norms which order bodies based on rules of appearance and acceptability. And, of course, it is these very same norms that have long been used to make anti-feminist violence permissable and commonplace.
In understanding the bathroom’s queer history, as a place in which queer desire and autonomy have flourished against the prohibition of free expression, the insidious nature of our own modern “bathroom politics” becomes much more visible. By remembering the mollies, cottagers and cruisers of the 17th and 18th centuries who risked arrest, alienation and even death in order to express their own truthful and messy desires, we do justice to the history of queer resistance that has long been integral to our culture. Hope in the face of oppression (and the threat of an incoming Trump presidency) is not ignorant or idealistic, but the responsible way forward, an act of remembering those queers who came before us and doing justice for the ones who will come after.
“Rather than capitulate to this language of surveillance and threat, we should seek to reclaim the bathroom as a place for queer joy”
The Telegraph should certainly tread carefully when misappropriating the name of feminism in order to continue the policing and marginalisation of a community that has experienced a 186% rise in hate crimes in the last five years. Rather than capitulate to this language of surveillance and threat, we should seek to reclaim the bathroom as a place for queer joy, as a place where prevailing ideas about decorum and etiquette are rejected and messed with and, above all, as a place to make a scene and cause a stink!